Annie Duke vs. Daniel Negreanu start to finish: Part 2 bad blood renewed

In Part 1 of this series I outlined the early run-ins between Annie Duke and Daniel Negreanu which were the genesis of their animosity toward each other. In this installment I’ll discuss the recent flare-up between the two.

The “FEUD” between Annie Duke and Daniel Negreanu had been on hold for a number of years prior to the Ladies-Only Tournament at this year’s World Series of Poker, where the two came down on opposite sides of the controversy surrounding the event. However, the rhetoric picked up a bit when Daniel caught Annie Duke taking a very hypocritical position regarding women in poker: On the one hand she is against gender-based tournaments like the Ladies Tournament at the WSOP, while at the same time self-applying the title of Best Female Poker Player on her website.

Still, the two weren’t exactly at each other’s throats as they have been in the past, but pretty much everyone saw the old feelings coming out in their respective blog posts. This incident probably would have died out, but for one off-the-cuff comment by Daniel.  In an interview with pokerplayer.co.uk, Daniel went a little overboard when he referred to Duke as a “F***ing C***” regarding her hypocritical stance (he later stated in an interview with PokerNews.com’s Kimberly Lansing that while he did say the quote in the article, and obviously meant it, he thought the response was off-the-record).

Just as the story seemed to be puttering out we get the obligatory response from Annie Duke on her blog, where she posts an response from PokerStars regarding the incident (anyone who has ever corresponded with a poker site knows that these are scripted responses by someone on the site’s Customer Support Team).  The problem was that whoever penned the E-Mail response definitely didn’t run it by their supervisors!

Back to that in a minute: First I want to talk about Duke’s use of the E-Mail response in her blog post. I have a problem with this because she is parading it out as if it came from the CEO himself, and not from the customer support team which she knows to be the case. It seems she is doing this in an effort to disparage PokerStars‘ handling of the situation. There is obviously a conflict of interest in doing this, since Duke is a UB Poker pro and PokerStars really has nothing to do with the whole fiasco — I had the same feelings when Negreanu talked disparagingly of UB Poker, and in general the players who represent the site not too long ago as well.

Going by the timeline it seemed PokerStars was content to let this run its News-Cycle and die out on its own, but with Duke’s “Open Letter” to PokerStars entry on her blog PokerStars had to write up a formal response, which of course keeps the story alive much, much, longer.

Here is the OFFICIAL response by PokerStars, which was given to PokerNews.com:

PokerStars does not support the use of derogatory or hurtful language directed at any other player. While this was a personal matter between two players, we wish that better judgment had been used in the choice of words.

As to the PokerStars email posted in “open letter to PokerStars” on Annie Duke’s site, our support handles over 10,000 emails per day, and this was a case where our staff member incorrectly speculated with personal opinion, and overstepped their boundary. However they did not ‘condone’ the use of Daniel’s language at any point as is implied. Rest assured, this email was *not* PokerStars‘ official statement on this issue.

So, this is where we stand at the moment: I will post one final entry in this series where I give my thoughts on the whole affair.

PokerPlayer.co.uk Interview with Daniel

Annie’s Blog Post