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

by Maria Konnikova

Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. Figure out what they are observing, how they are orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result. That way, you can anticipate them. Because at the end of the day, the fighting, just like the poker table, comes down to information. “You’re getting signals when you play, and you’re giving off signals. Your actions are both actions in the game that lead to the result in this particular hand, and signals for your opponent to interpret, that explain your strategy,” Lantz says. “Someone can look at them and, from them, reverse engineer the strategy book you’re using. It’s a deep, multilayered problem in information processing.”