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

by Maria Konnikova

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 bluff chance.

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. Two simple words that we simply ignore more often than not. Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.

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

Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?

In All Said and Done, 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. “And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.” How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?

The “thousand different futures” line is a perfect companion to the thought of a 180-degree future at every point in time (from the same thought as the infinite inch.

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. Not only would they decide ahead of time how they were going to divide their investments, but they would decide based on incredibly limited information which stock was “good” and stick to their guns—even as they started losing money. 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.

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 equation of luck and skill is, at its heart, probabilistic. 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. We believe what we want to see, not what research shows.

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.

Used in the right way, experience can be a powerful ally in helping to understand probabilistic scenarios. The experience just can’t be a one-off, haphazard event. It has to be a systematic learning process—much like the environment you encounter at the table. And the correct systematic learning process can help you unravel chance from everything else in a way that no amount of cramming numbers or studying theory ever will.

Life is so unfair was my first thought—but if there’s anything Mom taught me, it’s that life has no concept of fairness. It’s just tough luck. Deal with it.

She’d been through World War II, survived Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and was defeated by a slippery floor and one misplaced foot. Unfair. Or rather, unlucky. One surer step and she’d still be here.

Luck surrounds us, everywhere—from something as mundane as walking to work and getting there safely to the other extreme, like surviving a war or a terrorist attack when others mere inches away weren’t as fortunate. 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.

“The ‘one chance in a million’ will undoubtedly occur with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.”

It is probability, it is pure statistics, and it is part of life, neither good nor bad.

Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet—chance with an agenda.

To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough skill to make playing worthwhile, enough chance that the challenge was there for the taking.

Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives—chance and control.

Poker has a mathematical foundation, but with a dose of human intention, interaction, psychology—nuance, deception, little tricks that don’t quite reflect reality but help you gain an edge over others. 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.

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.

It’s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will ever be able to capture the vagaries and surprises of human nature.

And that’s what makes this game a particularly strong metaphor for our daily decision making. Because in life, there is never a limit: there’s no external restriction to betting everything you have on any given decision. What’s to stop you from risking all your money, your reputation, your heart, even your life at any point you choose? Nothing. There are no rules, at the end of the day, save some internal calculus that only you are privy to. And everyone around you has to know that when they make their decisions: knowing you can go all the way, how much should they themselves invest? It’s the endless game of brinkmanship, popularized by another giant of game theory, the Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling, that plays out everywhere in our lives. Who will say “I love you” first, moving “all in” in the relationship—and if you say it, will you be left out, so to speak? Who will walk away from the business negotiation? Who will wage war? The ability to go all in—and the knowledge that going all in is an option for everyone around us—is the crucial variable that makes so many decisions so very difficult.

You can emerge with the deal of a lifetime, or a life partner—or you can find yourself bankrupt or emotionally devastated. Like life, no limit poker is high risk and high reward.

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.

in an age of omnipresent distraction, poker reminds us just how critical close observation and presence are to achievement and success.

As Erik told me that first day, lesson one: pay attention. This book isn’t about how to play poker. It’...

“I go to the bottom line in everything,” he wrote in one of his letters, “and throughout my entire life, I have crossed this bottom line.”

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.

“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. Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no possibility of being mistaken? Would you bet your marriage? Your health? Even our deep convictions suddenly seem a lot less certain when put in that light.

Poker is such a powerful window into probabilistic thinking not in spite of, but because of, the betting involved: the betting in poker isn’t incidental. It’s integral to the learning process. Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.

Because the world is much messier than the poker table, it’s far easier to blame something else.

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.

“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.”

Of life.

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 “less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.

How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.

As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become.

Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly...

There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we i...

If you suffer a bad beat in life, it may set you back considerably more—and last a lot longer. All of a sudden, your framing matters significantly more. A victim of the cruel cards? This may serve as something I think of as a luck dampener effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it.

Bad beats drag you down. They focus your mind on something you can’t control—the cards—rather than something you can, the decision. They ignore the fact that the most we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have; the outcome doesn’t matter.

If your skill is good enough that you’ve earned the right to play, welcome. It’s what America hopes to be, but never, not in any other profession, actually is.

In everything, stability and support are important components in success. In their absence, there’s that much more to overcome, that many more obstacles that need to be moved before you’re on the same path as the next guy who was more fortunate.

“When you’re at the table, the amount of focus that you can generate is really rewarded,” he tells me, urging me to try to take in as much as I possibly can. “Pay close attention. You’re more likely to pick up patterns in betting, tells and things like that. There’s so much happening.”

“This is the funny thing about modern poker: even top players are sitting there, on their phones, and they’re missing all the information that’s on the table. It’s really kind of insane.”