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

by Maria Konnikova

My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can’t bluff chance.

“But for its costliness and dangers, no better education for life among men could be devised than the gambling table—especially the poker table.” CLEMENS FRANCE, THE GAMBLING IMPULSE, 1902

As with so many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker have been passed over in favor of the quantitative.

“They’re really something special. A brother-sister duo from Australia. I’ve heard them play many times.” “Something special” is a phrase I’ll come to know well.

Indeed, when I inevitably ask him the question he gets asked most frequently—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.

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.

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.

I went from expert to expert, steroid regime to steroid regime, only to be told the same thing: idiopathic. Doctor speak for “We don’t have a clue.” That idiopathy (root word: idiocy)

And in my reading frenzy, I came across John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

“Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

Poker was the ultimate puzzle: he wanted to understand it, to unravel it—to, in the end, beat it. If he could figure out how to disentangle the chance from the skill, how to maximize the role of the latter and learn to minimize the malice of the former, he believed he would hold the solution to some of life’s greatest decision challenges.

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. Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions. It’s about discerning the hidden, the uniquely human. It’s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will ever be able to capture the vagaries and surprises of human nature.

“Actually, my graduate adviser was Walter Mischel—you know, the marshmallow guy?” “Oh wow. That’s exciting. Self-control is huge in the game.” So Mr. Seidel knows the marshmallow guy, too. I seem to have picked well.

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. In some ways, poker players gamble less than most. After all, even if they lose an arm, they can still play.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray. From a misplaced faith in certainty, the fact that to our minds, 99 percent, even 90 percent, basically means 100 percent—even though it doesn’t, not really.

One specific class of lawyer, in fact, actually fares far better at probabilistic thinking than financial professionals whose jobs are more explicitly tied to probabilities: the lawyers who take cases for a percentage of the eventual settlement. You have a far higher personal stake in calibrating correctly, and so you learn to do just that.

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.

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. With multiple people still waiting to make their decision, the landscape may well change.

“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.

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.

I’ve never really thought about a single situation in my own life in this light, but now it actually makes sense. 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? If you’ve just lost your chips, was it because you chanced upon an unlucky situation—or because you planned a poor campaign?

Bet sizing and what it accomplishes is an incredibly useful analogue for most any decision. How much are you risking to accomplish what, exactly?

I feel good. And victorious. And the feeling lasts. A few weeks after my first poker win, I’m approached by a magazine to write an article. I look back through my old emails. I’ve played with this opponent before: she’s asked me to write in the past, multiple times. It was always a little too small a sum for the effort required, so I’d never actually written anything. Every time I mentioned money, she walked away. Part of me just wants to accept this assignment: it’s interesting, I’ve done a lot of work on the background already, and the money isn’t all that bad. I’ve been offered worse. It would actually be a nice and needed boost at this precise moment. But on some level, part of me must remember: 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; the smarter strategy might lie in another direction. I’m not sure that would be enough, I counter, since I really need to be paid more than I am at my home magazine to make it worth my while given the constraints on my time. In effect, I’m calling the bet, but I don’t raise. I simply stay in the hand to see what will happen. Three dollars a word, comes the next email. Done. I’ve won the hand and extracted more value than I ever thought I could from it. Thank you, Aggressive Idiot Asshole; you have taught me well.

There’s a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can’t get into too much trouble—but really, every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss of chips. And chances are, if I’m choosing those lines at the table, there are deeper issues at play. 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.

And then, instead of reevaluating, I start to chase the loss: Doesn’t this mean I’m due for a break? I can’t possibly keep losing. It simply isn’t fair. Gambler’s fallacy—the faulty idea that probability has a memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.

Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they don’t, really.

Frank Lantz has spent over twenty years designing games. When we meet at his office at NYU, where he currently runs the Game Center, he lets me in on an idiosyncrasy of game design. “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.” For a long time, Lantz was a serious poker player. And one of the reasons he loves the game is that the probabilities are what they are: they don’t accommodate. Instead, they force you to confront the wrongness of your intuitions if you are to succeed. “Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions,” he says. The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players.

But here’s the all-too-human element: we’re just fine with runs when they are in our favor. Hence the hot hand. When we’re winning, we don’t think we’re due for a change in the least. If the run is on our side, we’re thrilled to let it continue indefinitely. We think the bad streaks are overdue to end yesterday, but no one wants the good to end.

That we’re due to be in a certain part of the distribution, because our aces have already been cracked twice today. They can’t possibly fall yet again. We’ll forget what historian Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular”—a lesson history teaches particularly well.

I wander away, hating myself.

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.

The trick is to get past the plateau. 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.

Yes, in the long run, the Eriks of the world will be ascendant, their skill triumphant. But you will never see the long run if, in the short term, you don’t buffer yourself against the vicissitudes of chance. It’s not an ego thing. It’s practical survival. True skill is knowing your own limits—and the power of variance in the immediate future.

After all, probability distributions don’t care about the past.

“Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it. 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.”

There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves. How we phrase sentences—are we the one doing the acting or being acted upon?—can determine whether we have an internal or external locus of control, whether we’re masters of our fates or peons of forces beyond us. 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.

If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time.

I nod. He mistakes my silence for chagrin at being reprimanded. But really, it’s me going through my past to count the times I’ve let bad beats weigh on me, long before I’d ever heard the term. And thinking how much emotional energy I could have saved and invested productively had I just followed that simple piece of advice: no bad beats. Forget they ever happened.

chose to open my first ever book. It’s from my favorite poet, W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure.

When the flop comes out, he likewise already sees all the frequency permutations in his head. In this particular case, he holds a key card, the ace of diamonds—a blocker to the nut flush. With two diamonds on the board, he knows that no one else can be drawing to the nuts, because he has the card that would make the best possible hand. Now, if another diamond comes, he can credibly represent having the nuts, even though he has only a single diamond. If I have a blocker, I block you from having the hand I’m representing. Blockers are all the rage, I’ve learned. They inform many of your most successful bluffs—and many of your most successful folds. If you’re holding blockers to your opponents’ value hands, bluff away.

It gets complex quickly, but the main point is this: my holding a card means you can’t be holding that card. And if the card is a valuable one, I now have an important piece of information in determining my play.

The extra information should rightly give you more confidence—but nothing close to certitude. The relationship between information and confidence is a highly asymmetric one.

You can’t avoid bad beats altogether. But paying attention is one of the best ways I can see of minimizing the window for negative variance to peek through. In an age of constant distraction and never-ending connectivity, we may be so busy that we miss the signals that tell us to swerve before we’re in the bad beat’s path.

William Beveridge writes in The Art of Scientific Investigation. If we want to be successful, “we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.” We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.