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

by Maria Konnikova

As they say, man plans, God laughs.

Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet—chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It was always meant to be, and any sense of control or free will we may think we have is pure illusion.

“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.”

In the end, though, luck is a short-term friend or foe. Skill shines through over the longer time horizon.

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. Kant offers the example of a doctor asked to make a diagnosis. The doctor reaches a verdict on the patient’s malady to the best of his knowledge—but that conclusion isn’t necessarily correct. It’s just the best he can do given the information he has and his experience in this particular area. But will he tell the patient he’s unsure? Maybe. But more likely, if his certainty reaches a specific threshold—a different one for different doctors, to be sure—he will just state his diagnosis as fact.

“It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with such boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of his being in error,”

Kant

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.

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss …” RUDYARD KIPLING, “IF—,” 1943

Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.

The thing you have to conquer most obviously is yourself,” Dan continues. “Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’ And he’s right. Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes.

After all, losing is what brought me to the table in the first place.

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.

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.

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.

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

The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency.

Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us.

There’s an idea in psychology, first introduced by Julian Rotter in 1966, called the locus of control. When something happens

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. And while probabilities do even out in the long term, in the short

term, who the hell knows.

The relationship between our awareness of chance and our skill is a U‑curve.

As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

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.”

You need to find the motivation to find the narrative cohesiveness.

The more you learn, the harder it gets. The better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed.

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.

with all things statistical, they break down in accuracy at the level of the individual.

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

“Gaming is an enchanting witchery … [The gamester] is either lifted to the top of mad joy with success, or plunged to the bottom of despair by misfortune; always in extremes, always in a storm; this minute the gamester’s countenance is so serene and calm that one would think that nothing could disturb it, and the next minute so stormy and tempestuous that it threatens distruction to itself and others; and, as he is transported as he wins, so losing, is he tost upon the billows of a high swelling passion, till he hath lost sight of both sense and reason.”

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 so that my C game becomes my B game, my A game drifts to B, and an even better A game takes its place. Tilt not only stops the process but reverses it—and unless I work on it, I won’t see the sort of improvement I need.

“The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,” Jared tells me. “Everything else is earned every single day.”

“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

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive. Indeed, even work that has shown some benefits of fasting on certain tasks also admitted that the thought process involved was reliant on “gut feelings”—an appropriate choice of words for decisions governed by the stomach.

I’ve set off on a journey to learn about the limits of chance, and I’ve proven something that I needed to prove to myself: that with the right mindset, the right tools, you can conquer, excel, emerge triumphant—even through the setbacks, even when the original road map proves faulty and needs to be replaced.

Acquiescence is not harmless. Because the moment you acquiesce, you give up a bit of control, however tiny, to the process of superstition.

A 2018 study in Nature found clear evidence of hot streaks in artistic and film careers, as well as in scientific trajectories. The streak “emerges randomly” and inevitably comes to an end, but while it lasts, it has a self-reinforcing effect.

Here’s a cheat sheet. For sushi, Yui and Kabuto. For dinner close to the Rio, the Fat Greek, Peru Chicken, and Sazón. For when I’m feeling nostalgic for the jerk chicken of my local Crown Heights spots, Big Jerk. Lola’s for Cajun. Milos, but only for lunch. El Dorado for late-night poker sessions. Partage to celebrate. Lotus of Siam to drown your sorrows in delightful Thai.

“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

“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.”