The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

Thousands of bodies sit in seeming disarray on chairs straight out of a seventies dining room catalogue—orange-and-mustard patterned upholstery, gold legs, vaguely square frame.

That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs. I could definitely detect a slight cackle.

The outcome would be what it would be. All I could do was my best with what I could control—and the rest, well, the rest wasn’t up to me.

Reminds me of the Samaurai discussion I read somewhere. Something about accepting the fact that you may die in batle helping deal with the fear or something like that

than this stall, I heard the telltale sound of my phone’s text message alert. It was my coach, Erik Seidel. “How’s it going?” the message read. Simple enough. He wanted to see how his student was faring

LOL because she's in a bathroom stall I missread that as farting

I chose my outfit with care—sophisticated but not stuffy, serious but not overly so. The kind of person you could trust and depend on, but who would also be fun to hang around with over drinks.

Fashion is a language that I don't bother with but I love this detailed analysis

A poker player who reads the New Yorker is my kind of poker player.

I just looked up his photo, Erik looks the look of someone who would read the New Yorker.

years. As with so many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker have been passed over in favor of the quantitative. Measurement presides over intuition. Statistics over observation. Game theory over “feel.”

Talk of frequencies trumps talk of feelings.

Not the former us president

If I had to assign him a life motto, it would be this: life is too short for complacency. Indeed, when I inevitably ask him the question he gets asked most frequently—what his single piece of advice would be to aspiring poker players—his answer is two words long: pay attention.

It wasn’t about playing the cards. It was about playing the man. A cliché, true—but one that got to the heart of my interests, that captured much of what I’d been thinking about the world.

Through that journey, I hoped to learn how to make the best decisions I possibly could, not just at the card table but in the world. Through poker, I wanted to tame luck—to learn to make a difference even when the deck seemed stacked against me.

I really like her motivation here, this setup, it could be pulled straight out of mythology, Cambell's hero's journey etc.

Simone de Beauvoir says of her life that the “penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about.” Such was the role that chance had played in the whole trajectory of her existence.

How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?

What I found was something completely unexpected. Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events—smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better.

Is quantum going to come up? The observer effect? Parapsychology? Magic? This book has got deep hooks

People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

The author's highlight, I feel like I need to burn it into my brain

And a basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty.

It’s called the description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and even then, we often ignore the numbers in favor of our own experience.

A few months later, my vivacious, healthy, living-on-her-own grandmother slipped in the night. The edge of a metal bed frame. Hard linoleum floor. No extra pair of ears to hear anything amiss. The neighbors found her in the morning, alerted by a light that shouldn’t have been turned on. Two days later, she was dead.

Dan John practically preaches the importance of breakfall practice for adults. Kids (should) get plenty of practice tumbling, falling. As we age in modern life we start spending less and less time falling, so we get really bad at it. Years may go by without falling in adulthood until one day.....

And to the end, I never called back quite quickly enough. She’d been through World War II, survived Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and was defeated by a slippery floor and one misplaced foot.

The startup he’d joined failed to start

It was a stopdown

Sometimes, I couldn’t even leave the apartment: my skin broke out in hives whenever anything touched it, and it was winter outside.

My coworker was just talking about having an epispde Iike that when she was in final placement and at one point the hives inflammed her ankle joint with edema and everything as a young adult

I sat reading James Salter—“We cannot imagine these diseases, they are called idiopathic, spontaneous in origin, but we know instinctively there must be something more, some invisible weakness they are exploiting. It is impossible to think they fall at random, it is unbearable to think it”—and I found myself nodding in recognition. Whether it was pure chance or not, it sucked.

But we only notice it when things don’t go our way. We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves. When chance is on our side, we disregard it: it is invisible. But when it breaks against us, we wake to its power. We begin to reason about its whys and hows.

Consider the 7.5 billion people who currently make up the world’s population and you can be sure that the highly improbable is happening with regular frequency. The “one chance in a million” takes place every second.

