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

by Maria Konnikova

a huge amount of information comes from gestures. The smoothness and fluidity Slepian noticed is certainly part of it. “Confident people move from point A to point B quickly. There’s not a lot of hesitation,”

It turns out that if you look at enough hands over enough hours, you do start to develop a sense of patterns that may yield meaningful data. The patterns tend to come in two flavors. The first has to do with thought process: How does a person approach and think about the game? “The way people handle their chips when they are more indecisive, or their bet style at the top of their range—these are the sorts of things we pay attention to,” Blake says.

Sometimes, players have been playing for so long they’ve developed these subtleties in gesture and they don’t really realize it.”

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.

“It’s not really about the processing of raw emotion”—the proverbial poker face. “It’s about understanding a player’s level of concealment and how exactly they are concealing.” How still is someone, for instance?

Or maybe their hand placement differs. Or their breathing. Find out how they conceal and you begin the process of reverse engineering exactly what they might be concealing.

That’s the thing about tells: once you say it aloud, the read often stops working. The more specific the behavior, the more likely it is to stop revealing much once a player is aware of it. But I do want to get specific about one player: me. Would Blake agree to break down my nonverbal cues the same way he has in his courses? Am I more of an open book than I think—and if I am, could he give me a pointer or two to render me more inscrutable? Can he make sure that I’m a locked box rather than a tell box before I sit down to take on the summer sharks?

over the next two months, Blake does what he’s been doing for the past six years: he looks at multiple hours of my live play, complete with hole cards, correlates it with the thousands of hands and hours he’s seen from other players, and gives me a report.

There’s one thing in particular that I do that Blake really doesn’t like: I recheck my cards several times. “The moment you recheck your cards, you risk falling into a pattern,” he warns. Some players recheck only their marginal hands—it’s

“We really want to break this pattern,” Blake says. “The less information I have on you, the better, and the fewer actions you take, the less information I have.”

Suspect action number two: the way I put my hands on my cards. “Just don’t do it. No hands on cards, ever,” Blake warns.

In fact, he says, don’t put anything on your cards. “Almost every time a player puts a chip on a card, it’s a tell,” Blake says. It’s not the placement of the chip as such. It’s the style with which you do it. “There’s a direct style; there’s this sort of shrugging why not style—each one means different things,” he says.

Suspect action number three: apart from double-checking my hole cards, I may actually be a bit too consistent, especially early in a session.

“A lot of people think that acting robotic at the table is the best way to conceal tells. It’s actually the worst way,” Blake explains. “The more of a cognitive process you have towards concealment, the more of a likelihood that that’s eventually going to be a break and we’re going to see more stuff.”

Rather than consistency of motion, he suggests a consistency of execution at a deeper level—one that will help me fight fatigue and continue to play better longer, because it gets to the heart of my thought process rather than forcing me to pay attention to yet one more thing

“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. There’s no longer the problem of immediate action with straightforward decisions and delays with more complex ones.

It’s helpful advice far beyond the poker table. Streamlined decisions. No immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. These are the tools that help us cool down rather than act in the moment, that help us stay rational and look at longer time horizons. Streamlining my thought process may make me harder to read—but it will also make my thought process easier for me to discern.

Oh, there’s one final thing, Blake informs me. I talk, laugh, and smile a bit too much. Uh-oh. “It seems natural to you,” Blake says, “but I’d watch out for it. You’re a very dynamic player. If I was playing with you, I’d definitely want to engage you in conversation to see if I can pick anything up.”

I was being genuine. They may have been, too—but they were also figuring me out. And I was left the naïve one of the conversational duo.

model for analyzing behavior: CAPS, or the cognitive-affective personality system. For decades, Walter had argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed. Instead of embracing the nuance of humanity, it stripped traits from context and gave people global scores on things that made no sense. Maybe I’m conscientious at work but a slob at home, Walter suggested, or agreeable in the face of authority but a sudden bully in the schoolyard. Personality was all about context and all about dynamics,

People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations. If you can get a person’s behavioral profile—a catalogue of those reactions in an if-then relationship, such as “If I feel threatened, then I will lash out”—you

Tells are the hardest poker skill to master because there is no shortcut for experience,

How does someone react to winning a big pot? To losing a big pot? To being bluffed? To bluffing successfully? How does someone deal with a streak of bad cards? How does someone deal with a run of good outcomes? If a player wins a flip, what are they feeling? If they lose a flip, what are they feeling? Are they the sort of player who cares what others are thinking of them or no? Afraid to look “weak”? More afraid to bluff—or to be bluffed? To raise—or to be raised? These are the sorts of tells that are all about reactions rather than actions, reactions that are dynamic.

