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

by Maria Konnikova

What kind of a dunce do you have to be to let yourself blind down (the term for letting your chips dwindle by not playing any hands) in the middle of the Main Event? The genius, I regret to say, was your author. While everyone at the table idly speculated about my likely fate, I was huddled in fetal position on the bathroom floor of the Rio Hotel and Casino and, for lack of a more refined term, barfing my brains out. Could it have been food poisoning from the guacamole I knew I shouldn’t have eaten at the Mexican place just down the hallway during dinner break? A bad stress reaction? Delayed onset of stomach flu? Who knows. But my money was on migraine.

That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs. I could definitely detect a slight cackle.

what his single piece of advice would be to aspiring poker players—his answer is two words long: pay attention. Two simple words that we simply ignore more often than not. Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.

But life had other ideas. A plan shifted. A framework disappeared and was replaced by something unforeseen. Man plans, God laughs, indeed. Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?

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?

The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.

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.

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

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 so that you can not only catch the bluffs of others but bluff successfully yourself, poker is endlessly applicable and revelatory.

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.

We judge the poker player for gambling; we respect the stockbroker for doing the same thing with far less information.

“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. Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no possibility of being mistaken? Would you bet your marriage? Your health? Even our deep convictions suddenly seem a lot less certain when put in that light.

The 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 and you got incredibly lucky.

Nothing is personal. Everything should be treated like a business. My goals need to be pure: to run the best business I can. “Some of these other people had a goal to become famous, or even more, they just wanted action,” Dan says. And that’s their eventual downfall.

“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 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.

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 playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.”

That 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 didn’t take it well,” he tells me. “He actually got pretty upset.” But Erik wasn’t criticizing. 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.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.” SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR, 5TH CENTURY BC

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.

There was nothing barring individual states from legalizing it, though, so, slowly, some have come on board. Including New Jersey. Which is why I can now play online poker in this Gregory’s Coffee and look out across the Hudson at Manhattan—and while I sit here, what I am doing is perfectly legal. But the moment I cross back, I suddenly become a criminal. It’s bizarre when you stop to think about it, but then again, politicians have never exactly been known for their logic or evenhandedness.

And in the man’s world that is poker, people don’t play against girls the way they play against real people. They may think they do, but they simply don’t. In one study of online poker, men bluffed 6 percent more often against someone with a female avatar than a male or neutral one—but, when confronted with that possibility, refused to believe it.

But 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. I was so preoccupied by everything going on, including the little timer counting down how long I had to act, that I left my thought process behind for some assorted facts that were easily accessible to my memory.

“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?”

“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. Not playing scared is not the same thing as being aggressive. It means not making decisions because you’re afraid. It’s not about being passive or aggro. You can be way too aggro and still scared. And being passive can be strong.”

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. It may not look as glamorous or be the subject of fan adulation—it’s unlikely anyone sees the tiny flying alien look-alike as a kindred spirit—but it’s a far more effective predator. Its eyes have developed to spot the tiniest deviations in motion. Its wings allow it to swerve and swoop in unimaginably quick configurations. And its brain has evolved to not only see possible targets but predict their future movements with startling accuracy. The dragonfly is so good not only because it sees what its prey is doing, but because it can also predict what it will do and plan its response accordingly.

It comes to me then, the thing that’s been nagging at me, and I don’t at all like the realization: a lot of my failure to up the aggression factor is due to my social conditioning. Over the years, I’ve learned that it doesn’t pay to be aggressive while female. It’s unattractive to those in power—namely men, but also some of those women who have managed to make it to the top and now don’t want to jeopardize their position. It’s not just perception. It’s reality. I remember reporting a story a number of years ago about a woman who’d been offered that rare thing in academia, an assistant professorship in the philosophy department of a small liberal arts college. When she emailed the college in question to ask about parts of the offer, the professorship was summarily rescinded. Apparently, she was no longer a good fit.

Perceived aggression in women is not only not valued; it’s seen in a negative light. In men, on the other hand, it’s viewed as evidence of great potential. If a woman has managed to make it to a leadership position, she will be seen far more negatively than her male counterparts if she acts in a way that’s viewed as authoritative or assertive. If a woman is hired into a workplace, she’s far more likely to be judged on her social skills than her competence; men, meanwhile, continue to be valued for the qualifications that actually got them hired in the first place. 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.