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

by Maria Konnikova

the first day of the biggest poker tournament of the year, the Main Event of the World Series of Poker. This is the World Cup, the Masters, the Super Bowl—except you don’t need to be a superhero athlete to compete.

This championship is open to the everyman. For a neat ten grand, anyone in the world can enter and take their shot at poker glory: the title of world champion and a prize that has been known to top $9 million.

My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can’t bluff chance. Poker didn’t care about my reasons for being on the floor.

The message was clear. I could plan all I wanted, but the X factor could still always get me. The outcome would be what it would be.

It was my coach, Erik Seidel. “How’s it going?” the message read. Simple enough. He wanted to see how his student was faring in this, her biggest quest.

“Fine. A little below average in chips.” Which was true as far as I knew. “Hanging in there.” Slightly less true, but hey, I’m ever the optimist.

“But for its costliness and dangers, no better education for life among men could be devised than the gambling table—especially the poker table.” CLEMENS FRANCE, THE GAMBLING IMPULSE, 1902

Erik Seidel’s signature baseball cap

Poker is like PM. How? mentor - eric seidel

He is quiet. Reserved. Determinedly attentive. He seems to play with deliberation and precision. And he is a winner: multiple World Series of Poker bracelets, the World Poker Tour title, tens of millions in winnings. I have chosen with care. I am, after all, about to ask him to spend the next year of his life with me—a marriage proposal, if you will, right off a first date.

A proposal like marriage

he still contends for number one, as he has since his career first started, in the late eighties.

Measurement presides over intuition. Statistics over observation. Game theory over “feel.” We’ve seen the trend play out in areas as far afield as psychology—social psychology giving way to neuroscience—and music, with algorithms and experts quantifying not just what we listen to but how, to the fraction of a second, a song should be structured for maximum pop. Poker is no different. Caltech PhDs line the tables. Printouts of stats columns are a common sight. A conversation rarely goes for more than a beat without the offhand dropping of GTO (game theory optimal) or +EV (positive expected value). Talk of frequencies trumps talk of feelings.

Analytics has taken over in poker

his style of play—a psychological one, based less on mathematical outputs and more on understanding the human element—would render him a dinosaur, Erik stays on top.

Erics style of play is intuitive and psychological.

He loves to follow the up-and-coming players, is hip to the latest apps and programs, never assumes that he’s learned all there is. He refuses to plateau.

pay attention.

Pay attention.

I first encountered Erik the way I imagine most poker newbies do: in the 1998 movie Rounders. In many ways, Rounders brought poker to the masses—a story of a brilliant law student (Matt Damon)

It wasn’t about playing the cards. It was about playing the man.

I had never even played a single game of poker. I wanted Erik to teach me—to train me for the ultimate poker championship, the World Series of Poker, or WSOP.

I hoped to learn how to make the best decisions I possibly could, not just at the card table but in the world. Through poker, I wanted to tame luck—to learn to make a difference even when the deck seemed stacked against me.

to learn decision making and tame luck.

As a child, I had perhaps the greatest luck of my life: my parents left the Soviet Union, opening to me a world of opportunity I would never otherwise have had. As a teen, I used every ounce of skill I had to excel academically and become part of the first generation in my family to make it to college in the United States.

I wanted to know how much of my life I could take credit for and how much was just stupid luck.

How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?

How often are we actually in control, I wondered? And how does the perception of being in control in situations where luck is queen actually play out in our decision making? How do people respond when placed in uncertain situations, with incomplete information?

Luck uncertainty chance control

Choose the good stock, and you’d have a 50 percent chance of getting ten dollars, a quarter chance of making nothing, and a quarter chance of losing ten dollars.

What strategy would people follow in their choices—and how quickly would they learn which of the stocks was the winning one?

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events—smart

Not only would they decide ahead of time how they were going to divide their investments, but they would decide based on incredibly limited information which stock was “good” and stick to their guns—even as they started losing money.

People learn less when they believe they know. Most people believe they control outcomes.

The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them,

Because they thought they knew more than they did, they ignored any signs to the contrary—especially when, as inevitably happens in real stock markets, winners became losers and vice versa. In other words, the illusion of control is what prevented real control

People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

How could you use that theoretical knowledge to make better choices, practically speaking? It’s a tough ask, for one main reason: the equation of luck and skill is, at its heart, probabilistic. And a basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive:

There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment—just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare in this part of the country, and you have a 2 percent chance of encountering one, and an even lower chance of being attacked; we learned instead to deal...

description-experience gap.

Description-experience gap - we trust experiences we have to know the future. The movie Jaws.

study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules,

decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than base...

charts you want, but that won’t change their perceptions of the risks or their resulting decisions. What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has. If you were in New York City during Hurricane Sandy, for instance, you are far more likely to purchase flood insurance.

Your likelihood of slipping in a shower is orders of magnitude larger than your likelihood of being in a terrorist attack—but

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.

Used in the right way, experience can be a powerful ally in helping to understand probabilistic scenarios. The experience just can’t be a one-off, haphazard event. It has to be a systematic learning process—much like the environment you encounter at the table.

A few months later, my vivacious, healthy, living-on-her-own grandmother slipped in the night. The edge of a metal bed frame.

I never called back quite quickly enough. She’d been through World War II, survived Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and was defeated by a slippery floor and one misplaced foot. Unfair. Or rather, unlucky. One surer step and she’d still be here.

My husband lost his job next.

And on top of it all, I found my health suddenly failing. I’d recently been diagnosed with a bizarre autoimmune condition. No one knew quite what it was, but my hormone levels had declared insanity, and I was suddenly allergic to just about everything.

Luck surrounds us, everywhere—from something as mundane as walking to work and getting there safely to the other extreme, like surviving a war or a terrorist attack when others mere inches away weren’t as fortunate. But we only notice it when things don’t go our way. We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves. When chance is on our side, we disregard it:

As 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.

Until I began this journey, I’d never been a card player. I’d never played poker in my life. I’d never even seen a real game. Poker was a nonentity in my mind. But faced with event after event breaking the wrong way, I did what I always do when I try to understand something. I read.

the entire theory was inspired by a single game—poker. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

John von Neumann - game tbeory is like life and based on poker.

There was one exception to his distrust of gaming: poker. He loved it. To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough skill to make playing worthwhile, enough chance that the challenge was there for the taking. He was a god-awful player by every account, but that never stopped him. Poker was the ultimate puzzle: he wanted to understand it, to unravel it—to, in the end, beat it.

how to disentangle the chance from the skill, how to maximize the role of the latter and learn to minimize the malice of the former, he believed he would hold the solution to some of life’s greatest decision challenges.

poker, unlike quite any other game, ...

isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two. Poker stands at the fulcrum that bala...