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

by Maria Konnikova

The first read anyone has on me is a simple one: I’m female. How does that change their CAPS, if at all? I find that certain men want to be gentlemanly; they find it distasteful to take my chips. They will often show me their cards to let me know I’ve made a good fold. Once I discern that, I can use it to my advantage, folding more when I would otherwise call. Other men don’t think I have any business being there. I should be washing dishes or changing diapers. They want me gone. So they bully and bluff and push. Once I see that, I can play more passively and let them give me their chips. Some men don’t think a woman could run a big bluff. If I raise and show signs of life, they fold. Now I can bluff more than I otherwise would. And some would rather die than be bluffed by a woman. Now they will call me with next to nothing, only for the satisfaction of seeing me beat. With them, I can bet more thinly for value, but should avoid trying to pull one over. But all of that is only the first part. Now comes the interactive part of CAPS, the donkey space. Do they know I’m adjusting—and did they do this on purpose to get me to respond a certain way? I’m in a major hand in Monte Carlo, deep in the six-max that will be my final tournament of the trip, and I have to make a decision that will cost me most of my chips. I’ve been playing against a certain older Russian gentleman all day (no, not that one; this one comes later, but my impressions of the original Siberian wolf are still ...

Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself? And can you really do one without the other? I have a dual goal here. My poker journey—but also the larger journey that the poker is meant to lead to. They can’t be separated. And as I’m learning, the craft of poker certainly cannot be mastered without self-knowledge, self-care, and self-reflection. All your technical prowess will evaporate if your mind and emotional landscape aren’t solid. My return from Monte Carlo has made one thing clear: I need to recharge.

FIVE BULLETS. THAT MEANS five separate entries. Five times paying the oh-so-reasonable-sounding $565 entry—or

The Main Event just because isn’t quite as bad as the lottery, but it surely isn’t good. Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. This doesn’t mean never take shots. Shot-taking is a tried-and-true thing in poker, where someone plays a tournament at a higher level than before, enters a cash game at higher stakes than before, to see if she can hack it. If you never take shots, you never know when you’re ready to move up. But in a way, these past two weeks were a shot: they were higher stakes, more intense action, huge player pools. And what they’ve illustrated is that, while the seeds of success are there, I’m not yet ready. The smart thing is to pull back, play smaller, regroup, build up, and try again—better, smarter, savvier, more skillful in both the ways of poker strategy and the ways of mental strength. If I take the intent of my journey rather than the arbitrary end goal meant as a hook for a book proposal more than anything else, the conclusion is clear. Postpone. Come back for July, sure, but instead of the Main, play more of the smaller side events. Build my bankroll back up. Hone my skill. And shoot for the Main in a year’s time. Don’t jump into the arms of chance and say, “Please don’t let me fall!” Don’t play above your weight class after you’ve just been punched down. It’s a question of respect for the game—and not just the game of poker. It’s beyond simple journalistic curiosity. It’s only a...

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?

“Less certainty, more inquiry”: his words couldn’t have been more direct. There’s never a single right way to play a hand—and there’s certainly no single right way to reach a goal. Why not defer for a year? Or change the target to something in six months, sticking to the timeline but changing the specific event? Why not exercise some creative thinking in what my journey is going to be? I am too married to what it is all “supposed” to look like, and not critical enough of the fact that I simply made some decisions earlier on with incomplete information—and now that I know more, I should change course. No one is telling me to quit poker, merely to reassess where I am.

We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a result. It happens all the time in our lives. We find ourselves in an appealing situation—and then we hold on to it for dear life, even when any objective outside observer would tell us that the appeal is long gone. We start at a promising job, only to be stymied in promotions over and over—yet we cling to the notion that the job is great. We embark on a promising relationship, only to find we have less and less in common with our partner—yet we forge ahead, refusing to admit that what seemed so right is now wrong. Sometimes, the most difficult thing of all is to stop playing. All too often, we stay in a hand long after we should have gotten out. No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs to let it go. You are not playing in a vacuum. You are playing opponents. You have to follow the game. My starting hand couldn’t be better: Erik Seidel as coach, my background in the psychology of decision making as fuel, all the advice and resources I could hope for at my disposal. But, as I’ve realized in my assessment after my June WSOP foray, the game has changed. It’s no longer about a simple exercise in seein...

