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

by Maria Konnikova

A year is definable. It’s finite. It sells—because everyone can imagine doing something for a year.

you’ve undercompensated because the statistics haven’t ever affected you personally.

“If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance, not one wherein you do not risk a loss for the chance of some gain.” THOMAS JEFFERSON, “THOUGHTS ON LOTTERIES,” 1826

I’m going to be explaining this over and over, so I may as well get it right.

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

Steven Levitt

freakonomics!

Leave your certainty at the door.

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.

frustrating not-quite-rage that, weeks later, I miraculously find coalesced into knowledge.

“In video games where there are random events—things like dice rolls—they often skew the randomness so that it corresponds more closely to people’s incorrect intuition,” he says. “If you flip heads twice in a row, you’re less likely to flip heads the third time. We know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like it should be true, because we have this weird intuition about large numbers and how randomness works.” The resulting games actually accommodate that wrongness, so that people don’t feel like the setup is “rigged” or “unfair.”

The relationship between our awareness of chance and our skill is a U-curve. No skill: chance looms high. Relatively high skill: chance recedes. Expert level: you once again see your shortcomings and realize that no matter your skill level, chance has a strong role to play. In poker and in life, the learning pattern is identical.

You want to make sure you’re not the person in the poker room saying, ‘Can you believe what happened?’ That’s the other people.”

“The good thing about poker is there’s enough luck that you never have to admit it’s your fault you lost.”)

I smile. I may be a big swinging dick yet.

And wanting the cash isn’t the same as wanting the win.

Min cashing is great, and a good goal before, just to show that I could actually play in this field. But now I’ve shown I can. We move the goal higher. We move the target further. We become more ambitious. Fuck participation trophies. We go for the win.

I wasn’t using tells. I was using my implicit biases.

He called it irrational perseverance: “Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.”

They will, for instance, avoid learning how many calories are in an attractive dessert,

“Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men,” E. B. White wrote during World War II. “The Society of Movers and Doers is a very pompous society, indeed, whose members solemnly accept all responsibility for their own eminence and success.” I know enough to know that I’m anything but self-made. I know just how lucky I’ve been.

Out of countless billions—trillions, quintillions, more than the mind is capable of imagining—of possible people who were never to be, we are the ones who are allowed to play at the table.

And the biggest bluff of all? That skill can ever be enough.