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

by Maria Konnikova

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like. And in one sense, I can’t be faulted here: there is no base-case scenario for my endeavor. I don’t know of any other case of someone trying to learn poker from absolute scratch, having never played a real card game before, and aiming for the World Series. I’m a base rate of one. And yet I am at fault, because I’d mapped out a year from when I first had this idea—but have already seen that I was too optimistic in even getting started. A year from start would put me in the dead of the coming winter, with no WSOP events in sight. If even the start of my year was off, it’s not difficult to imagine that the training itself is also off. So how do I conclude that seven months is actually OK?