Annie Duke on Acting Out in the Poker Spotlight

I had a very interesting month of October where I had cameras on me for most of the day, every day.  I learned something from the experience that might seem really trivial, but is actually really important to me. I learned that I am the same whether or not a camera is on me.  This fact might actually hurt me as much as it might do me some good to be more aware of the cameras occasionally.  I mean sometimes a little self-censorship is not such a bad thing.  But love me or hate me, I am who I am and it turns out that it just doesn’t matter whether or not there is a camera around me or not.  I won’t do anything special to get them to point in my direction.  I don’t change who I am or what I am willing to say just because there is someone filming me.  Take me or leave me, this is just who I am.

Now the thing is that I also learned that that is not true of everyone.  There are a lot of people in this world who are really different when a camera is around than when it isn’t.  I don’t know how someone lives that way, personally.  I have seen people cross lines that I would never cross just to play up to the camera and try to get more face time.  I find it somewhat desperate, frankly.  But I have seen people say things so low, so far afield from what would be considered decent, all in the name of camera time.

How does this relate to poker?  Oh, come on. Are you kidding me?  Have you not seen the fist pumping, the celebrations, and the brutal berating that basically only started since 2003 when the cameras first popped around?  I give you Humberto Brenes as Exhibit A.  Here is a guy who never made a peep.  He never had a bad word to say.  He was a decent and kind human being.  I never saw him celebrate at the winning of a hand, throwing it in the loser’s face.  Never once did I see him act anything but graciously.

And then someone gave him that shark and a camera to play up to. Wow.  What a transformation.  And not in a good way.  Here is the thing: When you win a hand, someone has lost a hand.  Have a little empathy.  Win with some grace.  The loser already feels bad enough without your help.  Is there any reason, really, to shove a stupid shark in his face and taunt him so loudly that the whole room can’t help but hear you?  In the end, don’t you have to walk away when the cameras turn off with your soul intact, or at least some part of it?  How do you transform so completely from a kind and gracious person to some guy screaming “Shark” at the top of his lungs in some desperate attempt to make people pay attention to you?  I truly am at a loss.

The interesting thing about Phil Hellmuth, in contrast to Humberto, is that Phil was always the way he is now, even when there were no cameras around.  In private or in public, Phil is always the same.  Now I understand you might think he is an asshole.  But he is the same asshole in private as in public and, for the record, I don’t think he is an asshole.  I just won’t argue if you do and neither would Phil.  Phil understands how he comes off, but he just is who he is and you can be having a private dinner with him or be at a poker table with the lights and cameras running and you will get the exact same Phil in both situations.  Love him or hate him, he is who he is and he is true to himself for better or worse.

Mike Matusow is another guy like that.  Mike is loud.  Mike is brash.  Mike is emotion rubbed raw and exposed.  And Mike has been that way since the day I met him, years before anyone ever cared about poker, much less even understood there were people doing this for a living.  I had heard rumblings about some dude named Mike the Mouth in the late 1990’s.  Then one day I was playing in the big game at the Mirage and I heard some loud obnoxiousness at a table behind me and, without even turning around to look, I said to the table, “That must be Mike the Mouth.”  I was right.  And pretty soon Mike was playing in the same games I was and I discovered something about him: Mike is really kind hearted.  To be sure, he has no internal editor and things come out of his mouth that you can’t imagine someone saying, but he is genuine.  He is as real as it comes.  He would fly across the world to help you if you asked.  And he hasn’t changed one bit just because there are cameras around.  In the private break room at the WSOP, he is exactly the same as he is at the tables with the hole card cameras. And for that, you have to love him…even if it is just for the study of a human being gone completely raw.

Anyway, I am trying to figure out what the point of all this is.  I think it is just that whether you like someone or not, I guess you have to respect people who are true to themselves.  I guess I just can’t really get into the headspace of someone who can be that different for the sake of attention.  Maybe it is because I don’t really want the attention enough to sacrifice who I am. Maybe I don’t know how to be different or maybe I am already just so interesting that I don’t need to change to get attention (haha okay that was a joke), but I always feel like you have to walk away from these experiences with the cameras intact as a human being…whatever kind of human being you are.