ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood

ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood By Anna Dubrovsky For Bloomberg News Service ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood. The world's most successful female poker player is moving to Los Angeles to take advantage of her newfound celebrity. "I was lucky enough that someone decided to turn a camera on what I did," Duke, who won $2.5 million in poker tournaments last year, said in a telephone interview. "Because I've had success in a game that happens to be on TV, I've had a lot of doors open to me." Since many of those doors are in Hollywood, Duke is house-hunting in Los Angeles this month, ready to say farewell to Portland, Ore., where the 39-year-old divorced mother of four has been living since 2003. Duke is profiting from an unprecedented poker boom in the United States. Once considered a seedy pastime reserved for cigar-chomping, visor-wearing men, it's become a high-profile "sport" that's televised by several networks and played by millions in casinos and on the Internet. Duke recently formed her own production company and sold a poker-related game show to the GSN cable network, which is owned by Liberty Media Corp. and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Ten Dimes Productions — the name is poker slang for $10,000 — also is developing a horror film that Duke created. In addition, she's promoting a line of poker products by Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN and a new no-calorie soda, Coca-Cola Zero. Her autobiography is scheduled to be published in September, and she'll be a character in poker-themed video and cell-phone games that will be released this fall. That's the kind of attention you get when you beat nine men to win $2 million in last year's World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. One of those men was her brother, Howard Lederer, who taught Duke how to play the game. Another was Phil Hellmuth, the temperamental "bad boy" of poker. "People don't expect moms of four to be poker players," Duke said. "People expect Calamity Jane types to be poker players." Duke grew up in a competitive family obsessed with card games, majored in English and psychology at Columbia University and planned to become a professor. She abandoned her doctoral studies in cognitive psychology after five years and moved to Montana, where she started playing poker to help pay the $125-per-month mortgage on a cabin made of chicken wire and stucco. In 1994, Duke's brother convinced her to play in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. She made more than $70,000 and stood out as one of the few top-flight female players. Since then, she's become a regular on the TV poker circuit. Her colorful life story was the basis for "All In," a sitcom developed for General Electric Co.'s NBC. Although the comedy, starring Janeane Garofalo as a poker-playing single mom with four kids, didn't make the network's fall lineup, Duke still feels fortunate. "I'm very lucky because people seem to be interested in my story," she said. Duke is currently competing in the 2005 World Series of Poker, a series of championship events operated by Harrah's Entertainment Inc. The climax is the No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em event that begins July 7. If the field includes the maximum 6,600 players, the top prize would be $7.5 million, up $2.5 million from last year. Duke's children, ages 3 to 10, are out of school for the summer and staying with her in a rented house in Las Vegas while she plays high-stakes poker. Last year's event took place in April and May, so Duke had to leave her children in Portland. "It's hard for me to focus on poker when I miss my kids that much," she said.