“Very often you see they lose a big hand and then all of a sudden, it’s a lot more likely that they’re going to try to find a way to get it back and their judgment is not going to be as good. That’s a very common thing.” Or the opposite happens: they get gun-shy.

It’s an if-then pattern, not one based on a sudden slant of the eye or twitch of the nose. You don’t need thousands of hours to pick it up, just a few of what Walter would call diagnostic situations.

Who you are comes out at the poker table. Your baggage, your experiences, your confidence, the stereotypes you hold. Eventually, there will come a dynamic where you unwittingly act it out.

At the end of it all, am I risk-seeking or risk-averse? The answer, as Walter would tell you, is it all depends on the situation. It’s impossible to tell in the abstract. But at the poker table, it turns out, my “profile,” or behavioral signature, as Walter would call it, emerges in full. Blake could pick up on some small physical habits that may give off information—and I’m certainly going to make every single effort to eliminate those entirely. But the more powerful tells could well be psychological.

“The hard part of poker at this level is actually not this incredibly hard thing of knowing what perfect play is, which is as hard as it is in a game like chess,” Lantz says. “The hard part is this: How good are you at identifying where your opponent is in strategy space, based on their actions?” You watch them act and react over multiple situations and you try to adjust based on that behavior, to be maximally profitable against this particular person.

But now, if your opponent is good, they realize what you’re doing—and they adjust in turn. It may even be the case that they moved to this particular spot in strategy space on purpose, Lantz points out, so that they can now exploit you better.

“I call this donkey space because a donkey is a fish, a player who is not playing perfectly,” Lantz explains. “But these two people are like fight...

it’s like John Boyd’s OODA loop playing out at the table instead of in the air. Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: 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. Figure out what they are observing, how they are orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result. That way, you can anticipate them.

The first read anyone has on me is a simple one: I’m female.

certain men want to be gentlemanly;

I can use it to my advantage, folding more when I would otherwise call.

Other men don’t think I have any business being there. I should be washing dishes or changing diapers. They want me gone. So they bully and bluff and push. Once I see that, I can play more passively and let them give me their chips.

Some men don’t think a woman could run a big bluff. If I raise and show signs of life, they fold. Now I can bl...

some would rather die than be bluffed by a woman. Now they will call me with next to nothing, only for the satisfaction of seeing me beat. With them, I can bet more thinly for ...

Now comes the interactive part of CAPS, the donkey space. Do they know I’m adjusting—and did they do this on purpose t...

I know at every level how crucial it is to read people correctly if you’re going to develop beyond a basic and proficient player, into an exceptional one.

know how incredibly difficult a thing it is to get your read right. Through careful observation, you not only have to learn how to tell the difference between your faulty intuitions and real data, but understand how to exploit what you’ve seen—and how to know if you’re being exploited in turn.

the first person you have to profile—psychologically, not physically—is yourself.

Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. This doesn’t mean never take shots.

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.

Instead of learning from my original planning fallacy that has brought me to my “target” almost a half year ahead of an already short schedule, I now compound it by sticking to my guns. I had a plan, a specific goal, and even though the circumstances have changed—and changed significantly at that—I’m sticking to it. The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information.

Erik had warned me that one of the most important things about being a good poker player was flexibility. The willingness to admit you’re wrong, to embrace the uncertainty inherent in any decision. “Less certainty, more inquiry”: his words couldn’t have been more direct. There’s never a single right way to play a hand—and there’s certainly no single right way to reach a goal. Why not defer for a year? Or change the target to something in six months, sticking to the timeline but changing the specific event? Why not exercise some creative thinking in what my journey is going to be? I am too married to what it is all “supposed” to look like, and not critical enough of the fact that I simply made some decisions earlier on with incomplete information—and now that I know more, I should change course. No one is telling me to quit poker, merely to reassess where I am.

It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested. I’ve written about it many times. Only it seems that when it comes down to it, I don’t quite apply it to myself, right now. In my mind, sunk costs are supposed to be physical. Somehow it doesn’t occur to me that they can also be intangible.

It’s easy to spot sunk costs in others.

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.