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 calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs. I could definitely detect a slight cackle. My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can’t bluff chance. Poker didn’t care about my reasons for being on the floor.

John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Von Neumann was one of the greatest mathematical and strategic minds of the twentieth century: he invented that little machine we all carry around with us, the computer (back then, it wasn’t so little), crafted the technology behind the hydrogen bomb, and is the father of game theory. Theory of Games is his foundational text, and here’s what I learned within its pages: the entire theory was inspired by a single game—poker. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

There was one exception to his distrust of gaming: poker. He loved it. 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.

How no limit hold’em differs from other forms of poker is twofold. The first is in the precise amount of information that is held in common versus in private. Each player is dealt two cards facedown: the hole cards. This is privileged information. I can try to guess what you have based on how you act, but I can’t know for sure. The only information I’ll have is your betting patterns once the public information—the cards dealt to the middle of the table, faceup—is known. In hold’em, there are three stages of dealing the middle cards: the first three cards, called the “flop,” are dealt at the same time; the fourth card, the “turn,” is dealt after another round of betting; and the fifth, the “river,” is dealt after yet another round. In total, then, you have two cards in your hand, known only to you, five cards in the middle, known to everyone, and four “streets,” or betting rounds, in which to make your best guess as to how the cards you can’t see stack up against your own.

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.

If you bought in to a $1/$2 game—a game where the blinds, or forced bets that you have to post into the pot before seeing your cards, are one dollar for the small blind and two dollars for the big blind—it will always be a $1/$2 game. You won’t turn around and find you’re suddenly forced to pay five dollars when it’s your turn in the big blind.

Those two setups create rather different dynamics. Cash games are War and Peace. You’re a thousand pages in and still no closer to finding out how the battle resolved itself. You can try to flip ahead, but events will unfold at whatever pace they choose. Tournaments are far more Shakespearean in nature. You’ve barely hit act three and half the cast is already dead. If you want an overview of life at warp speed, tournament poker is the way to go. That’s what I choose.

In Range, David Epstein reflects on the nature of the outsider: “Switchers are winners,” he writes. Perhaps, as a switcher, I’ll be able to get beyond the myopia that often comes with an insider’s perspective, bring what psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness.” Not all experience is created equal, of course, but mine might be particularly well suited here. Erik is especially intrigued by my language ability.

in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win. No other way is possible. And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling

“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.

Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act. That makes sense. In any decision, information is power. The earlier you act, the less information you have. With multiple people still waiting to make their decision, the landscape may well change. He’s talked about the value of various starting possibilities. The pocket pairs—two cards that are the same. The suited connectors—cards of the same suit that are one apart in ranking, like a seven and an eight. The suited one- and two- and even three-gappers—cards of the same suit that are sort of related but not immediately adjacent, like a six and an eight of hearts. The suited wheel aces—an ace with a low second card of the same suit that can make a straight, or a wheel. They all have different strategic value, he’s told me. They all need to be part of a well-rounded arsenal. Some are good on their own. Some are good because they give you board coverage—that is, you can make strong hands in a variety of situations. Some are worthwhile for blocker value—key cards that lower the chance your opponent has a strong hand. Some are powerful because they can make monster hands that will get maximum value from weak opponents. And he’s explained how you can’t play all those cards in the same way all the time, especially given my lack of experience. “Basically, you can’t go too wrong in the beginning if you play good cards” is one of the first concrete pieces of inf...

Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.

M, Erik explains, is a way of thinking about your position in a tournament. “You have to be aware of everyone’s stack size,” he tells me. “When you get to Vegas and start playing, I want you to write down hands for me. And for every hand, you need to tell me how much everyone has behind. You have to always be aware of it.” Normally, people think of stack sizes in terms of big blinds. M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke. How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner. And the letter M itself? It comes from the last name of a player named Paul Magriel.

The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer. If you win right away—if your first foray into any new area is a runaway success—you’ll have absolutely no way to gauge if you’re really just that brilliant or it was a total fluke and you got incredibly lucky.

“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.” And it resonates. After all, losing is what brought me to the table in the first place. It makes sense that learning to lose in a game—to lose constructively and productively—would help me lose in life, lose and come back, lose and not see it as a personal failure. It resonates—but it’s a tough ask. Dan nods. “It’s still tough to do. Even for me, and I have a lifetime of experience, that’s not an easy thing.” We say our goodbyes. He missed his morning gym session, but he’s off to enjoy his “quiet retirement.” Oh, and I did learn how to beat roulette. Turns out all you need is a Department of Defense supercomputer, a software program developed from the work of Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp in the fifties, and an earpiece. Also casinos that don’t know what you’re up to. Get too greedy and you’re out.

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.

