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.

man plans, God laughs.

My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand th...

luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever ther...

I could plan all I wanted, but the X factor could still always get me.

All I could do was my best with what I could control—and the rest, well, the rest wasn’t up to me.

pay attention.

Psychology. Self-control. Being willing to check your straight all the way to the end, as Chan did—sitting on the best hand possible so stealthily that you rope along your opponents, tricking them into thinking they are

Through that journey, I hoped to learn how to make the best decisions I possibly could, not just at the card table but in the world. Through poker, I wanted to tame luck—to learn to make a difference even when the deck seemed stacked against me.

A year is a neat antidote to the messiness of life.

Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness.

The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do.

Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?

THE STRUGGLE FOR BALANCE on the spectrum of luck and control in the lives we lead, and the decisions we make, is one I have been grappling with for many years.

I wanted to know how much of my life I could take credit for and how much was just stupid luck.

How do people respond when placed in uncertain situations, with incomplete information?

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events—smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better.

The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.

People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment.

the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

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 need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and

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

you can show people all the charts you want, but that won’t change their perceptions of the risks or their resulting decisions.

What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has.

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.

Used in the right way, experience can be a powerful ally in helping to understand probabilistic scenarios.

but if there’s anything Mom taught me, it’s that life has no concept of fairness. It’s just tough luck. Deal with it.

Consider the 7.5 billion people who currently make up the world’s population and you can be sure that the highly improbable is happening with regular frequency. The “one chance in a million” takes place every second.

It is probability, it is pure statistics, and it is part of life, neither good nor bad. If bizarre coincidences and one-off events didn’t happen—well, that would be the truly remarkable thing.

But faced with event after event breaking the wrong way, I did what I always do when I try to understand something. I read.

“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.”

poker. He loved it. To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough

he wanted to understand it, to unravel it—to, in the end, beat it. If he could figure out how to disentangle the chance from the skill, how to maximize the role of the latter and learn to minimize the malice of the former, he believed he would hold the solution to some of life’s greatest decision challenges.

Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives—chance and control.

In the end, though, luck is a short-term friend or foe. Skill shines through over the longer time horizon.

Real life is based on

making the best decisions you can from information that can never be complete: you never know someone else’s mind, just like you can never know any poker hand but your own.

Each has its own unique set of rules, but in any style of poker, the basic parameters are essentially the same: Some cards are dealt faceup, visible to all—these are the community cards—and some facedown, so that only the person to whom they are dealt can see them. You make bets based on how strong your hand is and how strong you think others’ hands are. Because the only other cards you know for sure are your own, you are in a game of incomplete information:

make the best decision you can, given the little you know. The last player left standing at the end of the final round of betting takes the pot, or the sum of money that has been bet up to now.

In hold’em, there are three stages of dealing the middle cards: the first three cards, called the “flop,” are dealt at the same time; the fourth card, the “turn,” is dealt after another round of betting; and the fifth, the “river,” is dealt after yet another round.

Because in life, there is never a limit: there’s no external restriction to betting everything you have on any given decision.

What’s to stop you from risking all your money, your reputation, your heart, even your life at any point you choose? Nothing.

There are no rules, at the end of the day, save some internal calculus that only you are privy to. And everyone around you has to know that when they make their decisions: knowing you can go ...

Like life, no limit poker is high risk and high reward.

The basic math is so basic that a six-year-old could do it.”

“It’s all about thinking well.

“Switchers are winners,”

get beyond the myopia that often comes with an insider’s perspective,

It’s nice to hear that you do have obviously some abilities to pick up languages quickly or to adapt to different languages, because that’s essentially what the challenge is.”