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

by Maria Konnikova

Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove...

under...

emotional holes and teach me to be a one-woman bomb squad, defusing the emotional bombs and getting rid of them before t...

“Hope. Hope has its place in the world, but when it comes to poker, it really doesn’t belong,” he says. “As far as hope in poker, fuck it.”

resonates. It’s what Erik was getting at with his admonition about bad beats—the worrying about what could and should have been, the hope that replaces analysis and actual reflection.

THE CONCEPT OF TILT in poker is one that’s remarkably malleable: it applies to all sorts of situations. It means that you’re letting emotions—incidental ones that aren’t actually integral to your decision process—affect your decision making.

longer thinking rationally.

Not caring about the negative emotional effects of large losses, they don’t learn to distinguish the better decisions and instead go for the larger wins and larger swings.*

We experience emotions for a reason, and the goal is not to stop experiencing them.

Instead, the goal is to learn to identify our emotions, analyze their cause, and if they’re not actually part of our rational decision process—and more often than not, they aren’t—dismiss them as sources of information.

Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling.

Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it.

If I start to understand the sources of my tilt, I have a chance to stop misattributing the emotions I’m feeling to other things and instead to dismiss the emotions as irrelevant. If I’m upset about losing a pot, I can acknowledge that f...

it may help to learn to anticipate the emotion before it arises, thereby cutting it off at the source.

You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.

“You really have to make sure that you’re still thinking clearly and still going through the process of thinking through things in a way that’s not influenced or impacted by the fact that you just lost or won a big hand,”

problem. I need to actually sit down and make a spreadsheet. Each time something happens, write it down in the situation or trigger column. In the next column, write a description of the thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors that the situation or trigger causes. In the next column, give my best assessment of the underlying flaw or problem, and finally, write a logic statement that I can use in the moment to inject some rationality into the issue.

The tilt is on its way—and even knowing my reaction is based on incidental emotion isn’t enough to stop it. The feeling is too intense.

THERE’S THE CONSTANT ANXIETY that I’m letting people down—the players who believe in me, the people who back me, myself. It’s a fear of high expectations that I’m afraid to subvert.

instinctively cowering to future Maria’s power.” I don’t have the guts because I’m afraid—still—of looking stupid, of making mistakes, of being judged and judging myself.

We discuss my optimal stress level: how to push myself so that I’m stressed enough to perform well, but not pressure myself so hard that I lose all confidence.

embodied cognition: embody the feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out.

Stay away from the tables too long and all the work and progress you’ve made is threatened. But stay at the tables too long and the same thing could well happen—as it did to me in my frenzied Colossus outing. You lose perspective, you lose emotional stability, you lose the ability to accurately gauge how well calibrated your decisions actually are. It’s like that damned timer ticking down on my first glimpse of online poker—and while I realized how much decisions suffer under time pressure when the timer was in my face, I somehow failed to realize that I’d made a big red blinking timer in my head leading up to the Main. No wonder I couldn’t think straight. I was my very own experimental subject.

The recharging is also a part of playing well.

that. I’ve always been a proponent of stepping back during any endeavor. Of taking breaks. Of taking a breath.

3,790—but I’m feeling much more optimistic than I was. I feel like I’m playing better, like I’m thinking better, like I’m being less reactive and more proactive in the choices I’m making. Now that the time pressure is lifted, the brain fog that came in its wake lifts as well. I have the room to think—and have been given the permission, first by Jared and then, through repetition, by myself, to do so.

I’m armed with my spreadsheet of emotional triggers.

It’s smart risk-mitigation strategy given how tired I am, not a blow to my ego.

The moment your mind becomes preoccupied with sleep is the moment sleep escapes for good.

these pros approach nearly everything as a game-theoretical model to be optimized. To serious players, poker is as much of a sport as they come, and they will use every tool at their disposal to make sure they are fighting fit.

What they are trying to do is optimize their bodies—and do it in the most optimal way.

Quality ratios. Weighing benefits versus costs, calculating the best use of time, evaluating quality of life with different factors tweaked: welcome to the mind of a true poker player when it comes to most any decision.

“You haven’t seen those players in the lead-up to their peak. You don’t know that they were staked in their first hundred-K. You don’t know the serendipity that happened to get them there.”

“Everyone got lucky at some point. Strip down the mythology around their greatness. They still have weaknesses. They are humans first, players second.” I try to collect myself.

Bird by bird has become a sort of inner mantra for me whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed. When it seems like it’s just too much, I’ll never finish, I’ll never get something accomplished, I close my eyes and tell myself, Bird by bird. And then I start working on the next bird on the list. Bird by bird. Hand by hand. It might feel overwhelming, but I can do this. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and press the reset button, just like Jared and I discussed.

Or, in less colorful terms, may the variance go my way.

Nothing major; just bad cards, bad boards, and not many spots to do much but fold and wait. But now I’m far more comfortable doing just that. Waiting. Picking my spots, just like Erik has always said. The theory always made sense. My mental discipline has now caught up at last.

It’s one of the best decision-making aids you could possibly have: maximum information prior to acting.

Retell the story from the beginning. Does the narrative flow—or are there logical gaps? I’m a detective. I’m a storyteller.

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive.

“There you go. You’re playing like a hungry person. Next time, you have to eat.”

I can pressure players without fear of getting bluffed. All I need to do is push my chips into the middle, and they know I have nothing left to lose.

of agency, my life back in my own hands. I’ve set off on a journey to learn about the limits of chance, and I’ve proven something that I needed to prove to myself: that with the right mindset, the right tools, you can conquer, excel, emerge triumphant—even through the setbacks, even when the original road map proves faulty and needs to be replaced.

Games give us a chance to confront luck in a manner that allows us to process it in life in a way we’re not always forced to do. And sometimes, it’s the games that incorporate luck most explicitly that push us to the limits of understanding just how far agency can take us—and where it inevitably breaks down.

The players who end up here are the sharks who see dollars, precise and calculating in their quest to maximize financial value at the expense of everything else.

Macau is a shrine to the goddess of chance. And it’s where many of the great poker minds have come to embrace her power.

It’s like the story that’s apocryphally attributed to Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. A friend of his was visiting his office and kept looking up at the horseshoe over the door. Finally, he could no longer contain his curiosity. Could it really be that a mind as remarkable as Bohr’s believed that horseshoes brought luck? Of course he didn’t believe it, Bohr replied. “But I understand it’s lucky whether I believe in it or not.”

So Ike is making the rational decision to be irrational, in an attempt to make that irrationality more . . . rational?

Confidence is an important factor in how you play. Wouldn’t you want to minimize the potential confounding variables?

On the one hand, I recognize the power of the placebo effect: if you believe it’s working, it may well work. If you think an object brings you luck, you are more confident.