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

by Maria Konnikova

“We’ve talked about this,” Erik says. “You have to have a clear thought process for every single hand. What do I know? What have I seen? How will that help me make an informed judgment about this hand?”

“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.”

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. It’s not just a question of semantics: telling bad beat stories matters. Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it.

“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.

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.

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.

The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information.

In Schwarz and Clore’s seminal study on the phenomenon they term “mood as information,” they called people in various zip codes to ask them how satisfied they were with their life—a simple question rather than an elaborate decision task. The zip codes were chosen alongside weather reports. Some people were experiencing a sunny day, and others a rainy day. On average, people expressed higher life satisfaction when the sun was out. But the effect disappeared when the experimenter drew their attention to the weather, by asking, “How’s the weather down there?”

If I start to understand the sources of my tilt, I have a chance to stop misattributing the emotions I’m feeling to other things and instead to dismiss the emotions as irrelevant. If I’m upset about losing a pot, I can acknowledge that fact and realize it’s not technically relevant to the next hand.