Kahneman, of course, wouldn’t have been surprised. In a 1977 memo to DARPA that he’d written with Amos Tversky, on how to best reach specific military objectives, he warned that knowing about a bias didn’t mean you wouldn’t exhibit it; it could still look highly attractive: “Erroneous intuitions resemble visual illusions in a crucial respect: both types of error remain compellingly attractive even when the person is fully aware of their nature.” I might realize that my thinking has been fallacious—but if I still like my plan, I can trick myself into thinking it remains a good idea. Sure, there may be some planning fallacies and status quos and whatnot involved, but I see that, I’ve taken it into account, and I still think it’s a good idea.

Of course, the bigger issue is I don’t want to be getting a migraine, so I decide it’s not possible. The desire being conflated with the reality. And I trudge onward to the Rio. Here, then, is the unvarnished truth. I didn’t correct my decision not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to.

Scorpio mantra. Desire carefully

if I start comparing myself with the average, I’ll start panicking. He wants me to focus on what I can control, not the irrelevant noise.

“To go straight for the jugular: it all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego,” he tells me. This is at the heart of what he needs to identify. Who are you? What’s important to you? “When you sit down to play, you put yourself on the line. What you have to understand is you’re always a person first and a poker player second.” The key to figuring out where your emotional leaks will be as a player is to identify where they are as a human and what it is that brought you to the table to begin with. “How do you feel about yourself? Do you want to prove you’re not an idiot, or overcome pain, or fulfill visions and dreams of yourself as someone capable of playing at the highest levels?” The poker table, Jared explains, brings out the fears that I already carry with me and pushes them to the surface: fears of failure, pressure—it all gets exaggerated and brought forward during the course of a game. “What I look to do is see all of that as symptoms of deeper flaws. And what we’re trying to do together is get at those deeper flaws.” Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove your triggers so that you don’t have that emotional response in the moment.” Here’s what Jared proposed to do for me: work thro...

if our attention is drawn to the actual cause of our mood, it stops having an effect. Schwarz and Clore’s findings have been replicated in multiple settings. Stock market returns have been found to be lower on days with greater cloud cover—and higher when a favorite sports team wins. Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling. Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it. Which is great news for dealing with tilt—at least up to a point. 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.

Jared gives me an assignment: I need to map out my emotional process so that I can start finding ways to solve each problem. I need to actually sit down and make a spreadsheet. Each time something happens, write it down in the situation or trigger column. In the next column, write a description of the thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors that the situation or trigger causes. In the next column, give my best assessment of the underlying flaw or problem, and finally, write a logic statement that I can use in the moment to inject some rationality into the issue. Later that night, I sit down and I start thinking through the last six months. What has stuck with me? When do I remember being most uncomfortable? Angry? Upset? It’s not long before I start seeing patterns.

Jared calls this one my beaten dog syndrome. “You don’t want future Maria to beat the shit out of you, and so you’re instinctively cowering to future Maria’s power.” I don’t have the guts because I’m afraid—still—of looking stupid, of making mistakes, of being judged and judging myself. Here’s how to deal with that beaten beast, he says: “Tell yourself, sure, I may be wrong, but cowering to future Maria is the bigger mistake. The bigger mistake is not taking the aggressive line, even if I’m wrong. And future Maria has to learn to be OK with that.” Future Maria sounds like a real bitch, I tell Jared.

process known as embodied cognition: embody the feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out. And I start to see the results. Even as I’m working with Jared, I’m developing my new plan of attack with Erik. We decide that I need to retrench a bit, back to smaller events, series where not so many big shots are out, where the buy-ins are more often in the three figures. I also decide, with Jared’s help,

