The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
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the territory, the nature of the enemy. You can’t just plow ahead with one strategy because it worked in the past or you’ve seen someone else employ it successfully.
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Each time you act, you have to reassess based on what is now known versus what was known before. You need to have a process, a system, ...
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Position is information, and the more information you have about your enemies, the stronger you are. Position doesn’t ensure I won’t be ambushed, of course, but it makes the scenario just a bit more controllable.
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good strategist has to think through all the possible permutations.
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Every tactic you use, you have to ask what it accomplishes and whether the same thing could have been accomplished more cheaply.
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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.
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The point is, you can’t play based on how it will look. Not playing scared is not the same thing as being aggressive. It means not making decisions because you’re afraid. It’s not about being passive or aggro. You can be way too aggro and still scared. And being passive can be strong.”
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He just watches quietly—and then changes his hunting approach based on what he’s observed in his prey.
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he’d be the head of the guerilla infiltration team. Watch from the shadows, don’t announce yourself with any flashy movements, blend perfectly into your surroundings, and observe the local forces to see how, exactly, they should be approached. No one-size-fits-all weapon. No predetermined strategy. Just an eminently flexible, and ultimately deadly, system rooted in deep patience and observation before anything else—and then a willingness to do whatever it takes, given the circumstances, to emerge victorious.
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If I have a solid battle plan based on good intel, onward.
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He’s never been one to forgo a way of making himself better.
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Almost every time I play, I hear Erik telling me: “Pick your spots.” Any idiot can win any given hand with the best cards. That’s not the point of poker. You get dealt the best cards only every so often, and if you wait for them every time, your chips will run out. What’s more, you won’t win any money once you finally have those aces in hand, because even the least attentive player will have noticed that you only play with the best hand and will stay as far away as possible. So even when you win, you will lose.
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“Pick your spots.” Any idiot can win any given hand with the best cards. That’s not the point of poker. You get dealt the best cards only every so often, and if you wait for them every time, your chips will run out. What’s more, you won’t win any money once you
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finally have those aces in hand, because even the least attentive player will have noticed that you only play with the best hand and will stay as far away as po...
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The point is winning over the long term—and winning as much money as you possibly can with your best hands, all the while losing a...
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And in order to do that, you need to learn to pick your spots: know when to be aggressive, and how to be aggressive. The passive player doesn’t win. And the scared player, who always thinks someone can beat him, doesn’t win. But the openly aggressive player doesn’t win, either; he...
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aggressive, yes, but strategically so: against the right people, in the right circumstances.
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But on some level, part of me must remember: you can’t play scared. You can’t be afraid of how you look. You can’t be afraid someone will walk away because of what you do or don’t do. You have to play smart.
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Not a refusal, but something that leaves the action open. Turn the decision momentum so that the power of position is on my side. Do nothing without first gauging my opponent’s reaction. Reveal nothing about the strength of my hand until I have to.
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New me decides I don’t actually have to jump at anything; the smarter strategy might lie in another direction.
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Done. I’ve won the hand and extracted more value than I ever thought I could from it. Thank you, Aggressive Idiot Asshole; you have taught me well.
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“Yeah. When you’re short, you encounter these mathematical situations. SnapShove is basically all you need.”
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Yes, people will bluff me more. But they may also fold more when I make crazy moves, just because they don’t think I’m capable of making them. I can use that to my advantage to play hands more aggressively, accumulating chips in a way I otherwise wouldn’t.
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I’ve simply taken the passive line by default. Calling, checking, folding. Instead, Erik is telling me, I should challenge myself to be active. To raise. To check-raise. To three-bet.
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There’s a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can’t get into too much trouble—but really, every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss of chips. And chances are, if I’m choosing those lines at the table, there are deeper issues at play. Who knows how many proverbial chips a default passivity has cost me throughout my life. How many times I’ve walked away from situations because of someone else’s show of strength, when I really shouldn’t have. How many times I’ve passive...
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It isn’t a pleasant realization, but it is an important one. Now that I see it, perhaps I can start working through it.
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I try to take deep breaths, the calming, meditative approach I preach so frequently in my writing and talks. Mindfulness to help channel calm and circumspection.
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a “fish,” I’ve learned, is the nickname awarded to bad players with money to lose; “whales” are the ones with a lot of money to lose; “sharks” are the pros who pick them off one by one—or
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Now that I have some of the more basic concepts down, the shortcomings of my reasoning hit me in the face.
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I lose over half my chips by refusing to fold—hello, sunk cost fallacy!
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Gambler’s fallacy—the faulty idea that probability has a
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memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.
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Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really.
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And one of the reasons he loves the game is that the probabilities are what they are: they don’t accommodate. Instead, they force you to confront the wrongness of your intuitions if you are to succeed.
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The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players.
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Poker pushes you out of your illusions, beyond your incorrect comfort zone—if, that is, you want to win.
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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. Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.
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When something happens in the external environment, is it due to our own actions (skill) or some outside factor (chance)? People who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes, often more than they actually do, whereas people who have an external locus of control think that what they do doesn’t matter too much;
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events will be what they will be.
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Typically, an internal locus will lead to greater success: people who think they control events are mentally healthier and tend to take more control over their fate, so to speak. Meanwhile, people with an external locus are more prone to depr...
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Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular”—a lesson history teaches particularly well. And while probabilities do even out in the long term, in the short term, who the hell knows. Anything is possible. I may even final table this charity thing.
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unless I cure my distaste for bad runs and the sense of exuberance that envelops me during the good ones, I am going to lose a lot of money.
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Part of me knows that holding my ground with such a marginal hand is a mistake—and that if I play at all, I should be raising instead, upping the aggression
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and running the bluff, Erik’s “coming from you .
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“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
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If Vegas on a grand scale is the dream of developers and visionaries, on the individual scale it is the dream that has captivated the American mind from the first westward expansion: striking it rich. It’s the gold rush that never dies.
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Much more than Los Angeles ever was, it is the city of dreams. Vegas is the true America. The city of hope. With help from lady luck or the strength of your own pluck, anyone can make it.
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Casinos are conceived in a way that depletes your decision-making abilities and emotional reserves. Some of it is on purpose.
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basis—“You’ll never get good unless you put in the hours,”
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“And you learn best when you’re playing every day.”