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

by Maria Konnikova

In that moment where the lucky object is lost, a degree of mental equilibrium often goes with it, consciously or not. You may feel off your game. You may push your edge a little less as you recover. In a sense, you lose your control, because something outside your control has disrupted an object you’d imbued with power—even if only jokingly.

A human being is not a robot. How you feel affects how you act. And while a hot streak of cards or dice is actually not possible—the gambler’s fallacy remains eternally fallacious—streaks that require actual human performance may indeed exist. The more the realm is subject to individual action, such as creative careers where mindset is one of the central elements, the more this is the case.

That self-reinforcement can lead to a performance boost in most any field—and poker seems to be particularly well suited as a demonstration. Because at the poker table, perceived confidence often translates to incorrect assumptions on the part of your opponent: if you look self-assured and act with conviction, your actions will garner more respect.

Some minds are not meant to be changed.

“In every tablet there are as many grains of luck as of any other drug. Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.”

“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born,” Richard Dawkins writes, in Unweaving the Rainbow. “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions.

Пусть все будут здоровы. May everyone be healthy. Прекрасный тост! What a wonderful toast!

That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be. Most people think of poker as a way to get wealthy. And it is. Only not the way you think. I didn’t make millions. But the wealth of skill I acquired, the depth of decision-making ability, the emotional strength and self-knowledge—these will serve me long after my winnings have run dry.