“Less certainty. More inquiry.” “He didn’t take it well,” he tells me. “He actually got pretty upset.” But Erik wasn’t criticizing. He was offering the approach he’d learned over years of experience. Question more. Stay open-minded. And then I realize what I’m reminded of: Dante and Virgil. Dante, in a strange place, not knowing what anything is or where it might lead. Virgil, his guide through this infernal landscape, who doesn’t offer directions but rather stands to the side as Dante forges his own path.

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.

My screen name: thepsychchic. One word, all lowercase, chosen after much careful deliberation to embody as many of the traits I want to convey to my opponents as I can. Psych, short for psychology—or psychic, as many of my perhaps not-quite-literate opponents will read it. Or psycho. Will I psych you out, read your mind, go berserk? And, of course, chic: the missing k lends both a visual symmetry and an opportunity for the psychic misread, but in the end, chic reads “girl” even to the illiterate. And in the man’s world that is poker, people don’t play against girls the way they play against real people. They may think they do, but they simply don’t. In one study of online poker, men bluffed 6 percent more often against someone with a female avatar than a male or neutral one—but, when confronted with that possibility, refused to believe it.

static board—no new cards are likely to change the situation that much? Is it a dynamic board—many draws, like straights and flushes, are available, and any new addition is likely to change the advantage and can significantly change the value of your hand?

Bet sizing and what it accomplishes is an incredibly useful analogue for most any decision. How much are you risking to accomplish what, exactly? What are the situations where you want to bet frequently and small? Where do you want to bet less often, but big? When do you over-bet? When do you want to appear pot-committed, like Thomas Schelling and his rogue driver playing a game of chicken, ripping the steering wheel from the car in a display of ultimate commitment to not swerving? And how does it all change depending on your opponent? Every tactic you use, you have to ask what it accomplishes and whether the same thing could have been accomplished more cheaply.

2 percent is a big deal. What’s more, suitedness makes something a far stronger weapon: it’s easier to play. You have an added psychological edge because now you can navigate many situations much more clearly. But I don’t yet know this. I don’t feel it. I don’t understand it. My edge is precisely zero at this point. And the thing I’m worried about? Not whether I’m thinking through this correctly, but whether or not I look weak. A good commander never cares what others are thinking. Perception matters only insofar as you’re using it strategically to shape your image for future actions.

Not playing scared is not the same thing as being aggressive. It means not making decisions because you’re afraid. It’s not about being passive or aggro. You can be way too aggro and still scared. And being passive can be strong.”

Every time I mentioned money, she walked away. Part of me just wants to accept this assignment: it’s interesting, I’ve done a lot of work on the background already, and the money isn’t all that bad. I’ve been offered worse. It would actually be a nice and needed boost at this precise moment. But on some level, part of me must remember: you can’t play scared. You can’t be afraid of how you look. You can’t be afraid someone will walk away because of what you do or don’t do. You have to play smart. And so I decide to check back: I’m not really doing much freelance work these days, I respond. I’m working on my next book. Not a refusal, but something that leaves the action open. Turn the decision momentum so that the power of position is on my side. Do nothing without first gauging my opponent’s reaction. Reveal nothing about the strength of my hand until I have to. A day later, I receive another email: What if we paid you more than we’ve offered in the past? This is an opening, and old me would have jumped at it. New me decides I don’t actually have to jump at anything; the smarter strategy might lie in another direction. I’m not sure that would be enough, I counter, since I really need to be paid more than I am at my home magazine to make it worth my while given the constraints on my time. In effect, I’m calling the bet, but I don’t raise. I simply stay in the hand to see what will happen. Three dollars a word, comes the next email. Done. I’ve won the hand and extracted more ...

Gambler’s fallacy—the faulty idea that probability has a memory.

the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really.

“Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions,” he says. The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players. Poker pushes you out of your illusions, beyond your incorrect comfort zone—if, that is, you want to win.

The relationship between our awareness of chance and our skill is a U-curve. No skill: chance looms high. Relatively high skill: chance recedes. Expert level: you once again see your shortcomings and realize that no matter your skill level, chance has a strong role to play. In poker and in life, the learning pattern is identical.

I get a quick crash course in poker economics. Some players have backing. The specifics vary deal to deal, but broadly, it means that someone fronts you the cash for all your poker playing and you split the winnings. If you keep losing, though, you go into something called makeup, where you need to make up your losses before you pocket any wins. Then there’s staking. People can buy a percentage of your action for the same percentage of your winnings—say, 10 percent for 10 percent. If you’ve had good results, you can sell at markup: someone pays a bit more for the chance to have a sweat, or piece, of the event. Or there’s swapping. If you respect another player’s game, you can ask to swap a certain percent. So you get, say, 5 percent of anything they win, and vice versa. All of these are ways to manage risk. The best professionals know when to lower the gamble, not just when to ratchet it up.

