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

by Maria Konnikova

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, a twentieth-century statistician and geneticist, pointed out in 1966, “The ‘one chance in a million’ will undoubtedly occur with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.” Consider the 7.5 billion people who currently make up the world’s population and you can be sure that the highly improbable is happening with regular frequency. The “one chance in a million” takes place every second.

I don’t put much store in the ten-thousand-hour rule—even if you modify it with the caveat of Well, maybe not ten thousand precisely, but a very large number that is comparable across individuals and activities. The evidence simply does not bear up to scrutiny. Some people achieve much larger gains with much less investment than others who study far longer and work much harder; that’s the simple truth.

one thing is undoubtedly true: while practice is not enough and there’s not even close to a magic number for its effectiveness, you also cannot learn if you do not practice.

what’s interesting is that the women who play poker are, I would say, much smarter than the men. If you talk to Vanessa Selbst or Liv Boeree, these girls are really brilliant. I mean there are obviously plenty of very bright men as well. But somehow we have a really impressive crop of female players.”

This is true in computer programming and IT too. Any woman who survives is at least twice as good as the average guy, and usually better than that.

When women act in a more feminine, less confrontational way, we aren’t being shy or stupid. We are being smart. We are reacting to the realities of the world, knowing that to fail to do so is to incur potentially life-changing penalties. We are socialized into our passivity. After all, don’t we want to be liked . . . so that we will be hired and make money and make a living?

truly blank slate would have listened to her coach and executed—because why not? If Erik tells me to try out a strategy, I should try it out. And I simply haven’t been able to. Whenever I do, it feels off and I fail. It isn’t that I’m incapable of learning an aggressive approach or understanding its merits. It’s that I have learned and understood, and want to make it work—but can’t because of the emotional baggage that has accumulated, without my awareness, throughout my entire professional life.

Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past.

Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and

As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

W. H. Auden: “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.”

Take competence. Teacher evaluations, for instance, have been found not to correlate well with actual student learning: sometimes, the most popular teachers aren’t the best teachers, and the ones who get worse evaluations are actually far more competent and end up teaching their students far more, based on objective assessments. If consensus meant accuracy, there would be no fraudulent financial management—we’d give money only to trustworthy, competent people.

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