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You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do. “Although
“Everybody has a great opportunity to succeed and prosper at whatever they do, and everyone has some kind of unique gift. And I see that oftentimes, the most difficulty we cause ourselves is kind of fighting against the grain of what is healthy for us.”
before you do anything, think ahead to how that action fits into your narrative arc. If it doesn’t, well, perhaps it won’t work out the way you’d like it to. You need to be aware enough of your own narrative that it coheres, comes together, makes sense.
You need to find the motivation to find the narrative cohesiveness. What is this person’s story—and does what they are doing make sense given what you know?
Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it. And never judge anything others do without asking the same question.
people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
Every MT who has gone through a 200 hour certification program and thinks they're a healer.
“You know, you take much less shit from people than you used to,” he says thoughtfully, with something I take for admiration. “That’s really good.”
And the heart of modernity is conceived not in a laboratory but in a casino.
How good are you at figuring out how others see the world—and at gearing your own actions accordingly? Remember: objective reality doesn’t actually matter. Subjective perception, and your ability to tune into it accurately, is key to the win.
But knowing your man in the abstract isn’t enough. “I wasn’t watching him closely enough to see his reaction,” Erik recalls. “Antonio was.”
Do I do that often? I find myself asking. Do I go for the min cash in my life decisions, holding on for the safer sure thing rather than taking more risk for the more uncertain but ultimately more attractive option? Do I lack gamble in my life? Do I let myself be taken advantage of by people who recognize the fright behind my eyes? I’m not sure I’m prepared to know the answer.
“I know it’s important for the book. But you also have to take this seriously. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. And if you’re just doing it to do it and put it in your book, that’s one thing. But if you’re really looking to make a go of this, you have to assess where you are and if you have a real skill edge. Don’t hold yourself to an arbitrary deadline. There’s always next year.”
What was I thinking, indeed. Well, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was acting based on stereotypes and incomplete knowledge, all the while imagining that I had a very good read on someone I had no business reading to begin with.
Here’s the thing about thin-slice judgments: they are intuitive, and they are based on large samples. As with all things statistical, they break down in accuracy at the level of the individual. The slant of someone’s eyebrows may signal trustworthiness in general, but that’s not to say that this particular person is trustworthy.
No, looking and seeming trustworthy is a far cry from actually being trustworthy.
Tell me I chose the person I’m dating based on a jawline and I’ll laugh in your face.
I absolutely choose dates based on jawlines.
we often don’t really know why we make decisions—and we justify them with objective-sounding reasons even when, in reality, we were acting based on faulty intuitive reads.
It turns out that we’re able to make all sorts of accurate predictions about behaviors—not judgments about people, mind you, but predictions about how they might act irrespective of how we might feel about them—if we ignore the cues we normally love to look at (faces) and instead look at bodies.
“Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,” Blake suggests. As long as I always do that, I ensure that I’m thinking through every hand at every part of my range, aces and suited connectors and trash alike. Because I’ve thought before I acted, I act with confidence every time—and I act with a delay every time. There’s no longer the problem of immediate action with straightforward decisions and delays with more complex ones. And the whole process becomes more streamlined and fluid naturally.
Streamlining my thought process may make me harder to read—but it will also make my thought process easier for me to discern.
Mastery is always a struggle for balance.
The me who conceived of this project last summer wouldn’t have thought twice of jumping straight in. Wasn’t that the point? A journalistic foray into unknown territory, reporter’s notebook blazing bright, à la George Plimpton, or more close to home, Colson Whitehead?* But the me who has now traveled this far can’t help but feel a little differently.
Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog.
Don’t play above your weight class after you’ve just been punched down. It’s a question of respect for the game—and not just the game of poker. It’s beyond simple journalistic curiosity. It’s only a few months ago that Phil Galfond reminded me to always find the why behind every move, every decision, every action. And here’s one thing I know for sure: no matter the decision, the why shouldn’t ever be for the simple glory of saying you’ve done something. At least to me, right now, that’s not good enough.
Something I needed to learn in the art world.
In reality, I should have known going in. I just chose to ignore what I knew. Why?
He called it irrational perseverance: “Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.”
In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.
This is comforting. I'm not the only one.
The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information. Erik had warned me that one of the most important things about being a good poker player was flexibility. The willingness to admit you’re wrong, to embrace the uncertainty inherent in any decision. “Less certainty, more inquiry”: his words couldn’t have been more direct.
It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.
sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title.
The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a result.
Sometimes, the most difficult thing of all is to stop playing. All too often, we stay in a hand long after we should have gotten out.
This is what I’m thinking, and I don’t want to be persuaded otherwise.
She's over-writing this book. Needs to be edited.
Part of them knows that the information might mean they need to change their decision, so they choose to ignore it.
Here, then, is the unvarnished truth. I didn’t correct my decision not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to.
“Ignore the average,” Erik implores. “Just focus on how many blinds you have. The average doesn’t matter for your strategy. What matters is how deep you are.”
Erik knows something important about me that I can’t quite see: if I start comparing myself with the average, I’ll start panicking. He wants me to focus on what I can control, not the irrelevant noise.
And before I even pause to think, the way I’ve been taught to do before every decision, I raise. My mind, it seems, had decided it was going to check-raise even before I checked.
Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove your triggers so that you don’t have that emotional response in the moment.”
“The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,” Jared tells me. “Everything else is earned every single day.”
I explain that I need the man to be moved to another table. That I can’t play like this. And they refuse. He hasn’t done anything so terrible, they decide. It’s not like he called me a cunt, they suggest in so many words (that, too, has happened, and it didn’t matter nearly as much). No one speaks up to support me. Soon after, I bust the tournament.
I have an escape plan, one that gives me a degree of control that’s otherwise missing. Because whether I’m receiving unwanted overtures or condescending needles or patronizing good will, the thing that unites my encounters (apart from the obvious gender implications) is the lack of agency they foist on me. I’m placed in a position where I’m forced to react. Putting on my headphones reclaims some of that space for me.
My identity, the one thing I’m certain of, and now it’s being questioned. I can’t say any of this, of course, and so I cry. Loudly and with abandon. I want to do the same thing now, whenever I feel out of place, like I can’t control what’s happening, except crying has become a less socially acceptable response.
“Denying luck individually is to suggest that we have much greater agency than we really have over outcomes in our lives.” Games give us a chance to confront luck in a manner that allows us to process it in life in a way we’re not always forced to do.
Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning.
How you feel affects how you act. And while a hot streak of cards or dice is actually not possible—the gambler’s fallacy remains eternally fallacious—streaks that require actual human performance may indeed exist. The more the realm is subject to individual action, such as creative careers where mindset is one of the central elements, the more this is the case. A 2018 study in Nature found clear evidence of hot streaks in artistic and film careers, as well as in scientific trajectories. The streak “emerges randomly” and inevitably comes to an end, but
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.