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. 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. There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves. How we phrase sentences—are we the one doing the acting or being acted upon?—can determine whether we have an internal or external locus of control, whether we’re masters of our fates or peons of forces beyond us.

“Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure.

miss the signals that tell us to swerve before we’re in the bad beat’s path. One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: chance favors the prepared mind. What people often forget, though, is that the full statement is quite different: “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance appears, you will notice it. But that first part is equally crucial: if you’re not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough. The one is largely useless without the other.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do. “Although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognize it and profit by it when it comes,” William Beveridge writes in The Art of Scientific Investigation. 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.

Philosophically, it’s a powerful way of viewing life. (“Poker is exactly like life, but with instant karma,” Chewy remarks.) Practically, though, it implies a degree of nonattachment that seems oddly out of place in a profession built around maximizing expected value, in the financial rather than spiritual sense. But Chewy means what he says on every level—and has taken it to the extreme, in order to see where it brings him. For one, he sold his house and committed to a minimalist lifestyle.

In the grand scheme of life, there simply isn’t a place for negative emotions. “Some people just become overly emotionally invested in their sadness and their misfortune,” he says. “They forget to be grateful to be in the tournament, and then they lose their remaining chips.” That’s a bad attitude. Not only do you feel bad, but your decision making suffers. “Everybody has a great opportunity to succeed and prosper at whatever they do, and everyone has some kind of unique gift. And I see that oftentimes, the most difficulty we cause ourselves is kind of fighting against the grain of what is healthy for us.”

My view

“What you need to know first and most important of all is that poker is storytelling,” he says. It’s a narrative puzzle. Your job is to put together the pieces. “I know that you’ve already gotten a good start—and Erik is an amazing teacher. But”—and here he foreshadows a realization that it will take me another four or five months to reach myself—“I really hope that you don’t end up choosing the easier way to learn because of time pressure. This is a beautiful game, and I think you have the mind to appreciate it. But you’re not going to be able to take a shortcut.”

In a phenomenon known as omission neglect, we often pay attention to the barks but not to the moments when they are absent: we ignore what is omitted.

What is this person’s story—and does what they are doing make sense given what you know? Identifying motivation is key if I’m ever to become anything other than a merely competent player. Always ask why: Why is someone acting this way? Why am I acting this way? Find the why and you find the key to winning.

It’s powerful advice. How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react. And how much money we’d save on bills for our shrink if we paused to ask the same about our own actions and motivations.

A chop is when the remaining players in a tournament agree to divide up the money rather than continue playing. Sometimes, it’s done in a way known as a chip chop—you get the amount of the prize pool proportional to your portion of the chips. Other times, it’s done according to a principle known as ICM, or the Independent Chip Model, in which each chip is not created equal: your payout also takes into account the existing payout structure (the percentage of the prize pool designated to each place) and your likelihood of finishing in your current position. Either way, you divide the money and call it a day. As the chip leader, I’m the one to persuade to chop. I look around at the other players. I have more than twice the next stack. I shake my head. “No, thank you. I’d like to play.”

VPIP? You bet (nothing to do with VIPs, as I’d first thought; it’s simply the percentage of times that a player voluntarily puts money in pre-flop, a rough gauge of someone’s aggression).

The first few times he raises, I’m in no position to fight back, but the third time—the third time, I’ve got him exactly where I want him. The maniac raises, it folds to me, and I look down at the beautiful ace-queen. It’s not suited, so it’s actually not a great hand, but what it does have is wonderful blocker value. (Phil Galfond was right. The terms come far more naturally once I start playing more.) The fact that I’m holding an ace makes it less likely that he has one, and the queen makes queens or strong queen combinations equally less likely. It’s perfect for a bluff raise. And so I three-bet. Back it comes to the maniac, and he re-raises me. The nerve! I know he’s pushing me around—how else did he get that huge pile of chips but through his aggression?—and this is where I put my foot down. I shove my remaining chips into the middle. Instantly, he calls, the so-called snap call that usually spells doom for hands like mine. And indeed, he flips over one of the hands I so sneakily “blocked” in my analysis, pocket queens. In other words, I’m in absolutely terrible shape. If I lose—which I should do about 70 percent of the time—it will be game over. Oops. The board is dealt, and I hit the miracle card: the ace, the only card in the deck that can grant me victory. The maniac sends over his chips and departs two hands later, shaking his head. I stack my ill-gotten gains, congratulating myself on my excellent play, suck-outs like this one promptly deleted from memory. (I co...

When we make thin-slice judgments of people—the term for the fleeting perceptions our brain creates, first coined by psychologist Nalini Ambady—our inputs are often mistaken. We’re governed by things like facial structures and expressions—the things we rely on in those thirty-four-millisecond judgments—as well as our own past experiences, which, as it usually happens, are closer to incidental peripheral noise that has no bearing on the current situation.

