Las Vegas Weekly

March 8, 2010 · 11:01 AM

Annie Duke wins NBC’s Heads-Up tournament and $500,000

By Robin Leach

Annie Duke celebrates winning the 2010 Heads-Up Poker tournament in Caesars Palace on March 7, 2010.

Photo: Stephanie Moore/NBC Sports

Poker princess Annie Duke became the first woman in six years of the tournament last night to win the NBC Heads-Up championship at Caesars Palace, and she walked off with the $500,000 first-place prize. Annie triumphed against the creme de la creme of the poker world and defeated Erik Seidel, who has won eight World Series of Poker bracelets and is ranked ninth in the overall money list.

Erik went home with $250,000 for finishing runner-up, while the third- and fourth-place finishers collected $125,000 each, the fifth- through eighth-place players won $75,000 each, and the ninth thru 16th players collected $25,000 each. NBC will broadcast the showdown of the world’s top poker players over six consecutive Sundays starting April 18.

Annie giddily proclaimed: “I’m so exited to win such a prestigious event and join the likes of Huck Seed, Chris Ferguson and Phil Hellmuth as Heads-Up champion.”

When Annie and Erik reached the Final Table after winning their semifinal matches late yesterday afternoon, they had to play a best-of-three match, and as our good friend Emily Jillette reported the live play-by-play of the finals for me on my Twitter page, it went to a tie at 1-1 before Annie claimed victory. You can read all my earlier weekend tweets there, too.

Annie added: “I came into this tournament really focused, and it feels great to finally break through in this event.”

In five previous Heads-Up events, Annie never made it past the second round and had only advanced out of the first round once. On her way to this weekend’s finals, she defeated several top players, including Andy Bloch, last year’s WSOP runner-up Darvin Moon, Paul Wasicka, Jerry Yang and Dennis Phillips. Poker experts described her dramatic come-from-behind victory against Paul in the third round as one of the most compelling matches of the weekend.

The competition began Friday and continued through last night’s best-of-three championship. The tournament featured 64 top poker players competing in a series of heads-up, one-on-one matches of No Limit Texas Hold’em to determine the best heads-up poker player in the world. This tournament has a unique, single-elimination, bracket-style format modeled after college basketball’s NCAA tournament, except that the finals are the best of three.

The brackets were set during the tournament’s draw party held at Pure in Caesars Palace last Thursday, where Darvin, Jennifer Tilly and Phil Laak spoke with Vegas DeLuxe via Twitter video. The event is sponsored by GoDaddy.com, a leader in enabling people to build and maintain an online presence with domain names, Web hosting and Web design tools.

NBC’s TV coverage from Caesars Palace airs April 18 and 25 and May 2, 9, 16 and 23. Check local listings for air times.

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

Follow Vegas DeLuxe on Twitter at Twitter.com/vegasdeluxe.

Follow VDLX Editor Don Chareunsy on Twitter at Twitter.com/VDLXEditorDon.

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