Celebrity Apprentice

Joan Rivers beat Annie Duke on Celebrity Apprentice. I didn't watch the final episode, although I did watch most of them during the season. I watched Breaking Bad last night and switched over in the final moments to see who Trump was going to pick as the winner.

2+2 has a long discussion on the show, most of which focuses on personalities and conspiracy theories. The best analysis of the show I've seen is Danny Boy's. He does a really good job of analyzing the show.

He's so much more coherent when he's not drunk.

(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I just don't have it in me to be able to compliment Danny without an insulting followup.)

Although I do think Danny Boy did a good job in his overall analysis of the show, I do have to disagree with him about one thing. He says

I wasn't all that thrilled with how the profession of poker was portrayed on the show and I'd like a crack at giving people a different perspective. Too much emphasis was put on words like "deceit" and "manipulation" and while those are tools used at a poker table, I don't believe that if you play poker for a living those tools are something that are necessary in order to succeed in life, or in a game like Celebrity Apprentice.

I think that as a general rule poker players are a bunch of weasels. I don't like most of them and I don't trust most of them. That probably has something to do with why a lot of them don't like me.

Danny himself is a good example of the kind of weasels poker player's can be even away from the table.

A few years ago, before he got rich and famous, Danny-Boy was insulted by me and he challenged me to a duel, a heads-up poker match. Normally I ignore such school-yard pestering, but Danny offered 10-1 on a cash wager on the outcome of a 40 hour heads up limit hold'em match.

That was almost impossible to turn down. Even if Danny was a better player than me (something that's entireely possible) there's no way he would be a 10-1 favorite.

The initial problem was that I had no money. I also think that Danny-boy was busted at the time (this was before he was rich and famous) but he wasn't going to admit it. I tried to get Danny to give me a number, a maximum bet he would be willing and able to cover. He wouldn't do it.

By offering investors 6-1 on their money I thought I could raise $100k. So I suggested that to Danny -- my $100k versus his million dollars. He agreed. But the way he behaved I still wasn't convinced he wasn't busted. I don't think he really had the money and I don't think his tournament backers would have been willing to lay 10-1.

But I went to work on it anyway. Trying to raise cash. I found a video film maker willing to produce a documentary on the event. I found a backer to finance a series of vidios on heads up poker. I got a radio DJ to do a live internet braodcast of the event. I even talked to a Swedish TV producer about doing a reality TV show on the event. This was all before poker on TV was widespread. One of Danny's stipulations was that we play in either Las Vegas or Los Angeles. The match would have been legal in Texas and we could have done it rake free (I had a volunteer with many years of WSOP dealing and floor experience to deal it). But Danny wouldn't go for that. So I found a casino in Las Vegas that would sponser the event.

Then Danny balked. His new stipulation was that I just come out to Vegas and find him at the Belogio and we'd sit down and play right then. No advance planning, no fund-raising, and if I showed up on a day he wasn't in town that's just my tough luck.

That stipulation was presented after he had a friend call me (I think it was a potential backer of Danny) and talk to me about backing me. He wanted to know why I thought I had a chance to beat Danny. I was fairly open about that and would have told have told Danny if he'd have just asked. I thought I could play close to a game theory strategy and that Danny would likely beat himself with FPS trying to dance around.

Anyway, when it came time for Danny to call the casino that would be hosting the event to make arrangements for him to deposit his buyin (I didn't want to go to far in the planning until I actually saw the money -- I had some commitments from backers but didn't collect the monies because I never did think Danny would actually follow through). When it came time to show the money Danny Boy went berserk and the match clearly wasn't going to happen.

Basically I think Danny Boy is a worthless pestering weasel and that his lack of character is very typical of professional poker players.

Annie Duke

I'm sorry, but this woman really does remind me of Annie.

Total Woman

I hope Annie homeschools her kids, because if they have to go to school tomorrow they aren't going to like it.

What do you think Annie was thinking?

Discussions

Gambling911

You know Annie, I loved you as a poker player, but as a person? Your 'I'm so great' attitude is grating. You constantly brag while putting everyone else down, this speaks volumes about you and less about your targets. I went into this rooting for you - but frankly, I just can't stand you anymore. It's going to be hard watching you play poker, you have really been behaving disgracefully - and this article cements my opinion - well, at least your brother seems to have class

rec.gambling.poker

Can you just imagine how many kids at school are going to bring up to
her children that she gives a "good blow job"
Kids will keep on recounting that little fact long beyond the time
they forget where it even came from. In fact, the history behind it
will be rewritten over and over against until it develops into a story
about annie blowing every male in the area.

Pokerati

I think the fact that she was talking to Playboy star Brande Roderick had something to do with her comment. I don’t know if she expected it to be aired.

IGN Boards

2+2

annie duke just became cool in my book and i would let her go down for the record

Divorce and poker

The only person that you can be sure will benefit from a divorce is the divorce attorney. They almost always make out pretty well. Men and women not so much.

But the effects of divorce on men and women are typically different. Typically women suffer financial hardship from divorce and men suffer emotional hardship.

Women usually are the ones that initiate a divorce, so their unhappiness is in the past. The divorce is going to tend to make them happier even though because of the nature of gender roles in a marriage they'll usually take the short end financially. Men usually didn't know they were unhappy until they got blindsided by the divorce, so the divorce itself tends to make them very unhappy.

But maybe there's something different about poker players. I don't have a big sample, but if you look at the divorces of a couple of high profile poker players the typical pattern doesn't seem to play itself out.

When Annie Duke got divorced she did just find financially. But, of course ended up just fine financially. In her case, although her marriage started out with the traditional gender roles (her husband had a small trust fund income that supported them) she didn't move to get divorced until after she'd developed her own independent career.

And Danny Boy seems to be doing just fine emotionally since his divorce.

Maybe poker players tend to develop non-traditional gender roles in their marriages?

Luck v. Skill

I havn't read The Poker Chronicles in a while and was catching up on it this afternoon. I ran across an old post from back in May about a really stupid idea from David Sklansky, Howard Lederer, and Annie Duke that Freakonomics picked up on and actually seemed to think it was a meaningful idea about poker as a skill game. It's not a meaningful idea at all.

You might notice that Annie had made her blog post promoting the idea as part of her pimping from that scam organization, PPA.

Let me quote Annie's statement of the idea.

But now let's say that we have our two equally matched poker players and I lean into one of them and whisper in their ear that I want them to lose the next match as quickly as possible. The player would be able to do it, and fast. They could easily come up with a strategy that would insure that they lost (for example they could check fold every single flop). Baseball would work the same way. Remember the Chicago Blacksox?

The ability to purposely lose is a very definitive argument that a game is all skill. Notice that if I asked you to purposely lose at a roulette game or Baccarat game (where the house took no edge) you could not do it.

The Poker Chronicles points out how stupid that idea is by pointing out how to structure bets in roulette, craps, and baccaret to ensure a loss. In poker you have to depend on your opponent not taking counter measure if you want to ensure a loss, that's not even true if you want to ensure a loss in table games.

It's idiots like Annie Duke, with the apparant brains of a dead turnip, that are pimping your support of the PPA. Keep that in mind.