The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
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Not so poker: no matter how psychologically you want to play, much of the game is about statistics. You need to understand odds, how good your hand is, how good it is relative to others’, how likely it is to improve, and so on. Each of these requires a certain amount of statistical calculation.
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von Neumann’s challenge: poker as a lens into the most difficult and important life decisions we have to make, an exploration of chance and skill in life—and an attempt to learn to navigate it and optimize it to the best of our potential.
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From managing emotion, to reading other people, to cutting your losses and maximizing your gains, to psyching yourself up into the best version of yourself so that you can not only catch the bluffs of others but bluff successfully yourself, poker is endlessly applicable and revelatory.
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The mixture of chance and skill at the table is a mirror to that same mixture in our daily lives—and
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Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and how you can deal with the elements of pure luck—in a way no other environment I’v...
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in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand.
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betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it.
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From a misplaced faith in certainty, the fact that to our minds, 99 percent, even 90 percent, basically means 100 percent—even though it doesn’t, not really.
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“Sometimes it turns out that his persuasion may be valued at a ducat, but not at ten,” Kant continues. “If it is proposed to stake ten, he immediately becomes aware of the possibility of his being mistaken.”
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Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no possibility of being mistaken? Would you bet your marriage? Your health? Even our deep convictions suddenly seem a lot less certain when put in that light.
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But what if you had to bet, given Silver’s estimates? Would you bet on a 71 percent certainty the same way as if it were 100 percent, place the same amount of money on each proposition?
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Poker is
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such a powerful window into probabilistic thinking not in spite of, but because of, the betting involved: the betting in poker isn’t incidental.
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If we keep saying “I think I’m good here” without quantifying how often we’re actually good, we’ll lose all our money.
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We react emotionally rather than looking at the statistics:
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Poker rids you of the habit in a way nothing else quite does—and in so doing, it improves decisions far afield from the game itself.
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There was a key difference between him and other employees: he had a traditional finance background; the others were connections from the poker and backgammon worlds.
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He not only won back his opponent’s ill-gotten bounty but published his thoughts in the first known book on probability, The Book on Games of Chance. (It was published in 1663, long after his death.)
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if you want to improve your odds, understand probabilities; if you want a sure thing, rig the deck. Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever. You will never have all the information you
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want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.
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Harrington on Hold’em is a classic. Erik may not have given the basics much thought since Sklansky, but Dan Harrington had distilled them for thousands.
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I’m expecting a lesson in beating the odds, in calculations, in the power of position and optimal strategy. And I do get some of that—but what I mostly get instead is a crash session on the importance of failure.
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Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act.
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The earlier you act, the less information you have.
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“Basically, you can’t go too wrong in the beginning if you play good cards”
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Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image.
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There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation.
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“You have to be aware of everyone’s stack size,”
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M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke.
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Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit.
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“Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’
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Nothing is personal. Everything should be treated like a business. My goals need to be pure: to run the best business I can. “Some of these other people had a goal to become famous, or even more, they just wanted action,” Dan says. And that’s their eventual downfall.
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“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. “This game will beat you—it’s as simple as that. If you don’t understand what’s going on, the game will say, ‘We’re taking your money away from you.’”
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“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.”
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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.
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“When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that’s always surrounding them,”
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If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing.
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I admit to being nervous. Objectivity at its purest is a big ask. Can I truly hack it? Erik certainly can. Somehow, even over smoked fish, he manages to demonstrate just how able he is to learn from feedback and to change his actions accordingly.
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For Erik, the answer is simple: there is no answer. It’s a constant process of inquiry. A hand can be played any number of ways, as long as the thought process is there.
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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
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uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.
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‘The object of poker is making good decisions.’
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Among everyone I consult, there is a consensus: I have to play online if I want to improve on any sort of manageable timescale.
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I have ignored one of the most important elements of pre-flop play: position.
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When you’re the person acting last, you have the best of
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“You have to have a clear thought process for every single hand. What do I know? What have I seen? How will that help me make an informed judgment about this hand?”
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“For every action, you have to go back and think through everything you know and come to the right conclusion. You can’t act too quickly.”
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I saw decision quality degrade in participant after participant as the seconds ticked down.
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You have to be careful you’re not acting too fast. It’s a major hole for a lot of people.
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Before any campaign, or, indeed, even minor military action, you need to evaluate the situation,