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

by Maria Konnikova

“Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.” FAUSTO MAIJSTRAL, IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S V. “I wish you luck, because what lies ahead is no picnic for the prepared and the unprepared alike, and you’ll need luck. Still, I believe you’ll manage.” JOSEPH BRODSKY, “SPEECH AT THE STADIUM”

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.

In All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir says of her life that the “penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about.” Such was the role that chance had played in the whole trajectory of her existence. “And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.” How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?

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.

It’s called the description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and even then, we often ignore the numbers in favor of our own experience.

Luck surrounds us, everywhere—from something as mundane as walking to work and getting there safely to the other extreme, like surviving a war or a terrorist attack when others mere inches away weren’t as fortunate. But we only notice it when things don’t go our way. We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves. When chance is on our side, we disregard it: it is invisible. But when it breaks against us, we wake to its power. We begin to reason about its whys and hows.

Real 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.

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.”

“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

in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win. No other way is possible. And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling one.

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning. It’s why kids learn so much better—and remember what they’ve learned—if they know exactly how or when they’ll apply the knowledge.

We react emotionally rather than looking at the statistics: traders sell winning stocks to lock in the wins—it feels good, even though the numbers say that winners continue to go up in the short term; they hold on to losers to avoid locking in the losses—that would feel bad, even though the numbers say you should cut and run. In fact, numerous studies show that professional investors have a remarkable ability to ignore statistical information for their own gut and intuition—and that they’d often be better served not trading at all as a result.

Even people who seem like they suffer consequences, like stock traders, are often loath to admit that they were wrong in their certainties. Because the world is much messier than the poker table, it’s far easier to blame something else. It’s easy to have an illusion of skill when you’re not immediately called out on it through feedback.

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.

“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. All of us can step into that sometimes, but it’s important to know the difference. It’s like that great Kipling quote: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same . . . ’”

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.

“Less certainty. More inquiry.”

There is no certainty. There is only thought.

He won’t tell me how to play a hand not because he’s being mean but because that answer comes at the expense of the ability to make a decision. Of the discipline to think through everything for myself, on my own. All he can give me are the tools. The building blocks of thoughts. I’m the one who has to find the way through. It may make me frustrated in the short term.

Most real-world environments are what Hogarth calls “wicked”: there’s a mismatch between action and feedback because of external noise. Activities with elements of surprise, uncertainty, the unknown: suddenly, you’re not sure whether what you’ve learned is accurate or not, accurately executed or not. There’s simply too much going on. And so, in most environments, the problem is far more severe.

Before any campaign, or, indeed, even minor military action, you need to evaluate the situation, the territory, the nature of the enemy. You can’t just plow ahead with one strategy because it worked in the past or you’ve seen someone else employ it successfully. Each time you act, you have to reassess based on what is now known versus what was known before. You need to have a process, a system, a plan—one that evolves with feedback. If you don’t, how will you know whether the outcome of your battle—a bad one in my case, but successful ones, too—is the result of skill or luck?

Who knows how many proverbial chips a default passivity has cost me throughout my life. How many times I’ve walked away from situations because of someone else’s show of strength, when I really shouldn’t have. How many times I’ve passively stayed in a situation, eventually letting it get the better of me, instead of actively taking control and turning things around. Hanging back only seems like an easy solution. In truth, it can be the seed of far bigger problems.

I can’t possibly keep losing. It simply isn’t fair. Gambler’s fallacy—the faulty idea that probability has a memory.

Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really. The funny thing isn’t our discomfort. That’s understandable. It’s the different flavors that discomfort takes when the runs are in our favor versus not. The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency. We overreact to chance events, but the exact nature of the event affects our perception in a way it rightly shouldn’t.

“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.” “So they actually make it so that you’re less likely to flip heads the third time,” he says. “They jigger the probabilities.”

Back in 1890, William James described emotional memories as “so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.” High emotion, high impact, high recall. According to that logic, all of my knowledge should have come out with flying colors in the intensity of the moment. I should have risen to the occasion, recalled what I’d been learning, and performed. But we now know that’s not exactly true. Not only do memories change over time, but the more emotional the landscape, the less we’re able to engage them with any specificity. Put us in a situation where emotions are running high—a beginner in a poker tournament, say—and no matter how certain we may be that we’re in full command of everything, specific details will evade us. We’ll be able to access the gist of the thing, but not the intricacies of the thing itself.

Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control. The repercussions of that frame shift are worth considering. In poker, if you’re one of the bad beat dwellers, you can still just hop into the next tournament and regale the table with talk of the unfairness of the poker gods (you’ll be a sought-after companion, no doubt). If you suffer a bad beat in life, it may set you back considerably more—and last a lot longer. All of a sudden, your framing matters significantly more. A victim of the cruel cards? This may serve as something I think of as a luck dampener effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it. Potential opportunities pass you by; people get tired of hearing you complain, so your social network of support and opportunities also dwindles; you don’t even attempt certain activities because you think, I’ll lose anyway, why try?; your mental health suffers; and the spiral continues.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

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.

How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react. And how much money we’d save on bills for our shrink if we paused to ask the same about our own actions and motivations.

We form impressions about someone from the first moment we see them. As Solomon Asch, one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, once wrote, “We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter. We know that such impressions form with remarkable rapidity and with great ease. Subsequent observations may enrich or upset our view, but we can no more prevent its rapid growth than we can avoid perceiving a given visual object or hearing a melody.” Indeed, we now know that we don’t even need a few words or a real glance: in as little as thirty-four milliseconds—less than the time it takes to blink—we have already formed judgments on things like trustworthiness and aggression.

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.

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.

One of the most important lessons of poker strategy, intimately connected to self-assessment, is this: sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title. We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. 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. It happens all the time in our lives. We find ourselves in an appealing situation—and then we hold on to it for dear life, even when any objective outside observer would tell us that the appeal is long gone. We start at a promising job, only to be stymied in promotions over and over—yet we cling to the notion that the job is great. We embark on a promising relationship, only to find we have less and less in common with our partner—yet we forge ahead, refusing to admit that what seemed so right is now wrong. 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.

Never feel like you have to do something just because it’s expected of you—even if you’re the one who expects it of you. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned.

“Fortune always will confer an aura of worth, unworthily, and in this world the lucky person passes for a genius.” EURIPIDES, THE HERCLEIDAE, C. 429 BCE

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“In every tablet there are as many grains of luck as of any other drug. Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.” E. B. WHITE, 1943

“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born,” Richard Dawkins writes, in Unweaving the Rainbow. “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.” It’s mind-boggling to even consider. “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” We are here, and we have the chance to experience life, in all its vicissitudes, all its unfairness, all its noise. 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.

There’s a Buddhist proverb. A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs. Soon, the farmer’s son falls off one of the feral horses as he’s training it. He breaks a leg. The neighbor expresses his condolences. The farmer just shrugs. Who knows. The country declares war and the army comes to the village, to conscript all able-bodied young men. The farmer’s son is passed over because of his leg. How wonderful, the neighbor says. And again the farmer shrugs. Perhaps. You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions.

Nothing is all skill. Ever. I shy away from absolutes, but this one calls out for my embrace. Because life is life, luck will always be a factor in anything we might do or undertake. Skill can open up new vistas, new choices, allow us to see the chance that others less skilled than us, less observant or less keen, may miss—but should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.