Anything that could help shed light on what was happening, that would allow me to regain some semblance of control.

I think some personalities struggle with this more. I see it all the time with my patients,. People who always controlled everything in their life really struggle when they can't. I think psychedelics could help these people learn to go with the flow more but it's those very people who are most afraid of trying them paradoxically

“Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

He was a god-awful player by every account, but that never stopped him.

I like that the guy that developed game theory wasn't good at playing himself. It's like those really good coaches who don't have the physical attributes to play a sport at the top level but can bring out the best in others who do.

Real life is based on making the best decisions you can from information that can never be complete: you never know someone else’s mind, just like you can never know any poker hand but your own. Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions. It’s about discerning the hidden, the uniquely human.

You can emerge with the deal of a lifetime, or a life partner—or you can find yourself bankrupt or emotionally devastated.

I could finally find a way to overcome my all-too-human inability to disentangle chance from skill in the morass of daily life, and instead learn to master it. Could poker help my husband figure out his next career move, and when it was right to just start playing again as opposed to waiting for the perfect cards?

Why on earth would a professional poker player—the professional poker player—agree to let a random journalist follow him around like an overeager toddler, asking the most basic questions about how the world works?

I'm gonna say because even though he is a master of the game he is still a student of the game (which is a common comment from people who excel at a given skill) and teaching someone is a great way for you to see the familar with new eyes. But that is just my guess.

“It’s all about thinking well. The real question is, can good thinking and hard work get you there? And I think it can,” Erik says. In a way it’s good, he goes on, that I’m an outsider. I can bring fresh eyes, perspective—and some of the skills players don’t typically have.

I got the fresh eyes right

I promise him I won’t. And with that, a partnership is born.

I guess he went gaga over her pokerface

If you are starting from scratch, can a deep understanding of the human mind win out over the mathematics and statistical wunderkinds of the poker table? In a way, it’s as much a test of life philosophy as anything else. The qualitative side of things versus the measurable. The human versus the algorithmic.

It is not an exhaustive exploration of the game, how to play it, how to win at it, how to excel. It is no guide.

She has a way of setting her jaw that makes it jut out like it’s about to slice through stone. The chiseled expression of a conquering hero atop a pedestaled horse.

I'm reminded of the SNL church lady, and that ties into Eric's pat phrase "that's special" is close to the church lady's sarcastic "isn't that special". My great grandmother was the living embodiment of the church lady.

and financial ruin, the tables held an irresistible draw.

The roulette table, the table turns, literally

information. In some ways, poker players gamble less than most. After all, even if they lose an arm, they can still play.

Trying to make a joke about losing a hand

Indeed, when the economist Ingo Fiedler analyzed hundreds of thousands of hands played on several online poker sites over a six-month period, he found that the actual best hand won, on average, only 12 percent of the time and that less than a third of hands went to showdown (meaning that players were skillful enough to persuade others to let go of their cards prior to the end of the hand).

Success in poker, in other words, implies far more skill than success in that far more respectable profession, investing.

It wasn’t played with a full deck,

LOL

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.

Dan is Dan Harrington, or Action Dan as he’s often called with a wink, for his seemingly conservative playing style.

I love nick names like this. Eg. It's a trope to have a big guy named Tiny

what I mostly get instead is a crash session on the importance of failure.

Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.

There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation. Even seven-deuce—the worst hand, statistically speaking, that you can be dealt—can be playable in the right circumstances.

And so despite knowing fundamentally sound strategy, you have to be willing to part with it.

M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke. How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit.

Like how she opens the book in the shitter leaving her space at the table empty while the game plays on

“Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’ And he’s right. Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky—it’s as simple as that. You just won’t.”

Trying to make a joke about him giving or getting an earful from Hollyfield

And the only way to do that is by failing. By writing bad poetry. Burning your food. Turning in shitty first draft after shitty first draft. “You have to suffer defeat,” Dan continues. “As brutal as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”