Pete's Reviews > Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts (2018) by Annie Duke is an interesting look at how decision making in many circumstances is like poker and what many people can learn from professional poker players about making decisions when lacking information.

Duke made a lot of money playing poker and talks about how she did it. How she would go over her decisions from games with other professional players. It's fascinating that they wouldn't focus on the results, indeed they had a term for doing so, 'resulting', where the quality of the decision was overly influenced by the outcome rather than looking at where the probabilities lay. Duke makes the point that in life there is almost always imperfect information while in some games like chess there is perfect information.

Duke emphasizes how to improve her poker she would study and join in with other poker players to look at their decisions so they could improve their games. It's quite inspiring.

The book makes a lot of good points and is well worth a read. It's interesting that going over decisions and evaluating them with skilled colleagues is so critical to improving. It should also give most readers more of an appreciation of poker.