Annie Duke was desperately trying to ignore all the glitz of Las Vegas while sitting across the table from Eric Seidel, one of the world's top poker players.
Duke is one of the most successful female poker players of all time. But she knew that she had to come up with a unique strategy to beat Seidel in a championship match at Caesar's Palace in 2010. After all, she knew that he was a much better poker player than she was.
"I needed to figure out a way to inject more luck into my game," she recalled.
Tap Into Luck Like Annie Duke
In other words, she figured that luck was her best winning strategy. She started making unusually high bets when she had fairly decent hands. In the end, it worked. With that win, she became the only woman to ever win The NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship and she's also the only woman to win the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions.
While she's not particularly proud about winning that Heads-Up Championship in and of itself, she says that she is extremely proud about figuring out an unusual winning strategy — doubling down on luck.
Now she's taken that same leadership acumen and is running with it — all the way across corporate America. After retiring from the poker world in 2012 — where she amassed more than $4 million in tournament poker winnings — she's now a consultant, speaker and author in the decision-making space. She helps leaders learn how to lead even better. Her book, "Thinking In Bets," was a bestseller.
Focus On What You Can Control
As a corporate consultant, Duke takes pride in sharing with senior executives many of the same cognitive behavioral skills that she used to win poker tournaments. Key among them: Focus only on the things you can control and ignore all the things you can't.
"Otherwise, you end up getting emotional about things you can't control," she said.
For example, in poker, she can't possibly have foreknowledge about what cards will come up and when. That's totally outside of her control. So she can't waste time feeling bad when she's dealt a lousy hand.
Similarly, she reminds executives that when a salesperson on their team misses a sales target — sometimes the reason for that is outside of that person's control. They may have been working off a lousy sales projection. Or, perhaps, they just experienced bad luck.
"You can't expect your people to be omniscient," she said.
Break The Mold Like Duke
One thing is for certain: Duke is not a conventional leadership coach.
For one thing, she reminds business leaders that the single best way to get valuable input from your team on any important matter is to hold off from making your own opinion known until everyone else has first shared theirs.
This is the opposite of how many companies work. Too many business leaders make their opinions known early on in meetings — which instantly influences the responses of everyone else. So, instead of getting valuable advice on a possible change in direction, most members of the team might instead feel coerced into echoing whatever the boss said they wanted.
"I help business leaders create a culture on their team where everyone's voice is heard," she said.
Get A Variety Of Opinions
The best way to find out what your team actually thinks about something is to seek out each individual's opinion before the meeting, she says. The meeting itself should simply be to come to a consensus on those opinions. "All of the judgment and opinion discovery should take part outside of the meeting," she said.
She recently consulted with a CEO who came to her to specifically to get her help in implementing a "remote first" workplace policy at his company. He told her everyone at his workplace agreed that was the right policy.
Duke wasn't so sure. Among other things, she discovered, the employees didn't fully understand what "remote first" even meant. So she independently reached out virtually to each employee and it turned out there was little agreement about in-person, hybrid or remote-first. Once each team member's opinion was clear to Duke, the group met to discuss its opinions — even before the CEO offered his.
In the end, the team chose a hybrid workplace policy.
Duke: Thrive Under Pressure
Executives come to Duke for advice, in part, because they know she has made decisions under the most stressful of circumstances. As if playing poker isn't stressful enough, back in 2000 she found herself playing in — and winning — one tournament when she was almost nine months pregnant.
In this particular tournament, she was only permitted a bathroom break every two hours. "You have to learn to focus under the most uncomfortable of situations," she said.
It's no accident that playing cards became a passion.
When she was a kid, her family often played all kinds of card games together — from gin to hearts. But never poker. And as a kid, there was no betting allowed in the games. By age 14, she was her dad's bridge partner.
"I guess I was bred to make money at cards," she said.
Her brother, Howard Lederer, made certain of that. He was a terrific poker player and she initially learned the game by watching him in action. While at grad school at The University of Pennsylvania, Duke got a stomach ailment and had to take a leave of absence.
Double Down On Your Advantage
Duke needed a source of money and Lederer suggested that she should play professional poker. At the time, professional poker was legal in Montana and she took her brother's advice — and loved it. Poker tournaments were not yet on TV, so she had a hard time explaining to folks what she did for a living.
