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

by Maria Konnikova

And I realize that in Vegas, games and life, fantasy and fact, have become so fused, so seamlessly connected, that it’s no longer quite possible to tell one from the other. This is an adult playground on a lifelike scale.

“And second of all, one hundred forty dollars is way too expensive. You need to build a bigger bankroll before you can play that high.”

Bankroll, I learn, is exactly what it sounds like: the amount of money you have to devote to poker.

All of these are ways to manage risk. The best professionals know when to lower the gamble, not just when to ratchet it up.

“They should know better, but they spend way too much,” Erik tells me.

“One of the most difficult things is seeing gifted players that don’t have a mental understanding of real variance, so that they might have an eighteen-month streak or a two-year

streak when they make two million, five million, whatever. And they feel like the cards can’t go against them, so they spend it, are reckless with it, gambling, casinos.” And then the inevitable happens: “They go through a down streak and they have nothing left to show for one of the ...

Poker is far less forgiving. If you play too high, risk too much, go too big, you will inevitably find yourself confronted with going broke.

but to Erik, that’s not a point of pride. Because you can never rely on being able to get that loan, get that backing, and have the chance to rebound. At some point, if you go broke, it will be for good.

You have to take these things seriously.”

When you put it that way, in the prosaic business-ese of bankroll management, it becomes clear just how crucial it is to respect the power of luck, the role of variance, if I’m ever going to learn to understand it.

Skill is not being an idiot who signs up for $140 tournaments when I don’t even have a designated bank account for poker playing and am taking all the tournament cash out of my monthly life budget.

Without a safety net, your skill couldn’t matter less. You can be the most talented player in whatever your chosen profession, but if you’re not buttressed against the immediate impact of the worst case scenario, you may never get a chance to recover. I grimly assent to lower my target.

I make myself two promises. First, I am going to stick with this. I will master this game, even if it takes more than a year. I will be a winning player. I will be someone to contend with—or give my all trying. And second: if I’m known as anything in this game, I want to be known as a good poker player, not a good female poker player. No modifiers need apply.

I wonder, only I’m not tuned in, not paying attention as closely as I should, not able to separate the signal from the noise—and so, not able to realize that I’ve got a shark biting at my heels as I swim merrily along and think he’s on my side? How often have I been that friendly, helpful neighbor? Certainly, I’ve been here more than once, in noisier environments. Moments where I thought someone was on my side only to be stabbed in the back. Promising starts to a friendship only to realize someone was looking for an angle, and once they had what they wanted, they (and their friendship) evaporated. It feels nice to feel useful and appreciated—until you realize you’ve been used.

There are the talkers, the stalkers, the bullies, the friendlies. With each game, each bust-out, each hand, I take it all in and write it all down.

“Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it. You want to make sure you’re not the person in the poker room saying, ‘Can you believe what happened?’ That’s the other people.”

How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state.

Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.

How we phrase sentences—are we the one doing the acting or being acted upon?—can determine whether we have an internal or external locus of control, whether we’re masters of our fates or peons of forces beyond us.

Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.

effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it. Potential opportunities pass you by; people get tired of hearing you complain, so your social network of support and opportunities also dwindles; you don’t even attempt certain activities because you think, I’ll lose anyway, why try?; your mental health suffers; and the spiral continues.

If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time.

and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come at some point, even if that point is far in the future.

I’m describing things as happening to me rather than taking responsibility for my actions.

They focus your mind on something you can’t control—the cards—rather than something you can, the decision. They ignore the fact that the most we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have; the outcome doesn’t matter.

And thinking how much emotional energy I could have saved and invested productively had I just followed that simple piece of advice: no bad beats. Forget they ever happened.

“Are you really doing that with top pair?” and then looking pointedly for a reaction. This is a different world.

Everyone is allowed. No one will turn you away because you didn’t come from the right school or have the right connections or diplomas. If you can afford the buy-in, you can play, simple as that. There’s no interview process where a hiring manager can decide you rub them the wrong way. You’re not penalized for bad social skills or annoying habits. Unlike other sports, there’s no need to be genetically endowed with the right height or musculature. If you’re blind, deaf, or any other way physically impaired, you can still play—indeed, many a player started from a hospital bed when no other activities were possible.

In everything, stability and support are important components in success.

Somewhere out there, I know, are the anti-Fedors: the people on the other end of that distribution who got such bad luck at the start of their foray into the world

of poker that they never even realized they had the skill to continue.

“Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible

for his choice and must accept the consequences.”

Blockers are all the rage, I’ve learned. They inform many of your most successful bluffs—and many of your most successful folds. If you’re holding blockers to your opponents’ value hands, bluff away.

It gets complex quickly, but the main point is this: my holding a card means you can’t be holding that card. And if the card is a valuable one, I now have an important piece of information in determining my play.

certainty: because the math tells me this, I’m more confident (correctly so), but perhaps a bit too confident given the extra data. And so I may fail to take in new data—the behavior of a player at the table, say—as I make my decision because I have a slightly misplaced sense of security. He can’t possibly call me here, goes the thinking.

The extra information should rightly give you more confidence—but nothing close to certitude. The relationship between information and confidence is a highly asymmetric one.

“The good thing about poker is there’s enough luck that you never have to admit it’s your fault you lost.”)

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.

You can’t avoid bad beats altogether. But paying attention is one of the best ways I can see of minimizing the window for negative variance to peek through. In an age of constant distraction and never-ending connectivity, we may be so busy that we miss the signals that tell us to swerve before we’re in the bad beat’s path.

“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance

appears, you will notice it. 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.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

“Everything in poker is always some sort of flow of energy, where whoever can apply the right amount of pressure and allow the right amount of retreat will win. If you find that balance, it’s really nice. That’s what will allow for success,”

Where Dan views it as a way of teaching yourself strategic lessons and analyzing your game, finding your mistakes and plugging your leaks, Chewy sees it in more cosmic terms.

profession built around maximizing expected value, in the financial rather than spiritual sense.

improve. I know I can’t take a magic pill or find the magic words that will replace practice and study, but I’m optimistic that maybe Phil will offer some ineffable something that will give me a

We know that in most any environment, the best way to not screw up, so to speak, is to follow a specific protocol. Checklists, step-by-step modules: these lead to high proficiency in minimal time. If, that is, everything goes according to plan—or fails in anticipated ways.

For short-term profitability, a rote-based approach is key. For long-term growth, I need to revert to my inner Sherlock Holmes.