Annie Duke Breaks Down Celebrity Apprentice, by Annie Duke - Poker News Daily - 15th February 2009

Well, the Celebrity Apprentice cat is out of the bag now. The cast has been announced and, yes, I am part of it. Okay, so what would make me do this show? I mean I have tried to avoid reality TV. Over the years, I have had a few offers to do a reality show about my poker life with four kids. My answer is always that I won’t put my kids on TV, so they quietly go away. I really value my private life and protecting the privacy of my kids. So then why on Earth would I agree to do this show?

Here is how it went: My manager called and told me that he had a meeting for me with the Celebrity Apprentice people. I was not happy about it because I wasn’t really interested in being on a reality show. We had had this argument before about “Dancing with the Stars.” He kept saying he wanted to pitch me for it. I kept saying a) I am not a big enough celebrity by any stretch of the imagination and b) I can’t dance.

My boyfriend teases me when I dance and imitates me (making sure I never ever dance in his presence, by the way). Joe is an amazingly good dancer, made more amazing by the fact that he is a 200+ pound burly dude with crazy long curly hair who doesn’t look like he could dance his way out of a paper bag. Yet, he used to break dance for money on the streets of Boston as a kid and got his first job in Hollywood as a dancer. I once even had the pleasure of witnessing a dance-off between Joe and Jeff Donovan (the star of the show “Burn Notice”). That was pretty awesome and really too close to call. It has to go down as one of the funniest dance-offs I have ever seen because both of them were doing some kick ass dancing while trying to be funnier at it than the other one. Imagine doing some popping and locking while essentially miming going down on each other in the middle of a club. It was pretty hilarious. Okay, I have really digressed.

The point is I was not interested in Dancing with the Stars. OMG that would be humiliating. And I was not interested in Celebrity Apprentice either, particularly since I can be, shall we say, snarky and I didn’t really want that to be seen in all its glory on national television. But, then I went in for the meeting and, not having watched the previous season, was shocked to find out that the cast had raised $1 million for charity during the run of the show. I thought to myself that I have to do this show because that is a lot of money for charity and would be really good for Ante Up for Africa. You see, I didn’t know the show was for charity and now I realized it would be hard for me to say no.

To be honest, it is a game. I mean a game. And we all know I love a good game. This was a pretty cool game that involved managing your opponents, raising money for charity, and doing some pretty cool marketing tasks. It seemed to me that maybe I was pretty well-suited for that particular type of game since I play one for a living, one that also involves managing your opponents. I also do marketing work for Ultimate Bet and have raised $2 million with Don Cheadle and Norman Epstein for Ante Up for Africa in the last two years.

Game. Charity. Cool.

So I decided I should do it. I got the last season on DVD and started studying the tapes madly… you know, because that is what I do. If I am going to agree to a competition, I am going to make sure I analyze how the game is played and come in super prepared knowing exactly what people did right the last season and what people did wrong. I am going to have a good handle on it and get all of my ducks in a row money raising-wise and all that. I analyzed the whole last season and starting working a formula for how much money I needed to raise and what the highest percentage part of the tasks was to do to make sure you didn’t get fired, but also got noticed and impressed Donald Trump. I was obsessed for the couple of weeks before doing the show.

So, of course, I cannot tell you anything about how it all turned out, right? That annoys me because I want to talk about the game because I LOVE talking about games. You are going to have to watch to see how I do and whether my preparation pays off. The thing is that, well, I am direct. That is a nice way to put it: direct. The thing I was most worried about going into the game was that my fellow players would not really get my interpersonal style. When people first meet me, they sometimes come away with the impression that I am a jerk. To be fair, I can be a jerk, particularly if I think someone is saying something stupid. I suffer fools very poorly and I have to remember to work on that more. I was really concerned because even though this is an individual game, you still have to have your teammates like you so they don’t throw you under the bus and I am just not good at making nice nice and pretending that I can deal with everyone. It probably comes from doing a job my whole adult life where you only have to answer to yourself. Oh, and I have stupidly high expectations of people.

With all of that going on in my head, knowing that I had analyzed the hell out of last season, but also knowing that I might have some issues with my teammates liking me, I headed off to New York to try my hand at the game. March 1st, everyone. That is when you can start seeing how I do! (Credit: Poker News Daily)

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