Author, decision strategist, former professional poker player.
Contemporary · United States
Install Annie's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install annie-dukeInstalls 0 skills from Annie, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Duke was born Anne LaBarr Lederer in Concord, New Hampshire, where her father Richard Lederer taught English at St. Paul's School and her mother taught at Concord High School; both parents were card players, and games were a constant presence at home. She studied English and psychology at Columbia University, part of the first fully co-educational class in the school's 230-year history, then began a doctoral program in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania on a National Science Foundation fellowship. One month before she was scheduled to defend her dissertation in 1991, she left academia to play poker professionally, following her older brother Howard Lederer, already an established professional, into the game.
Duke won $70,000 in her first month playing at the 1994 World Series of Poker and moved to Las Vegas soon after to play full time. In 2000, nine months pregnant with her third child, she finished tenth in the WSOP Main Event, at the time the second best finish by a woman in the tournament's history. She won a WSOP gold bracelet in 2004 and, that same year, took first place in the inaugural WSOP Tournament of Champions for two million dollars, and in 2010 became the first, and to date only, woman to win the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Across her tournament career she won more than four million dollars. She stepped back from professional poker around 2010 and turned to writing and consulting on decision making under uncertainty, publishing Thinking in Bets in 2018, followed by How to Decide in 2020 and Quit in 2022. In 2014 she co-founded the Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit working to bring decision science into K-12 classrooms, and in 2023, three decades after leaving her doctoral program a month short of finishing, she completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Duke is now a leading popularizer of decision science outside academia, teaching as an adjunct at the Wharton School's executive education program and lecturing at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her central contribution, naming and popularizing resulting, the error of judging a decision's quality by its outcome rather than by the process that produced it, has become common vocabulary well beyond poker, in business strategy, medicine, and public discussion of risk.
Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Annie.
“Life is more like poker than chess.”
“Drawing an overly tight relationship between results and decision quality affects our decisions every day, potentially with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences.”
“Diversity and dissent are not the only checks on fallibility, but the only means of testing the ultimate truth of an opinion.”
“Just as we are almost never 100% wrong or right, outcomes are almost never 100% due to luck or skill.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Duke
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