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

by Maria Konnikova

Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has

Be willing to be more aggressive even if that means losing more.

It’s important not to let a minor victory lull you into thinking you’re doing great, when all you’re doing is better than before but not good enough to actually make it count.

our denial belies the fact that we often don’t really know why we make decisions—and we justify them with objective-sounding reasons even when, in reality, we were acting based on faulty intuitive reads.

One thing we’re incredibly good at is making excuses for ourselves and crafting explanations for why we’re still as good as we thought.

the vast majority of people don’t fare any better than a coin toss at deciding whether someone is lying or telling the truth—and even with significant training, people are unlikely to spot the practiced deceiver.

“Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,”

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.

the first person you have to profile—psychologically, not physically—is yourself.

Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself?

Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog.

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.

The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information.

The willingness to admit you’re wrong, to embrace the uncertainty inherent in any decision.

the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.

What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness.

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.

Kahneman continues, “we must let our beliefs and actions be guided by a critical and reflective assessment of reality, rather than by our immediate impressions, however compelling these may be.”

In 2018, Kaitlin Woolley and Jane Risen demonstrated that people will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided.

500,000 tournament—one with quite a prestigious title—because he wasn’t feeling his best. He’d done a self-assessment, decided he wasn’t quite where he wanted to be at the moment he needed to be there, and calmly bought

What this is is a wake-up call. A chance to reflect, reassess, and see how I can improve.

Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact.

It means that you’re letting emotions—incidental ones that aren’t actually integral to your decision process—affect your decision making. You are no longer thinking rationally.

emotions can be powerful drivers of correct choice: the emotion just needs to be integral to the decision, rather than incidental to it.

the goal is to learn to identify our emotions, analyze their cause, and if they’re not actually part of our rational decision process—and more often than not, they aren’t—dismiss them as sources of information.

You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.

“The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,” Jared tells me. “Everything else is earned every single day.”

One hand at a time. Reset. Reset not just strategically (how do I play a short stack?) but also emotionally (no anger at myself, no frustration with myself, just focused energy, forward-looking momentum; I may make mistakes, but I am still competent). I do my best to slow my breathing, let go of my blunder, and look ahead.

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later.

“People can recognize that one course of action is rationally superior yet choose to follow a different one,”

A person who knew that gambling was stupid and irrational, that drugs were likewise not the way to success, and who did it all the same, with the full knowledge of his own folly.

Gambling is about chaos. It rewards the illogical, the irrationally exuberant. It preys on weakness.

Luckily, I have the tools to understand what’s going on, the ability to not panic, to analyze, to study, to move on.

We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itself—that, we don’t control.

reader. Note: Page numbers in italics indicate glossary terms.