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

by Maria Konnikova

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

And the whole process becomes more streamlined and fluid naturally.

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.

I talk, laugh, and smile a bit too much. Uh-oh. “It seems natural to you,” Blake says, “but I’d watch out for it. You’re a very dynamic player. If I was playing with you, I’d definitely want to engage you in conversation to see if I can pick anything up.”

Tells are the hardest poker skill to master because there is no shortcut for experience, for the brutal hours of analysis required to pick up accurate information about player tendencies.

Poker is a CAPS theorist’s wet dream: it’s all about dynamics. At the table, you see a range of situations that would take months to encounter in the real world. It’s a living drama. It’s a game that manages to concentrate the essence of myriad situations and force you through them as the day wears on. You’re up, you’re down, you’re energized, you’re exhausted, you’re in a position of power, you’re in a position of defense:

“Very often you see they lose a big hand and then all of a sudden, it’s a lot more likely that they’re going to try to find a way to get it back and their judgment is not going to be as good. That’s a very common thing.”

Or the opposite happens: they get gun-shy. They want to protect the chips they have and become frightened of running any major bluffs or playing any big hands.

Who you are comes out at the poker table. Your baggage, your experiences, your confidence, the stereotypes you hold.

But at the poker table, it turns out, my “profile,” or behavioral signature, as Walter would call it, emerges in full.

“The hard part is this: How good are you at identifying where your opponent is in strategy space, based on their actions?” You watch them act and react over multiple situations and you try to adjust based on that behavior, to be maximally profitable against this particular person.

observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. Figure out what they are observing, how they are orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result. That way, you can anticipate them. Because at the end of the day, the fighting, just like the poker table, comes down to information.

“Someone can look at them and, from them, reverse engineer the strategy book you’re using. It’s a deep, multilayered problem in information processing.”

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

Targets move, but having a new one, however hard it may look to hit, doesn’t negate that you’ve reached the first.

I had set out to understand the limits of control, the nature of luck.

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

And as I’m learning, the craft of poker certainly cannot be mastered without self-knowledge, self-care, and self-reflection.

And then you get unlucky, and the cards don’t go your way, and someone hits their flush when you held top set and you find yourself at the end of the line, ready for the walk of shame out the door . .

I’m chagrined that I was so easily swept up in it all, that I wasn’t strong enough to know my own limits. I’m mad that I let the pros talk me into doing something I wasn’t comfortable with.

Final tally for the two weeks: $11,810 in entries (yikes) and $5,748 in cashes, for a net loss of $6,062. And that’s before hotel, food, airfare, and my daily Lyft rides to and from the Rio.

If my journey is about understanding luck, about feeling out the boundaries of control, about knowing how to optimize and reclaim power over what you can do while minimizing the perils of happenstance that you can do little about, then poker has already done its job well.

It has taught me the pitfalls of the gamble, the necessity of selecting games so that you have an edge, so that you have a statistical advantage, so that your skill can win.

It has taught me to avoid situations where skill falls by the wayside, where you have to rely on variance alone to break your way because...

If you never take shots, you never know when you’re ready to move up.

The smart thing is to pull back, play smaller, regroup, build up, and try again—better, smarter, savvier, more skillful in both the ways of poker strategy and the ways of mental strength.

Build my bankroll back up. Hone my skill. And shoot for the Main in a year’s time. Don’t jump into the arms of chance and say, “Please don’t let me fall!” Don’t play above your weight class after you’ve just been punched down. It’s a question of respect for the game—and not just the game of poker.

It’s only a few months ago that Phil Galfond reminded me to always find the why behind every move, every decision, every action.

“Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.”

In what’s known as 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.

Instead of learning from my original planning fallacy that has brought me to my “target” almost a half year ahead of an already short schedule, I now compound it by sticking to my guns. I had a plan, a specific goal, and even though the circumstances have changed—and changed significantly at that—I’m sticking to it. The

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

the most important things about being a good poker playe...

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

Why not exercise some creative thinking in what my journey is going to be?

I simply made some decisions earlier on with incomplete information—and now that I know more, I should change course. No one is telling me to quit poker, merely to reassess where I am. But

One of the most important lessons of poker strategy, intimately connected to self-assessment, is this: sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title.

What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a result.

people will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided.

One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever.

“See how you feel in the morning” is a refrain I’ve grown used to hearing from him.

To play your best game, you need to be your best you. Rested, sharp, focused. If you’re off, a game that would have been a winning ende...

Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned.

And I do the exact thing he told me not to do—compare myself with others rather than focus on how I’m doing on my own.

“Ignore the average,” Erik implores. “Just focus on how many blinds you have. The average doesn’t matter for your strategy.

All I need to know is how many chips I have relative to the blinds, and I can play.

“To go straight for the jugular: it all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego,”

“When you sit down to play, you put yourself on the line. What you have to understand is you’re always a person first and a poker player second.”

with. “How do you feel about yourself? Do you want to prove you’re not an idiot, or overcome pain, or fulfill visions and dreams of yourself as someone capable of playing at the highest levels?”

The poker table, Jared explains, brings out the fears that I already carry with me and pushes them to the surface: fears of failure, pressure—it all gets exaggerated and brought forward during the course of a game. “What I look to do is see all of that as symptoms of deeper flaws. And what we’re trying to do together is get at those deeper flaws.”