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

by Maria Konnikova

The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition.

Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium.

“And also, to be honest, I think it’s funny to talk about it because people find it very strange. Like, I don’t really believe it, but I do put a medium amount of effort into keeping track of my lucky objects and making sure I have them.”

A modified Pascal’s wager: You don’t really believe it, but what’s the harm? Perhaps.

Because even at the highest level, the mind craves control. We are on an endless quest to put our stamp on the things that couldn’t care less about our existence. Even if it’s not altogether rational, just let me be.

“Yup. I feel you. Well, once you’ve done Macau, you’ve survived the worst,” he says. “Everything is better from here. The Rio will feel like the Four Seasons Bali after this.”

The chaos of life is far greater than the chaos of games.

It was all the same demon. It’s always tricky to use the slippery slope argument, but it seems that with X, something of that nature really did happen. A genius for games, a mind fascinated with the nuances of mathematics, and a temperament that never learned to slow down. That wanted action and excitement. A person who knew that gambling was stupid and irrational, that drugs were likewise not the way to success, and who did it all the same, with the full knowledge of his own folly.

Poker is about precision. Poker rewards the logical and the rational, and, yes, the creative, but with a reason behind it. Gambling is about chaos. It rewards the illogical, the irrationally exuberant. It preys on weakness.

It’s why I have such a strong instinctive dismissal of any superstition whatsoever. It’s inviting the chaos. It’s opening you up to the very elements poker is meant to control.

Acquiescence is not harmless. Because the moment you acquiesce, you give up a bit of control,

And if you actually believe in it, you become a gambler in the real sense of the word, ready to gamble with fate in a way that is the very antithesis of everything poker has taught me about approaching lif...

How you feel affects how you act.

but the evidence seems to be that it can’t all be luck.

Luckily, I have the tools to understand what’s going on, the ability to not panic, to analyze, to study, to move on. I’m willing to leave my ego at the door and revisit my thought process, over and over. I get into the habit of writing down the results of every all-in confrontation to see if I’m running at chance levels, and realize that I’m on the wrong side of variance—I’m losing more than my share of flips. It’s reassuring: variance plays both sides, and at least I’m not losing despite being on the right side.

I’ve now learned to pause, wherever I am. To appreciate the contrast between the table and the rest of it, to absorb and not just dread the travel.

My mother may not have gotten another job in programming, but she has learned the power of the career pivot and is teaching young children how to code. My husband did land on his feet soon after his last venture had shut its doors—more than on his feet: a job at one of the best-regarded investment businesses in the world.

because in life, the rules derived from games can break down in unforeseen ways. It’s called the ludic fallacy. Games are too simplified. Life has all sorts of things it can throw at you to make your careful calculations useless. And that’s true enough.

But one thing that poker has given me are the very skills necessary to deal with the chaos that can be thrown at you from outside the poker table.

Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it.

The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions. “Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion.

“Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

It turns out that it’s a very good thing indeed that poker has made me more comfortable with the unknown:

but should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.

And the biggest bluff of all? That skill can ever be enough. That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up. We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.

I didn’t make millions. But the wealth of skill I acquired, the depth of decision-making ability, the emotional

strength and self-knowledge—these will serve me long after my winnings have run dry.