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

by Maria Konnikova

In the end, though, luck is a short-term friend or foe. Skill shines through over the longer time horizon.

Poker has a mathematical foundation, but with a dose of human intention, interaction, psychology—nuance, deception, little tricks that don’t quite reflect reality but help you gain an edge over others.

The games that interested von Neumann are the ones that, like life, can’t ever be mapped cleanly.

life is based on making the best decisions you can from information that can never be complete: you never know someone else’s mind, just like you can never know any poker hand but your own.

Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions. It’s about discerning the hidden, the uniquely human. It’s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will ever be able to capture the vagaries and surprises of human nature.

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Poker wasn’t theoretical, the way the research I’d done and the studies I’d run had been. Poker was practical. Poker was experiential. Poker embodied the way the human mind learns best, and it wasn’t a one-off event: it was a systematic process.

Poker isn’t a homogeneous game; there are multiple varieties of play, with names like Stud, Omaha, Razz, Badugi, and HORSE. Each has its own unique set of rules, but in any style of poker, the basic parameters are essentially the same: Some cards are dealt faceup, visible to all—these are the community cards—and some facedown,

You make bets based on how strong your hand is and how strong you thi...

you are in a game of incomplete information: you must make the best decision you can, given the little you know. The last player left standing at the end of the final round of betting takes the ...

most popular. No Limit Texas Hold’em.

The first is in the precise amount of information that is held in common versus in private. Each player is dealt two cards facedown: the hole cards. This is privileged information. I can try to guess what you have based on how you act, but I can’t know for sure. The only information I’ll have is your betting patterns once the public information—the cards dealt to the middle of the table, faceup—is known.

there are three stages of dealing the middle cards: the first three cards, called the “flop,” are dealt at the same time; the fourth card, the “turn,” is dealt after another round of betting; and the...

the amount of incomplete information in Texas hold’em creates a particularly useful balance between skill and chance. Two hole cards is just about as practical a ratio as you can have:

The second thing that distinguishes this particular playing style is the concept of no limit—von Neumann’s own preferred style. “The power of the pure bluff is restricted in a game of limit,” explains Amarillo Slim,

In no limit, you can bet everything you have, at any point. You can “shove” or “jam”—that is, make an all-in bet, placing every chip you have into the pot. And that’s when the game gets really interesting. Limit is for people who have “the guts of an earthworm or make [their] living as an accountant,” Slim says. “If you can’t ‘move in’ on someone—meaning bet everything you’ve got in front of you—then it’s not real poker.”

makes this game a particularly strong metaphor for our daily decision making.

in life, there is neve...

It’s the endless game of brinkmanship, popularized by another giant of game theory, the Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling, that plays out everywhere in our lives. Who will say “I love you” first, moving “all in” in the relationship—and if you say it, will you be left out, so to speak? Who will walk away from the business negotiation? Who will wage war?

And, of course, there’s the emotional element. Be it at the poker table or out in the real world, there is no risk quite like the risk of the shove: at its best, it can let you “double through”—that is, win the maximum amount possible, doubling your stack—but it can also end your game. You can emerge with the deal of a lifetime, or a life partner—or you can find yourself bankrupt or emotionally devastated. Like life, no limit poker is high risk and high reward.

Once you’ve chosen your game, there’s one more choice to make: cash or tournament? In a cash game, every chip has a cash value. You buy in to a game for a certain amount, say, $100, and you get that exact amount in chips placed in front of you. At any point, you can choose to add more money to your stack by paying the requisite amount in cash. At any point, you can get up and walk away. And if you ever go bust, you can always choose to rebuy and start over for another shot. What’s more, the structure will remain constant. If you bought in to a $1/$2 game—a game where the blinds, or forced bets that you have to post into the pot before seeing your cards, are one dollar for the small blind and two dollars for the big blind—it will always be a $1/$2 game.

In a tournament, chips have value only relative to other players’: they are a way of keeping score. A $100 buy-in might get you ten thousand chips or two hundred; it doesn’t really matter. Everyone gets the same amount, and your goal is to accumulate as many of them as possible, with the eventual winner holding all the chips.

Cash games are War and Peace. You’re a thousand pages in and still no closer to finding out how the battle resolved itself. You can try to flip ahead, but events will unfold at whatever pace they choose. Tournaments are far more Shakespearean in nature. You’ve barely hit act three and half the cast is already dead.

I began to genuinely wonder if, in poker, I could finally find a way to overcome my all-too-human inability to disentangle chance from skill in the morass of daily life, and instead learn to master it. Could poker help my husband figure out his next career move, and when it was right to just start playing again as opposed to waiting for the perfect cards? Could it help me think through when to give up with the medical consultations, or how to deal with the fallout of the bills in planning our financial future? Could it help my mother leverage an unfavorable table environment, so to speak, in her favor?

“I have a PhD in psychology. I studied decision making—the sort of stuff you do every day, but from a theoretical perspective.” “A psychologist. Now that’s interesting. That could be really helpful in poker.”

