at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on cognitive linguistics and writing her dissertation on a hypothesis of how children learn their first language called "syntactic bootstrapping". For her graduate studies she was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship. In 1991, one month before defending her doctoral dissertation, she decided that she no longer wished to pursue academia and left school. In 1992, she married Ben Duke, grandson of Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke and a descendent of Washington Duke, and moved to Billings, Montana. The couple divided their time between Las Vegas and Montana between 1992 and 2002, when they moved to Portland, Oregon. They were married until 2004 and had four children. Maud Duke was born in 1995; Leo Duke, in 1998; Lucy Duke, in 2000; and Nell Duke, in 2002. In 2005, Duke and her children relocated to Hollywood Hills, California. Professional poker career Early career Duke first played Texas hold'em at age 22 in a casino and continued to play for fun in Las Vegas casinos while visiting her brother, Howard Lederer, during her graduate school years. In 1992 after Duke moved to Billings her brother encouraged her to play poker professionally, sending her $2,400 and providing her with poker instruction books and lessons by phone. She began to play poker initially at the Crystal Lounge, a local bar in Billings that had a legal poker room. Following a successful year playing in Montana, her brother prompted her to enter tournaments at the 1994 World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas. Within the first month, she won $70,000 and decided to move to Las Vegas to pursue a professional poker career. Live poker In the first two tournaments of the 1994 World Series of Poker, Duke placed 14th and 5th, and finished 26th in the Main Event. Following her move to Las Vegas, Duke continued successfully playing poker on a professional basis through the late 1990s, and by 2000 had 16 in the money finishes at WSOP events, prior to the WSOP World Championship event that year. From 2000 onward, she became well known for her high-profile achievements in WSOP events. In the 2000 WSOP World Championship event, although nine months pregnant with her third child, she placed 10th out of a total of 512 players, which was the second-highest finish by a woman in the event's history. She received a WSOP gold bracelet in 2004, placing