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

by Maria Konnikova

Here’s the thing about thin-slice judgments: they are intuitive, and they are based on large samples. As with all things statistical, they break down in accuracy at the level of the individual. The slant of someone’s eyebrows may signal trustworthiness in general, but that’s not to say that this particular person is trustworthy.

Charles Burns exploits this in his graphic novel Blackhole

the vast majority of people don’t fare any better than a coin toss at deciding whether someone is lying or telling the truth—and even with significant training, people are unlikely to spot the practiced deceiver.

I’ve witnessed enough Lodden Thinks, for one, to see that some people really can pick up on seemingly invisible information. Maybe not deception as such. But something.

suggesting that faces may actually give more false than useful information. (That seems right to me, I reflect, based on how I’ve been using faces up to this point. Maybe everyone should play in a ski mask to help me out.) But when they looked at the motion of hands alone, their performance shot up. Even people who had no prior knowledge of poker whatsoever seemed suddenly able to tell with some accuracy whether someone had a hand that was strong or weak.

I forgot to stop and enjoy it all—enjoy the game, the journey, the new skills that are rapidly making their way into my thought process.

If I take the intent of my journey rather than the arbitrary end goal meant as a hook for a book proposal more than anything else, the conclusion is clear. Postpone.

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.

and not critical enough of the fact that I simply made some decisions earlier on with incomplete information—and now that I know more, I should change course.

It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.

people will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided.

Never feel like you have to do something just because it’s expected of you—even if you’re the one who expects it of you.

THE CONCEPT OF TILT in poker

I'm wondering if it was taken from pinball or is it not related

Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling. Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it.

The jury’s out on whether his injury

The jurys out but there is an in jury

What I have to start doing is being proactive rather than reactive. When I react, it’s already too late.

anyone who has ever dealt with insomnia knows so well. The moment your mind becomes preoccupied with sleep is the moment sleep escapes for good.

One recent study showed that elite chess players can burn up to six thousand calories a day during tournaments, exhibiting metabolic patterns reminiscent of elite athletes. Professional poker players, I suspect, would exhibit many of the same effects.

A color. A number. A motion. An outfit. A word. Lucky numbers. Lucky charms.

As kids we finished the lucky charms jingle with"they're magically disgusting"

I’d missed, like the long pinky nail. “It’s a way of signaling wealth and status, because you can’t grow out your long pinky nail if you’re doing manual labor,”

I was told it was for cocaine

Bohr’s believed that horseshoes brought luck? Of course he didn’t believe it, Bohr replied. “But I understand it’s lucky whether I believe in it or not.” So Ike is making the rational decision to be irrational, in an attempt to make that irrationality more . . . rational?

When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome.

In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo.

Even the rabbit’s foot is a lucky object for 14 percent—and

Makes me think of that one episode of Supernatural

“It had probably never occurred to you to imagine what the Goo Goo Dolls would sound like if the lead singer had a Chinese accent and the band couldn’t play their instruments at all.”

“Which is sicker? Billy standing at the craps table, who thinks he’s going to win, or me, who knows he can’t win and still plays?”

A 2018 study in Nature found clear evidence of hot streaks in artistic and film careers, as well as in scientific trajectories. The streak “emerges randomly” and inevitably comes to an end, but while it lasts, it has a self-reinforcing effect.

I skip the Colossus, or the Colasshole as I’ve taken to calling it in my head.

It's a tradition in my family to have pet names for places like what Maria does here. Burger King is Booger King. Taco Bell is Taco Hell. McDonald's is Rotten Ronnies. Canadian Tire is Crappy Tire. The Real Canadian Superstore is the Stupid Store