"I'd been studying cognitive psychology in school — and here I was, finding myself in a profession where you couldn't see the other players' cards," she recalled. "It was so exciting to me in terms of real-world application."
When she tried to explain to folks what she did — many presumed she had a gambling problem. She did not. She played poker professionally for eight years — amassing international acclaim. Then, in 2002 Duke was asked to talk with some options traders about how poker might inform their decisions.
"Playing poker is a lot like investing," she said. Then she started doing public speaking gigs — and writing books. She's written three — and is working on a fourth.
Know When To Quit Like Duke
Duke also knows when to fold 'em.
Perhaps that's why her most recent book is called "Quit: The Power Of Knowing When To Walk Away." The book is about the importance of walking away from things that aren't working. This can be anything from big projects to new products. It also means feeling empowered to quickly let go of poorly performing employees.
"People spend too much time toiling at things that aren't worthwhile," she said. "Instead, you should be encouraging your people to do things that are worthwhile."
She wants executives — and team members — to "feel fabulous," about walking away from things that aren't working. "Don't spend six months on a deal that was dead the first day," she said.
She is on a mission to rehabilitate the term quitting — and get people to be proud of walking away from things. Her book reminds thoughtful executives that saying no — even after a decision has been made — can be just as powerful as saying yes.
Find Your New Challenge
That would include her own decision to quit the poker world years ago.
That's mostly because she fully realized that in order to make herself happy in her own job, she had to make someone else extremely unhappy in theirs. "When I win, they lose," she said. "When I was making people sad at the poker table, I was seeing the worst version of them."
So, instead, Duke left poker and took up consulting — which makes her clients extremely happy when her suggestions are on target. She mostly consults with hedge funds and helps them to create unique frameworks for investing — or not investing — in small companies.
"I'm around happy people all the time now," she said. "When we work through a crisis, they are happy and so am I."
Last year, for example, the venture capital firm Renegade Partners was at the earliest stage of deciding what to do about a software firm that it was funding. Renegade's CEO Renata Quintini, reviewed the investment framework that Duke had helped her company establish and ultimately opted to triple down on funding the software maker. "Her framework helped us to see that this company was an outlier in our portfolio," Quintini said.
Build Others' Confidence
Duke's key to success as a consultant, she says, is in her unique ability to instill self-confidence in her clients. "I never tell anyone what to decide — but how to decide," she said.
Instead of fearing uncertainty, she encourages clients to embrace it. "Your mental well-being is much better when you see the world that way," she said.
To relax, she cooks. While she loves to cook a killer steak or a sizzling bacon dish for friends or family members, she eats no meat herself. She sticks with a vegan, gluten-free diet with zero processed foods. This is the result of a stomach ailment she suffered years ago.
She also likes to watch cooking TV shows. "I give myself permission to watch others bake things. It shuts my brain off."
Learning to shut things off is critical, she says, particularly at the dinner table.
That's why, since her two adult kids were teens, she's never allowed phones at the dinner table. If there's a slip-up, she takes the phone and doesn't return it until the end of the meal.
Stick With Healthy Habits
She's also a stickler for a good night's sleep. Typically, she's in bed by 11 p.m. and up by 7 a.m. When she wakes up, she typically takes her dog for a long hike — often with another dog owner or two.
At 58, she has no specific retirement plans and adores her home just outside of Philadelphia. While she isn't sure exactly what she wants to still accomplish in her career, she knows it will continue to involve the use of cognitive psychology.
Even before she became a poker pro, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, last year at the age of 57, she completed her Ph.D. there.
She's lived a lifetime passion for education, including co-founding The Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit whose mission is to empower students to make tough decisions.
Skip Distractions Like Duke Does
Making clearheaded decisions is something she does better than most. Just like she did while sitting at the Las Vegas card table years ago, she has learned to avoid distractions and divisions — and advises her clients to do the same.
That's why, with America's biggest national decision — the 2024 elections — just months away, she regularly reminds her clients to do the opposite of bringing their whole selves to work each day. "If you do this, you are also bringing your politics to work, and that only divides people."
Annie Duke's Keys
- One of the winningest female poker players of all time. Won the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions.
- Overcame: Negativity and ill-will from other poker players.
- Lesson: "People spend too much time toiling at things that aren't worthwhile."