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive. Indeed, even work that has shown some benefits of fasting on certain tasks also admitted that the thought process involved was reliant on “gut feelings”—an appropriate choice of words for decisions governed by the stomach. And while that’s all well and good for someone like Erik, whose “intuition” is actually decades of careful expertise that he doesn’t necessarily have conscious access to, for the rest of us, our guts are just as likely to be wrong than right—and we have no way of telling the difference. We become reliant more on our reflexive thinking than on cool, measured reflection. And we become more emotional: we often interpret the cues of hunger that our bodies send as negative emotional states—hence the term “hangry”—and so, all the negative decision effects that occur when we misattribute mood as information may very well now enter into our thought process.

“Can one even touch a gaming table without becoming immediately infected with superstition?” FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE GAMBLER, 1866

As it turns out, having money did not make him feel particularly good. “I felt conflicted about it. I gave some to two museums I cared about, to my old college, to some other charities, but it wasn’t actually about wealth distribution.” What it was about, at the bottom, was luck. “This transformative financial life event—I didn’t feel like I deserved it,” Slavin explains. “Yes, I worked like an animal, and we did do something that was innovative, but that was also true of lots of other people I knew, and I knew other people who worked harder and nothing happened for them.” It was a chain of reasoning oddly similar to the thoughts that went through my mind as I took my trophy: Did I actually earn this, or did I get lucky? Or, rather, did I earn this more than I got lucky—or the other way around?

“That’s when I first started really thinking about the role of games in metabolizing luck,” he says. “They let you really get your arms all the way around this idea and say, Yeah, luck exists. And I think it’s really necessary to do that, both as individuals but also collectively.” He pauses for a second to reflect. “Denying luck individually is to suggest that we have much greater agency than we really have over outcomes in our lives.” Games give us a chance to confront luck in a manner that allows us to process it in life in a way we’re not always forced to do. And sometimes, it’s the games that incorporate luck most explicitly that push us to the limits of understanding just how far agency can take us—and where it inevitably breaks down.

And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made-up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for ...

Jane Risen, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, calls this kind of thinking from people like Ike—“smart, educated, emotionally stable adults”—a form of acquiescence. We can recognize that something is wrong and irrational, but then consciously and purposefully choose to let the false belief stand rather than correct it. “People can recognize that one course of action is rationally superior yet choose to follow a different one,” Risen writes. You know the sports team you support won’t lose if you don’t wear your lucky jersey—but you put it on anyway. You may not actually believe in astrology, but can it really hurt to read your monthly horoscope? And you know that your shirt doesn’t actually affect the cards you’re dealt, but you wear it—or don’t wear it—even with that knowledge.

know all the places to go that will give us a more genuine Vegas experience. Here’s a cheat sheet. For sushi, Yui and Kabuto. For dinner close to the Rio, the Fat Greek, Peru Chicken, and Sazón. For when I’m feeling nostalgic for the jerk chicken of my local Crown Heights spots, Big Jerk. Lola’s for Cajun. Milos, but only for lunch. El Dorado for late-night poker sessions. Partage to celebrate. Lotus of Siam to drown your sorrows in delightful Thai.

“But you gave such a beautiful talk at that conference.” She is talking about the World Economic Forum in Davos, where I was invited to speak about poker and decision making that winter. I’d like to tell her that no one knew who I was in Davos back when I was just a journalist. It took poker for the invitation to come—and my talk was all about my time on the tour. Instead, I just smile again. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I’ve learned a lot.”

“In every tablet there are as many grains of luck as of any other drug. Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.” E. B. WHITE, 1943

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...

You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions. “Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “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.

Admitting to unknowing, accepting a lack of agency without resorting to gimmicks, and instead attempting to analyze the unknown as best we can with the tools of rationality: those are some of the most powerful steps we can take.