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

by Maria Konnikova

“But for its costliness and dangers, no better education for life among men could be devised than the gambling table—especially the poker table.”

life is too short for complacency.

Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.

It wasn’t about playing the cards. It was about playing the man.

Man plans, God laughs, indeed. Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness.

The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.

the illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging—and before long, the quality of people’s decisions deteriorated.

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.

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.

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions:

John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

“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.”

Humans aren’t rational. Information isn’t open to all. There are no “rules” of behavior, only norms and suggestions—and within certain broad constraints, anyone might break those norms at any point.

When there’s a limit, it means that the exact amount you bet has a ceiling on it. Sometimes, the ceiling is set by the house rules—an arbitrary number above which you can’t go. Sometimes, in what’s known as “pot limit,” it’s set by the total amount in play: your bet cannot exceed what’s in the pot. Either way, your range of action is artificially restricted. In no limit, you can bet everything you have, at any point. You can “shove” or “jam”—that is, make an all-in bet, placing every chip you have into the pot.

Those two setups create rather different dynamics. Cash games are War and Peace. You’re a thousand pages in and still no closer to finding out how the battle resolved itself. You can try to flip ahead, but events will unfold at whatever pace they choose. Tournaments are far more Shakespearean in nature. You’ve barely hit act three and half the cast is already dead. If you want an overview of life at warp speed, tournament poker is the way to go.

All the other guys are very math-based, very data-based. This area is way more open. Actually, of the great players, the ones who are some of the most exploitable are the ones who are really into math.”

From managing emotion, to reading other people, to cutting your losses and maximizing your gains, to psyching yourself up into the best version of yourself so that you can not only catch the bluffs of others but bluff successfully yourself, poker is endlessly applicable and revelatory. The mixture of chance and skill at the table is a mirror to that same mixture in our daily lives—and a way of learning to play within those parameters in superior fashion. Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and how you can deal with the elements of pure luck—in a way no other environment I’ve encountered has quite been able to do.

“If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance, not one wherein you do not risk a loss for the chance of some gain.”

Dostoyevsky knew of what he wrote. On a trip to Baden-Baden with his twenty-two-year-old lover, Polina Suslova, he developed a passion for roulette and “lost absolutely everything.”

My grandmother’s reaction may be extreme—nothing is quite as personal as your grandchildren heading out to ruin on your watch;

We judge the poker player for gambling; we respect the stockbroker for doing the same thing with far less information.

in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win.

“The observed differences in ROIs are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns.” Success in poker, in other words, implies far more skill than success in that far more respectable profession, investing.

betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it. And it is one of the best ways of conquering the pitfalls of our decision processes in just about any endeavor.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray. From a misplaced faith in certainty, the fact that to our minds, 99 percent, even 90 percent, basically means 100 percent—even though it doesn’t, not really.

“It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with such boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of his being in error,” Kant writes. “The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.” Now that he has something real at stake, he has to reevaluate just how sure of a sure thing his opinion really is.

“If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief,” says Kant.

kids learn so much better—and remember what they’ve learned—if they know exactly how or when they’ll apply the knowledge.

Because the world is much messier than the poker table, it’s far easier to blame something else. It’s easy to have an illusion of skill when you’re not immediately called out on it through feedback.

if you want to improve your odds, understand probabilities; if you want a sure thing, rig the deck.

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.

in the year made famous by an accountant, Chris Moneymaker, winning the top prize and starting the modern poker boom, the so-called Moneymaker effect.

David Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker,

that thing where you mix two stacks of chips into one with your hand. Riffling, I find out it’s called.

success: 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.

let’s say you’re playing a field of four hundred people. You have to be involved in many more hands, because just good cards aren’t going to get you there. They’re not going to get you there a high enough percentage of the time.” And so despite knowing fundamentally sound strategy, you have to be willing to part with it. “It turns out that people who are sort of involved and reckless are more likely to go deep.” To go deep means to make it through a large portion of the field. “You just have to be smart about it.”

Normally, people think of stack sizes in terms of big blinds. 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. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner.

“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.

if you don’t have an objective evaluation of what’s going on, you’re a loser,” he tells me. “This game will beat you—it’s as simple as that.

“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”

one of the keys to success, Erik says, if not the key, is objectivity. And objectivity is a hard thing to come by.

Kipling quote: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same .

Understand the dark side of variance first: that’s the only time you’ll actually learn to process your decision making well. Because when you’re winning, it’s just too easy not to stop and analyze your process.

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other.

If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.”

“Less certainty. More inquiry.”

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.” SUN TZU,

learn to pay attention to board texture,” Erik tells me. Is it a dry board, one where the cards don’t have much relation to one another—different suits, values spread far apart, making it unlikely that someone has a strong draw? Is it a wet board, one where the cards are closely connected—two or three of a suit, cards that could form a part of a straight, a landscape that means players who don’t yet have a strong hand can suddenly find themselves with a monster if a draw completes? Is it a static board—no new cards are likely to change the situation that much? Is it a dynamic board—many draws, like straights and flushes, are available, and any new addition is likely to change the advantage and can significantly change the value of your hand? The texture is the changing battleground. Different textures require different strategies.