“I think you’re approaching it from the area of most value, especially of most differentiated value. All the other guys are very math-based, very data-based. This area is way more open. Actually, of the great players, the ones who are some of the most exploitable are the ones who are really into math.” “Oh, good.” I’m happy to have struck a chord after the false start. “I haven’t done any math since high school,” I admit. “My math skills are not particularly great, either, and that’s not unusual,” Erik says, putting me at ease. “It doesn’t hurt, but it’s no barrier to playing well. The basic math is so basic that a six-year-old could do it.”

The real question is, can good thinking and hard work get you there? And I think it can,” Erik says. In a way it’s good, he goes on, that I’m an outsider. I can bring fresh eyes, perspective—and

In Range, David Epstein reflects on the nature of the outsider: “Switchers are winners,” he writes. Perhaps, as a switcher, I’ll be able to get beyond the myopia that often comes with an insider’s perspective, bring what psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness.”

“You know, psychology really is the most fascinating part of the game,” Erik says, interrupting my thought process. “What specifically about decision making did you study? Like Kahneman?” “Actually, my graduate adviser was Walter Mischel—you know, the marshmallow guy?” “Oh wow. That’s exciting. Self-control is huge in the game.” So Mr. Seidel knows the marshmallow guy, too.

Erik Seidel doesn’t actually care about whether I win any given game. He just wants to see how far we can go—how far psychology, people reading, and emotional nuance can get me.

It became a new life. From novice, I turned champion. From amateur, I went pro. And all along the way, I watched with a mix of wonder and pride as my life changed for the better. This book is the result of that journey.

It is a picking up of von Neumann’s challenge: poker as a lens into the most difficult and important life decisions we have to make, an exploration of chance and skill in life—and an attempt to learn to navigate it and optimize it to the best of our potential.

insight into decision making far removed from poker,

From managing emotion, to reading other people, to cutting your losses and maximizing your gains, to psyching yourself up into the best version of yourself

Key summary

Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and how you can deal with the elements of pure luck—in a way no other environment I’ve encountered has quite been able to do.

As Erik told me that first day, lesson one: pay attention. This book isn’t about how to play poker. It’s about how to play the world.

of course people would understand that poker was an important way to learn about decision making.

the economist Ingo Fiedler analyzed hundreds of thousands of hands played on several online poker sites over a six-month period, he found that the actual best hand won, on average, only 12 percent of the time

economists Steven Levitt and Thomas Miles looked at live play and compared the ROI, or return on investment, for two groups of players at the 2010 WSOP, they found that recreational players lost, on average, over 15 percent of their buy-ins (roughly $400), while professionals won over 30 percent (roughly $1,200). They write, “The observed differences in ROIs are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns.” Success in poker, in other words, implies far more skill than success in that far more respectable profession, investing.

“If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief,” says Kant.

Poker is such a powerful window into probabilistic thinking not in spite of, but because of, the betting involved: the betting in poker isn’t incidental. It’s integral to the learning process. Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.

One specific class of lawyer, in fact, actually fares far better at probabilistic thinking than financial professionals whose jobs are more explicitly tied to probabilities: the lawyers who take cases for a percentage of the eventual settlement. You have a far higher personal stake in calibrating correctly, and so you learn to do just that. Likewise, meteorologists and horse-race handicappers: their calibration of risk is accurate because they not only deal explicitly in percentages but have immediate feedback on their performance—and

Outside the realm of games, accurate probabilistic thinking is a rare skill.

the father of probability—the first person who we know of to go beyond a vision of chance as some sort of unknowable goddess, or otherwise in the purview of the supernatural—was a gambler. Girolamo Cardano was a doctor, a mathematician, a philosopher. He was part of the group responsible for the advent of higher algebra and was known for his thought-provoking prose (Shakespeare, it seems, was a fan, and it has been claimed that Cardano’s Consolation was the book originally held by Hamlet in the “To be or not to be?”

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.

The Art of Losing New York, Fall 2016 “If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss . . .” RUDYARD KIPLING, “IF—,” CIRCA 1895

Finding a good mentor is crucial to learning any new skill—and

I’m expecting a lesson in beating the odds, in calculations, in the power of position and optimal strategy. And I do get some of that—but what I mostly get instead is a crash session on the importance of failure.

Before I did anything else, I went out and bought copies of Dan’s books—and read them, pen in hand, cover to cover.

there are powerful computer algorithms that help you work out strategies and run millions of simulations in seconds to answer strategic questions that used to be approached by the brunt of sheer repetition and experience.

If I’m to work with him, I can’t skip steps. First I read and watch—read Harrington, watch streams with real hands being played by the best players. (“Sign up for Run It Once,” he tells me early on. I find out it’s a coaching site, and when I start looking at the library of available topics, I suddenly feel very, very lost and very, very small and very, very silly.