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

by Maria Konnikova

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

the higher the amount of money for which people played, the greater their actual skill edge. When Chicago economists Steven Levitt and Thomas Miles looked at live play and compared the ROI, or return on investment, for two groups of players at the 2010 WSOP, they found that recreational players lost, on average, over 15 percent of their buy-ins (roughly $400), while professionals won over 30 percent (roughly $1,200). They write, “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.

It’s fascinating how that works, isn’t it? Runs make the human mind uncomfortable. In our heads, probabilities should be normally distributed, that is, play out as described. If a coin is tossed ten times, about five of those should be heads. Of course, that’s not how probability actually works—and even though a hundred heads in a row should rightly make us wonder if we’re playing with a fair coin or stuck in a Stoppardian alternate reality, a run of ten or twenty may well happen. Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really. The funny thing isn’t our discomfort. That’s understandable. It’s the different flavors that discomfort takes when the runs are in our favor versus not. The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency. We overreact to chance events, but the exact nature of the event affects our perception in a way it rightly shouldn’t.

Frank Lantz has spent over twenty years designing games. When we meet at his office at NYU, where he currently runs the Game Center, he lets me in on an idiosyncrasy of game design. “In video games where there are random events—things like dice rolls—they often skew the randomness so that it corresponds more closely to people’s incorrect intuition,” he says. “If you flip heads twice in a row, you’re less likely to flip heads the third time. We know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like it should be true, because we have this weird intuition about large numbers and how randomness works.” The resulting games actually accommodate that wrongness, so that people don’t feel like the setup is “rigged” or “unfair.” “So they actually make it so that you’re less likely to flip heads the third time,” he says. “They jigger the probabilities.”

Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.

“You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck. . . . One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.” WINSTON CHURCHILL, “MY EARLY LIFE,” 1930

“Look, every player is going to want to tell you about the time their aces got cracked. Don’t be that player,” he continues. “Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player. It’s like dumping your garbage on someone else’s lawn. It just stinks.”

“Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it. You want to make sure you’re not the person in the poker room saying, ‘Can you believe what happened?’ That’s the other people.”

Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

If we want to be successful, “we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.” We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.

Checklists, step-by-step modules: these lead to high proficiency in minimal time. If, that is, everything goes according to plan—or fails in anticipated ways. The rote learning method is excellent for high volume and high immediate output, but when it comes to swerving off the lesson plan or reacting to unforeseen events, it leaves you less able to deal. You reach competency quickly, but mastery will prove elusive. It’s like the tests you cram for in school only to realize a few months later that you can’t remember a single thing—or, when you reach the next class, that you aren’t sure how to apply anything that you do remember correctly. You may know a concept, but you’re less able to think through decisions for yourself.

“Even terrible players make the plays they make for a reason, and it’s your job to figure it out,” he tells me. “When a hand is shown down, try to walk back through your opponent’s decision and come up with reasons they might have had for taking the actions they did.” Don’t judge them. Don’t berate them, even in your head, by thinking what an awful play they’ve made—a bad bet, a crazy call, an insane raise. Just try to figure out the why behind it.

In poker, I’m experiencing firsthand the learning trajectory that I so often modeled in the lab. The more you learn, the harder it gets. The better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper.

Erik isn’t discouraging me. Quite the opposite. He’s moving my target ever higher. He’s fighting my complacency before I realize I could possibly become complacent.

“In the great American game, Draw Poker . . . the ‘bluff’ plays so great a role—the attempt to beat your opponent by sheer boldness and self-confidence. The psychic effects of this are significant. It makes the man who bluffs play better and the opponent play worse. The psychic effects of the bluffer in every day life only need to be mentioned.” CLEMENS FRANCE, “THE GAMBLING IMPULSE,” 1902

“What were you thinking?” The Irish gentleman to my left is looking at me in wonder. “That’s one of the tightest players on the circuit. When he re-raises you, you fold pocket jacks!” What was I thinking, indeed. Well, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was acting based on stereotypes and incomplete knowledge, all the while imagining that I had a very good read on someone I had no business reading to begin with. I wasn’t using tells. I was using my implicit biases. Some were formed from experience, sure—I’d played with plenty a muscled and tattooed bro who’d tried to bully me out of pots over my months in the game; in Atlantic City, they practically rule the felt—but they weren’t formed from specific experience with this player, and they were far too broad (and biased) to be useful.

