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.

Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.

the illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging—and before long, the quality of people’s decisions deteriorated.

In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown.

We believe what we want to see, not what research shows.

mere inches away weren’t as fortunate. But we only notice it when things don’t go our way. We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves.

The “one chance in a million” takes place every second.

“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.”

“The power of the pure bluff is restricted in a game of limit,” explains Amarillo Slim, one of the best poker players of his day, who, in 1972, won the third ever WSOP title. When there’s a limit, it means that the exact amount you bet has a ceiling on it.

Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and

What’s more, in an age of omnipresent distraction, poker reminds us just how critical close observation and presence are to achievement and success.

lesson one: pay attention.

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 one.

Success in poker, in other words, implies far more skill than success in that far more respectable profession, investing.

Kant writes. “The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.” Now that he has something real at stake, he has to reevaluate just

“If it is proposed to stake ten, he immediately becomes aware of the possibility of his being mistaken.”

“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.

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.

It’s why kids learn so much better—and remember what they’ve learned—if they know exactly how or when they’ll apply the knowledge.

We react emotionally rather than looking at the statistics: traders sell winning stocks to lock in the wins—it feels good, even though the numbers say that winners continue to go up in the short term; they hold on to losers to avoid locking in the losses—that would feel bad, even though the numbers say you should cut and run.

chess being a game of perfect information and life being a game of uncertainty.

Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act.

“Basically, you can’t go too wrong in the beginning if you play good cards”

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.

“As a professional gambler, you have to understand: if you don’t have an objective evaluation of what’s going on, you’re a loser,” he tells me.

“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.”

but there’s a larger skill at play: his absolute lack of ego. His willingness to be objective about himself and his own level of play.

They thought that they could actually predict the results of a coin toss.

it’s an interaction that focuses more on process than prescription, on exploration rather than destination.

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.

He won’t tell me how to play a hand not because he’s being mean but because that answer comes at the expense of the ability to make a decision.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.” SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR, 5TH CENTURY BC

Some people achieve much larger gains with much less investment than others who study far longer and work much harder; that’s the simple truth.

Every tactic you use, you have to ask what it accomplishes and whether the same thing could have been accomplished more cheaply.

that any edge is huge, and 2 percent is a big deal. What’s

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.

The dragonfly is so good not only because it sees what its prey is doing, but because it can also predict what it will do and plan its response accordingly.

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

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

If you want to be a good player, you must acknowledge that you’re not “due”—for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is.

“You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck. . . . One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.” WINSTON CHURCHILL, “MY EARLY LIFE,” 1930

There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves.

A victim of the cruel cards? This may serve as something I think of as a luck dampener effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it.

The relationship between information and confidence is a highly asymmetric one. In

the overconfidence in your opinion that comes from thinking you know more than you do simply because you have more information available to you, can be a dangerous thing.

Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action.

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.

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.

“Every action your opponent takes has a reason behind it, whether conscious or unconscious,”