Poker champ Annie Duke on gut instincts and bluffing.

Annie Duke, one of the world’s top professional poker players, is an excitable fast-talker, a shameless flirt, and an affectionate mother of four children. And when she’s at the poker table, Duke, 41, is an enigma who crunches numbers while divining her opponents’ intentions. In 1991, she impulsively dropped out of a Ph.D. program in cognitive psychology to play cards for money and ran off to Montana to marry a friend she’d never even dated. Her gamble paid off in 2004, when she nabbed the $2 million prize at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas….

Annie Duke
POKER PLAYER
Age: 41. AKA: The Duchess of Poker. Greatest hit: Won the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, a $2 million purse. Why her? To call her the best female poker player in the world, which she is, does Duke a disservice. A Ph.D. dropout in psycholinguistics, she is one of the brightest stars in the glitzy new poker universe, smart and sexy enough to make card playing an ESPN event. Posse: Under her tutelage, Ben Affleck won the California State Poker Championship in 2004. The test: Can this mother of four cash in on her celebrity before the poker fad wanes?