As his current bio on X, Jacob Duffy carries a line that does not immediately belong to cricket.

"Deuces never loses."

It began, he says, as an inside joke during online poker sessions with teammate Michael Rae. Whenever pocket twos appeared, the pair would shove everything in, almost irrationally, a little bravely, but above all, in the spirit of fun.

He smiles as he explains it, but the metaphor lingers longer than he lets on.

Pocket twos are statistically one of the weakest starting hands in poker. Most players fold them without hesitation. But every once in a while, they hold. And when they do, the win feels outsized. Not because the hand was dominant, but because you stayed in.

Duffy's career has unfolded in much the same way.

He signed a first-class contract with Otago at 17. In his T20 debut season, still in his final year at Southland Boys' High School, he dismissed Kane Williamson and Tim Southee in the same spell. That was in 2012. He went on to represent New Zealand at an Under-19 World Cup and made headlines before he had even fully grown into his body.

The trajectory seemed obvious. He was a prodigy. And then, for a long time, he wasn't. There would be no international debut until 2020, and even then he sat out more matches than he played.

"Some guys at the international scene are very young," Duffy tells Cricbuzz. "My career, I guess, has gone up and down a lot."

Looking back, Duffy feels that after a couple of good seasons at the domestic level, the better batters had "figured me out". He needed an extra edge. "I probably wasn't bowling as fast as what's required at international level," he explains. "But when I tried to do that, my bowling picked up some bad habits."

In his search for pace, Duffy ended up losing his rhythm. The harder he pushed, the further his action drifted from what had once felt natural. And everybody around him had a solution to offer.

"I'm a pretty open sort of guy," Duffy says. "I like to take on a lot of feedback. I've had a lot of different voices over the years. You take the good stuff and some of the not-so-good stuff and give it a go."

A lot of the good stuff came from Rob Walter, who was in charge of Otago at the time, and is now the head coach of New Zealand. What followed were small adjustments to the run-up, a straighter followthrough, conversations that stretched beyond a single net session. The changes felt technical at the time. The lessons proved longer-lasting.