Blake Eastman is a former psychologist turned professional poker player turned behavioral analyst. It’s not-quite summer and the WSOP is not-quite started. I don’t have much time, but I’m hoping that in the little window I have may be enough. After all, I don’t actually have to make my final decision on when and what I play until the day itself arrives. No need for early commitment—or early defeat. Blake is personable and friendly, an open smile completing the all-American look of blond crew cut and blue eyes. His square jaw, the spacing of his eyes, and the oval of his face would likely put him on the “trustworthy” end of the Todorov stimuli. He leans in when he talks, illustrates points concisely with his hands, makes impeccable eye contact, and generally exudes expertise and confidence—not surprising for someone who, for the past decade, has run an organization called the Nonverbal Group, where he’s developed research on nonverbal communication in applied settings. While for many years his main focus was on dating behavior—how

huge amount of information comes from gestures. The smoothness and fluidity Slepian noticed is certainly part of it. “Confident people move from point A to point B quickly. There’s not a lot of hesitation,” Blake says. “When you’re at the top of your range in poker”—that is, at the top of the range of possible card combinations you’d hold in a given situation—“you’re often going to do that, too.”

The most telling moment is often at the very beginning of a hand, when players first check their hole cards: how they check and what they do immediately after tend to be the most honest actions a player will execute in the entire hand. It’s still early; the stakes are still low, since there’s not yet much money at play; and so their guard is down.

There’s one thing in particular that I do that Blake really doesn’t like: I recheck my cards several times. “The moment you recheck your cards, you risk falling into a pattern,” he warns. Some players recheck only their marginal hands—it’s easy to remember when you have pocket kings, but you may need to double-check if you have five-six suited or six-seven. Some players vary the timing in between checks, sometimes checking moments apart and other times rechecking after a pause. That, too, can correspond to hand strength. “We really want to break this pattern,” Blake says. “The less information I have on you, the better, and the fewer actions you take, the less information I have.” If I really want to double-check, he offers—maybe I’m getting tired and my energy is flagging—I should do the second look right before the flop comes. That way, I at least ensure that I do it at the same time, every time. It becomes a part of the routine rather than a potential deviation from it. Suspect action number two: the way I put my hands on my cards. “Just don’t do it. No hands on cards, ever,” Blake warns. People tend to place their hands on their cards in different ways with different parts of their range—one style of motion when strong, another when marginal. In fact, he says, don’t put anything on your cards. “Almost every time a player puts a chip on a card, it’s a tell,” Blake says. It’s not the placement of the chip as such. It’s the style with which you do it. “There’s a direct st...

Rather than consistency of motion, he suggests a consistency of execution at a deeper level—one that will help me fight fatigue and continue to play better longer, because it gets to the heart of my thought process rather than forcing me to pay attention to yet one more thing (did I bet in the exact same way, say, or place my hand in just the same spot?). “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,” Blake suggests. As long as I always do that, I ensure that I’m thinking through every hand at every part of my range, aces and suited connectors and trash alike. Because I’ve thought before I acted, I act with confidence every time—and I act with a delay every time. There’s no longer the problem of immediate action with straightforward decisions and delays with more complex ones. And the whole process becomes more streamlined and fluid naturally. Sure, my exact hand gesture may not always be identical, but it’s unlikely to convey anything meaningful. 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.

specific model for analyzing behavior: CAPS, or the cognitive-affective personality system. For decades, Walter had argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed. Instead of embracing the nuance of humanity, it stripped traits from context and gave people global scores on things that made no sense. Maybe I’m conscientious at work but a slob at home, Walter suggested, or agreeable in the face of authority but a sudden bully in the schoolyard. Personality was all about context and all about dynamics, and you couldn’t hope to crack its puzzle unless you were willing to go through the work of regimented analysis. Walter and Yuichi Shoda formalized the idea of CAPS in 1995, writing: In the proposed theory, individuals differ in how they selectively focus on different features of situations, how they categorize and encode them cognitively and emotionally, and how those encodings activate and interact with other cognitions and affects in the personality system. The theory views the person not as reacting passively to situations, nor as generating behavior impervious to their subtle features, but as active and goal-directed, constructing plans and self-generated changes, and in part creating the situations themselves. People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with sit...

But at the poker table, it turns out, my “profile,” or behavioral signature, as Walter would call it, emerges in full. Blake could pick up on some small physical habits that may give off information—and I’m certainly going to make every single effort to eliminate those entirely. But the more powerful tells could well be psychological. I shy away from small risks—in a marginal spot, where a more aggressive player may call or raise, I’ll just choose to fold. But given the right circumstances, I’m also apt to run insane bluffs for my tournament life.