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.

we’ll still adamantly deny making decisions based on snap judgments. Tell me that I’m making a play based on a fleeting impression of a face and I’ll tell you I know better. Tell me I chose my investment adviser based on a friendly encounter and I’ll tell you that, no, actually, I looked at all sorts of objective data to make my decision. Tell me I chose the person I’m dating based on a jawline and I’ll laugh in your face. But our denial belies the fact that we often don’t really know why we make decisions—and we justify them with objective-sounding reasons even when, in reality, we were acting based on faulty intuitive reads. That’s not so bad if we were to listen to corrections. But instead, we often argue with the truth: if someone gives us our actual thought process, we dismiss it in favor of the version we’ve constructed for ourselves.

It’s helpful advice far beyond the poker table. Streamlined decisions. No immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. These are the tools that help us cool down rather than act in the moment, that help us stay rational and look at longer time horizons. Streamlining my thought process may make me harder to read—but it will also make my thought process easier for me to discern.

One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning” is a refrain I’ve grown used to hearing from him. His point is a simple one: your edge is your edge only if you’re playing your best game. To play your best game, you need to be your best you. Rested, sharp, focused. If you’re off, a game that would have been a winning endeavor can suddenly become a losing one. An almost sure thing can become a gamble. I thought that it was just his way of letting me off easy, in case I got jittery about playing a big event—but, no, he does it himself. I’ve seen him skip a major $500,000 tournament—one with quite a prestigious title—because he wasn’t feeling his best. He’d done a self-assessment, decided he wasn’t quite where he wanted to be at the moment he needed to be there, and calmly bought a ticket to New York, where he spent the week of the tournament seeing the latest of Broadway and taking in art at the Whitney. No regrets. He lives what he tells me. 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. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned. Everyone thought he’d play. I thought he’d play. He’d thought he’d play. And then he didn’t. And it was all fine. And he went on to play that event the following year—this time, he was feeling just great—and came in fou...

We take a twenty-minute break. Jared has created a routine for me, and I now follow it by the minute. First five minutes of break: off-load and brain dump. I write down some of the key hands so that they don’t occupy any of my headspace going forward. I’ll analyze them later with Erik. For now, the important thing is to get them out of my system so that my mind is ready for new information. Then a few minutes of contemplating my decision making. Asking myself: How was my thinking? Were there any emotionally compromised decisions? Again, I’m not analyzing now, just noting for the future. Next ten minutes: nothing. No poker talk. No thinking. Just walking and relaxing. And then, right before the end of break, a few minutes of warm-up for the next level. Get myself mentally ready, psyched, in gear. My goal is to keep my mind as clear and fresh as possible, for as long as possible.

Yes, a basketball player who seems to be on a winning streak may not always be making more baskets—but sometimes she is. Her confidence translates to her execution, especially in the immediate term. 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.

one thing that poker has given me are the very skills necessary to deal with the chaos that can be thrown at you from outside the poker table. Experiencing smaller one-off events over and over during play has taught me both the mathematical and the emotional forbearance to accept them for what they are—and to emerge on the other side. There’s simply no denying real life at the poker table.

“Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” If we cannot do it ourselves, we cannot control it. We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itself—that, we don’t control.

Nothing is all skill. Ever. I shy away from absolutes, but this one calls out for my embrace. Because life is life, luck will always be a factor in anything we might do or undertake. Skill can open up new vistas, new choices, allow us to see the chance that others less skilled than us, less observant or less keen, may miss—but should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.

And the biggest bluff of all? That skill can ever be enough. That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up. We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.