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

by Maria Konnikova

Then I begin to play for real—online, for tiny stakes, but for real money, to see how I do in putting the lessons into practice.

Only after I start consistently winning money online will I get to do the thing I thought I’d be doing right away: going to Vegas to play in real life—somehow,

Even from Vegas, it’s still a long road to the WSOP. The Main Event is a $10,000 buy-in. That’s high stakes for an amateur who knows nothing.

Erik is nothing if not responsible. And he takes his role as mentor quite seriously. If I want him to be my coach, I have to agree that he will not be letting me anywhere near a $10,000 tournament, book or no book, if he doesn’t feel I at least have an outside chance at success. For that to happen, I have to get to the point where I’m consistently cashing in lower-stakes tournaments,

We walk, we talk, and we let the pace of the afternoon determine the flow of the conversation.

Our earliest walking conversations are, as you’d expect, among the most basic. I’ve drilled down the super basics—the ground rules, so to speak. You are dealt two cards. You decide whether to play them or to fold. If you do play them, you call or raise. Everyone else follows the same decision process, going in a clockwise direction starting from the player to the left of the big blind, a position called, appropriately enough, under the gun. And then you make that decision again every time new information, in the form of new cards, appears. At the end, if only one person holds cards when the betting is done, she wins the pot. If the hand goes to showdown—that is, the final bet is called—the person holding the best cards will win.

Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act. That makes sense. In any decision, information is power. The earlier you act, the less information you have.

“Basically, you can’t go too wrong in the beginning if you play good cards” is one of the first concrete pieces of information he ever gave me. But what Harrington seems to be saying makes a lot of sense to me, too: If I suddenly start opening hands that aren’t expected of me, in super-aggressive style, how will people know how to react?

Hyper-aggressive play, he tells me, can be a short-term boon. But most of the time, those players go broke. And at the highest levels, they don’t last more than a heartbeat.

Of course, being too conservative is also a liability. You become predictable. And often times, you lose the ability to press the fold button.

You have to be involved in many more hands, because just good cards aren’t going to get you there. They’re not going to get you there a high enough percentage of the time.” And so despite knowing fundamentally sound strategy, you have to be willing to part with it. “It turns out that people who are sort of involved and reckless are more likely to go deep.” To go deep means to make it through a large portion of the field. “You just have to be smart about it.”

What exactly is “M” and do I care? It’s a term I’ve circled in red, to make sure to review. It seemed awfully important to be designated with a single letter. M, Erik explains, is a way of thinking about your position in a tournament. “You have to be aware of everyone’s stack size,” he tells me. “When you get to Vegas and start playing, I want you to write down hands for me. And for every hand, you need to tell me how much everyone has behind. You have to always be aware of it.” Normally, people think of stack sizes in terms of big blinds. M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke. How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner. And the letter M itself? It comes from the last name of a player named Paul Magriel.

“We can go over everything you should be paying attention to, but the truth is, until you start playing a lot, it’s just information overload.”

“But here’s what I can tell you. The thing you have to conquer most obviously is yourself,” Dan continues. “Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’ And he’s right. Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky—it’s as simple as that. You just won’t.”

you need a way of testing your thought process.

Am I thinking correctly? Before I start experimenting with writing free verse, have I learned how to think through a poem’s basic structure? Before I start adding those exotic spices to my recipe, have I learned how to make a basic white rice? And the only way to do that is by failing. By writing bad poetry. Burning your food. Turning in shitty first draft after shitty first draft. “You have to suffer defeat,” Dan continues. “As brutal as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”

benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer. If you win right away—if your first foray into any new area is a runaway success—you’ll have absolutely no way to gauge if you’re really just that brilliant or it was a total fluke

They were superstars because they were able to bring it to the edge, they had ability, but when things went a little bit wrong they either fell apart or didn’t know what to do with the money and spent it all on drugs and sports betting. So were they actually courageous? No.”

Do I know what I don’t know? Am I thinking well? “As a professional gambler, you have to understand: if you don’t have an objective evaluation of what’s going on, you’re a loser,” he tells me. “This game will beat you—it’s as simple as that. If you don’t understand what’s going on, the game will say, ‘We’re taking your money away from you.’”

crucial, Dan says, is to develop my critical thinking and self-assessment ability well enough that I can constantly reevaluate, objectively, where I am—and whether where I am is good enough to play as I’m playing. It’s not about winning or losing—that’s chance. It’s about thinking—the process.

“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”

“When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that’s always surrounding them,” he tells me. They take it personally. They don’t know how to lose, how to learn from losing. They look for something or someone to blame. They don’t step back to analyze their own decisions, their own play, where they may have gone wrong themselves. “It’s a really big handicap in life to think that way.

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other.

Ellen Langer had students guess the outcome of a coin toss, heads or tails.

outcomes were predetermined in a specific order: they could be distributed in an intuitively random pattern, there could be more correct guesses clustered near the beginning, or there could be more correct guesses clustered near the end. In each case, the absolute numbers were the same.

results couldn’t have been more different. After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a series of questions: Did they feel they could improve on this task? Did they feel they were particularly talented at it? Did they need more time to get better? Would they be better with limited distraction? And so on. In each case, the obvious answer is no: to answer otherwise is to classify something that is the outcome of chance (a coin toss) as being in the realm of skill. But the obvious answer is not the answer she got. When students had a random progression or one where the accuracy clustered near the end, they did indeed answer in the negative. But when the correct answers were clustered up front, they developed a sudden myopia. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would improve with time. Success led to an abject failure of objectivity: suddenly, they were in the throes of the illusion of control.

