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

by Maria Konnikova

AUTHOR AND STATISTICIAN NASSIM TALEB distrusts the premise of my entire project: he believes we cannot use games as models of real life because in life, the rules derived from games can break down in unforeseen ways. It’s called the ludic fallacy. Games are too simplified. Life has all sorts of things it can throw at you to make your careful calculations useless. And that’s true enough. After all, that knowledge is precisely what brought me to poker. That life is uncertain. That we can’t know everything. That we can’t control it all, no matter how much we think we may be able to. But 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. It always breaks through, whether in your emotions and reactions or in a more blunt way—that summer, there’s an earthquake that forces a momentary end to the WSOP tournaments for the day; the year before, I find myself in Barcelona during a terrorist attack that puts our casino on lockdown. Life happens, and through it all, we play. We play, gaining perspective, survival skills, the strength and knowledge to be the conqueror rather than the conquered. We play, and we acknowledge, with the full force of the o...