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

by Maria Konnikova

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.

No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs to let it go. You are not playing in a vacuum. You are playing...

knowing about a bias didn’t mean you wouldn’t exhibit it; it could still look highly attractive: “Erroneous intuitions resemble visual illusions in a crucial respect: both types of error remain compellingly attractive even when the person is fully aware of their nature.”

One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning” is a refrain I’ve grown used to hearing from him. His point is a simple one: your edge is your edge only if you’re playing your best game. To play your best game, you need to be your best you. Rested, sharp, focused. If you’re off, a game that would have been a winning endeavor can suddenly become a losing one. An almost sure thing can become a gamble.

Jared Tendler. He’d told me that he was a psychologist and a mental game coach.

Now that I’ve ingloriously busted the Main—it’s hard to describe the deep disappointment that envelops you from toe to head once you realize the dream of the Main is at an end—I realize that maybe a mental coach is just what I need. A coach who can help me take a step back and critically assess myself. Not someone who spends time running solver simulations or talking through the specifics of bluff frequencies and bet sizing. One who can help me with the mess of data inside my head.

What this is is a wake-up call. A chance to reflect, reassess, and see how I can improve. I may have busted the Main, but the process has certainly opened my mind. I have my decision-making strategy coach in place. Why wouldn’t I also want someone to help me through the mental elements that I seem to have left to fend for themselves?

it all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego,” he tells me. This is at the heart of what he needs to identify. Who are you? What’s important to you? “When you sit down to play, you put yourself on the line. What you have to understand is you’re always a person first and a poker player second.”

The key to figuring out where your emotional leaks will be as a player is to identify where they are as a human and what it is that brought you to the table to begin with. “How do you feel about yourself? Do you want to prove you’re not an idiot, or overcome pain, or fulfill visions and dreams of yourself as someone capable of playing at the highest levels?”

The poker table, Jared explains, brings out the fears that I already carry with me and p...

“What I look to do is see all of that as symptoms of deeper flaws. And what we’re trying to do together is get at those deeper flaws.”

Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove your triggers so that you don’t have that emotional response in the moment.”

work through my underlying emotional holes and teach me to be a one-woman bomb squad, defusing the emotional bombs and getting rid of them be...

“Hope. Hope has its place in the world, but when it comes to poker, it really doesn’t belong,” he says. “As far as hope in poker, fuck it.”

I’d thought hope was a tenet of mental health. In some sense, yes. But not in the sense of making me a mentally strong player. “You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just do.”

THE CONCEPT OF TILT in poker is one that’s remarkably malleable: it applies to all sorts of situations. It means that you’re letting emotions—incidental ones that aren’t actually integral to your decision process—affect your decision making. You are no longer thinking rationally.

everyone tilts differently. And while tilt often is a negative feeling—anger, frustration, and the like—it can also be a positive emotion—being very happy at winning a hand, liking someone at the table, and so on. All it means is that you’re experiencing an emotion that is not, strictly speaking, related to your decision.

When it comes to making solid decisions, emotions aren’t inherently bad. They can be useful markers for making the correct choice.

in the right context, emotions can be powerful drivers of correct choice: the emotion just needs to be integral to the decision, rather than incidental to it. Touching a hot stove makes you feel pain and anger—and you avoid touching the stove in the future. By anticipating the negative emotion caused by pain, you make a more prudent choice the next time around. We experience emotions for a reason, and the goal is not to stop experiencing them. Instead, 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.

“mood as information,”

You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.

Tilt makes you revert to your worst self.

Think of your game as a resting inchworm divided into three sections, A, B, and C, Jared tells me. A is my best game. It is infrequent—I have to be at my peak to achieve it. C is my worst game, which should, at least in theory, also be infrequent. The B game is the bell curve part of the inchworm. It’s the longest and most visible part. To improve my game, I need to move my bell curve the way that an inchworm moves, slowly pushing

Jared gives me an assignment: I need to map out my emotional process so that I can start finding ways to solve each problem. I need to actually sit down and make a spreadsheet. 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.