If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control

“The beauty of poker is generally, delusion is punished,” Erik tells me. You may get away with an illusion of control in the short term, but if you persist, no one will know your name in a few years’ time. In real life, we can remain deluded indefinitely.

player was offering a very specific opinion on how a certain hand should be played. Erik listened quietly and then told him one phrase: “Less certainty. More inquiry.”

He was offering the approach he’d learned over years of experience. Question more. Stay open-minded.

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.

‘What is the object of poker?’”

‘The object of poker is making good decisions.’

The Mind of a Strategist New York, Late Fall 2016

Robin Hogarth terms a “kind” learning environment, where you receive immediate feedback.

the most crucial mistake I made wasn’t necessarily the poor strategy—“You’ll get there, that’s the easier part,” Erik says—but the fact that I don’t have good reasons for most of my decisions.

“We’ve talked about this,” Erik says. “You have to have a clear thought process for every single hand. What do I know? What have I seen? How will that help me make an informed judgment about this hand?”

“Even a few seconds of reflection, that’s all you need to just go through every action. Stop and take a breath and think through your alternatives. Am I folding? Am I calling? Am I raising? Everything is always a possibility. You have to be careful you’re not acting too fast. It’s a major hole for a lot of people.

the action here is multiway. Multiple enemies. And everyone knows how much harder it is to fight a two-front war, let alone four-front, than a one-on-one battle. “When you’re multiway,” Erik tells me, “you tend to have to be more straightforward.” There are simply too many variables to juggle. Like a general working out a multistage plan, I have to think multiple streets ahead. Will I be in a good position to react if the hand continues? I bet because I want them to fold, but what if they don’t? What do I do next? What if they raise? How do I respond then? Every good strategist has to think through all the possible permutations. The more players there are, the harder it is.

“First of all, you can’t think like that,” Erik tells me. “I mean, you actually are very weak here and you shouldn’t even be in this hand, but that’s not the point. The point is, you can’t play based on how it will look.

“You know, this is actually really important. A lot of players actually start playing worse when they’re on livestream”—when a poker table is televised so that people can see the cards—“because they’re so worried about how they look.”

The cheetah comes in highest, killing approximately 58 percent of the animals it hunts. The lion is next, at less than half that—one quarter of its intended kills hit the mark. And the wolf captures only 14 percent of what it stalks. The true deadly killer is one that hardly anyone would think of: the dragonfly. According to a 2012 study from researchers at Harvard University, the dragonfly manages to capture an astounding 95 percent of its targeted prey.

the dragonfly effect. You observe the slightest motion. Your muscles are primed to respond. And you use your experience to anticipate what your opponent will do and act accordingly. The observation, in Erik’s case, is on several levels. There’s the knowledge he’s accumulated over decades of this general type of situation. “It feels like an ace raises pre-flop. Even likely a king does, too,” he says. He’s played enough heads up matches to know that the typical aggressive opponent—and Urbanovich is as aggressive as they come—won’t be looking to limp in with one of the best cards in the deck in his hand. He will apply pressure right away. “And he’s not betting a queen,” Erik continues. The queen actually has showdown value: it beats any other missed draw that Erik might hold. “So the bluff is just way more likely than it appears.”

How has Urbanovich been playing up until now? The answer is, extremely aggressively. Earlier, it was the typical aggression of the strong player. But when they got heads up, that level ratcheted up a notch. As they played hand after hand, Erik observed certain patterns that didn’t appear before. “He wasn’t too crazy until we got heads up,” Erik says. And then he went wild. “His betting did factor in. If he had a hand, is that the way he would bet it? It didn’t feel like the story added up.”

“But it was a relevant factor to my energy.” Erik was at his limit. He knew he needed energy—pure physical energy. And he asked for what he needed. (Research caffeine pills, I jot down.) In the animal kingdom, he’s the killer dragonfly. If we’re talking military strategy, he’d be the head of the guerilla infiltration team. Watch from the shadows, don’t announce yourself with any flashy movements, blend perfectly into your surroundings, and observe the local forces to see how, exactly, they should be approached. No one-size-fits-all weapon. No predetermined strategy. Just an eminently flexible, and ultimately deadly, system rooted in deep patience and observation before anything else—and then a willingness to do whatever it takes, given the circumstances, to emerge victorious. “The best players don’t really care how they look,” Erik says. “The artistry of the top players is fun to watch.

The point is winning over the long term—and winning as much money as you possibly can with your best hands, all the while losing as little as possible with your worst. And in order to do that, you need to learn to pick your spots: know when to be aggressive, and how to be aggressive. The passive player doesn’t win. And the scared player, who always thinks someone can beat him, doesn’t win. But the openly aggressive player doesn’t win, either; he follows the fate of Aggressive Idiot Asshole. You have to be a strategist.

you can’t play scared. You can’t be afraid of how you look. You can’t be afraid someone will walk away because of what you do or don’t do. You have to play smart. And so I decide to check back: I’m not really doing much freelance work these days, I respond. I’m working on my next book. Not a refusal, but something that leaves the action open. Turn the decision momentum so that the power of position is on my side. Do nothing without first gauging my opponent’s reaction. Reveal nothing about the strength of my hand until I have to. A day later, I receive another email: What if we paid you more than we’ve offered in the past? This is an opening, and old me would have jumped at it. New me decides I don’t actually have to jump at anything;

A Man’s World New York, Winter 2016 “Playing poker is also a masculine ritual, and, most times, losers feel either sufficiently chagrined or sufficiently reflective to retire, if not with grace, at least with alacrity.” DAVID MAMET, “ABOUT MEN,” 1986

“Because it’s a particularly harsh environment for women. It’s almost impossible to be a female poker player and not get online harassment or comments or whatever it is.”

The women who do play seriously, though, Erik continues, tend to be in a class of their own. “You know, 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.”