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

by Maria Konnikova

“But once in a while the odd thing happens, Once in a while the dream comes true, And the whole pattern of life is altered, Once in a while the Moon turns Blue.” W. H. AUDEN, LIBRETTO FOR PAUL BUNYAN

What I found was something completely unexpected. Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events—smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better.

the illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging—and

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.

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.

it’s that life has no concept of fairness. It’s just tough luck. Deal with it.

“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.”

Real life is based on making the best decisions you can from information that can never be complete:

And that’s what makes this game a particularly strong metaphor for our daily decision making. Because in life, there is never a limit: there’s no external restriction to betting everything you have on any given decision.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In many ways, poker does resemble language learning. After all, there is a new grammar, a new vocabulary, a new way of relating to the world. But there is one big difference that I can see. Humans have built-in language-learning ability.

betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it.

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.

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.

That personal accountability, without the possibility of deflecting onto someone else, is key.

pocket pairs—two cards that are the same. The suited connectors—cards of the same suit that are one apart in ranking, like a seven and an eight. The suited one- and two- and even three-gappers—cards of the same suit that are sort of related but not immediately adjacent, like a six and an eight of hearts. The suited wheel aces—an ace with a low second card of the same suit that can make a straight, or a wheel.

seven-deuce—the worst hand, statistically speaking, that you can be dealt—can

you need a way of testing your thought process. Before I get fancy with strategy, with the curlicues and trappings of expertise, I need to answer something far more basic: Am I thinking correctly? Before I start experimenting with writing free verse, have I learned how to think through a poem’s basic structure? Before I start adding those exotic spices to my recipe, have I learned how to make a basic white rice? And the only way to do that is by failing.

“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.

“less certainty, more inquiry”

it a dry board, one where the cards don’t have much relation to one another—different suits, values spread far apart, making it unlikely that someone has a strong draw? Is it a wet board, one where the cards are closely connected—two or three of a suit, cards that could form a part of a straight, a landscape that means players who don’t yet have a strong hand can suddenly find themselves with a monster if a draw completes? Is it a static board—no new cards are likely to change the situation that much? Is it a dynamic board—many draws, like straights and flushes, are available, and any new addition is likely to change the advantage and can significantly change the value of your hand? The texture is the changing battleground.

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.

the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.

I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.

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.”

“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.”

In a phenomenon known as omission neglect, we often pay attention to the barks but not to the moments when they are absent: we ignore what is omitted.

Identifying motivation is key if I’m ever to become anything other than a merely competent player. Always ask why: Why is someone acting this way? Why am I acting this way? Find the why and you find the key to winning.

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. Don’t forget

the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has

the heart of modernity is conceived not in a laboratory but in a casino.

People can predict whether someone is about to cooperate with them or compete with them based on how they reach for a Lego piece.

The most telling moment is often at the very beginning of a hand, when players first check their hole cards: how they check and what they do immediately after tend to be the most honest actions a player will execute in the entire hand.

Concealment, or how a player chooses to actively hide what they perceive to be telling behaviors, is actually the second type of pattern that the Beyond Tells team has found.

“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.

People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations.

to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop.

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.

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.

The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information.

sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.

In 2018, Kaitlin Woolley and Jane Risen demonstrated that people will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided.

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.

the goal is to learn to identify our emotions, analyze their cause, and if they’re not actually part of our rational decision process—and more often than not, they aren’t—dismiss them as sources of information.

Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling. Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it.

Each time something happens, write it down in the situation or trigger column. In the next column, write a description of the thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors that the situation or trigger causes. In the next column, give my best assessment of the underlying flaw or problem, and finally, write a logic statement that I can use in the moment to inject some rationality into the issue.

embodied cognition: embody the feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out.

One recent study showed that elite chess players can burn up to six thousand calories a day during tournaments, exhibiting metabolic patterns reminiscent of elite athletes.