What I have to start doing is being proactive rather than reactive. When I react, it’s already too late. The tilt is on its way—and even knowing my reaction is based on incidental emotion isn’t enough to stop it. The feeling is too intense.

If I see a situation that may turn sour—and let’s face it, many of them potentially could—I should put on my headphones as a way of controlling my surroundings. I don’t actually have to listen to music. But now I have a socially acceptable way to selectively drown out conversation. I can still hear everything at the table, so I don’t miss important information, but I no longer have to acknowledge hearing it. I have an escape plan, one that gives me a degree of control that’s otherwise missing.

whether I’m receiving unwanted overtures or condescending needles or patronizing good will, the thing that unites my encounters (apart from the obvious gender implications) is the lack of agency they foist on me. I’m placed in a position where I’m forced to...

Over the next few months, Jared and I systematically go through a host of emotions I didn’t realize I was feeling. There’s the persistent impostor syndrome lurking underneath the veneer of confidence—I’m a fraud who doesn’t deserve to be playing the events I’m playing in. Over and over, I feel like I don’t belong. We finally get to the root—the real root—of that one. I’m in kindergarten. It’s the first day of school. I’m five years old, and my name tag is missing. Every kid has one, but my name is absent from the table. There is one name tag left, and the teacher insists on putting it around my neck. I shake my head. That’s not me, I want to scream. Why are you insisting I be someone else? But I can’t. I don’t have the words. I speak no English. The only thing I know is how to write my name. My identity, the one thing I’m certain of, and now it’s being questioned. I can’t say any of this, of course, and so I cry. Lo...

THERE’S THE CONSTANT ANXIETY that I’m letting people down—the

It’s a fear of high expectations that I’m afraid to subvert. The fear of making mistakes that has never quite gone away. Often as I play, I can see myself from afar, a fly observing what’s going on below. There I am, knowing exactly when I’m supposed to bluff and how, and not quite having the guts to pull the trigger. And I know that I can’t actually pull that trigger unless I’m feeling it. It works only if your mind and heart are behind it.

When I overcome the jitters and just go for it is when I play the best—when I start winning. But I somehow can’t summon that inner strength at will.

Jared calls this one my beaten dog syndrome. “You don’t want future Maria to beat the shit out of you, and so you’re instinctively cowering to future Maria’s power.” I don’t have the guts because I’m afraid—still—of looking stupid, of making mistakes, of being judged and judging myself. Here’s how to deal with that beaten beast, he says: “Tell yourself, sure, I may be wrong, but cowering to future Maria is the bigger mistake. The bigger mistake is not taking the aggressive line, even if I’m wrong. And future Maria has to learn to be OK with that.” Future Maria sounds like a real bitch, I tell Jared.

Slowly, we work through it all. We set goals. We practice visualization: planning out how I want to play so that it’s easier to execute, holding my future self in my mind’s eye before the fact. We discuss my optimal stress level: how to push myself so that I’m stressed enough to perform well, but not pressure myself so hard that I lose all confidence. I learn how to sit up and take up space and hold my head to project a confidence I might not be feeling—the techniques of self-deception that are often the first step to making you feel the confidence that was lacking. It’s a process known as embodied cognition: embody the...

Bird by bird has become a sort of inner mantra for me whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed. When it seems like it’s just too much, I’ll never finish, I’ll never get something accomplished, I close my eyes and tell myself, Bird by bird. And then I start working on the next bird on the list. Bird by bird. Hand by hand. It might feel overwhelming, but I can do this. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and press the reset button, just like Jared and I discussed.

One hand at a time. Reset. Reset not just strategically (how do I play a short stack?) but also emotionally (no anger at myself, no frustration with myself, just focused energy, forward-looking momentum; I may make mistakes, but I am still competent). I do my best to slow my breathing, let go of my blunder, and look ahead.

We have won the impossible, improbable lottery of birth. And we don’t know what will happen. We never can. There’s no skill in birth and death. At the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment. We don’t know what the next card will be—and we don’t even know when we see it if it’s good or bad.

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.

“Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions.

Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” If we cannot ...

We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itsel...