The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win,” by Maria Konnikova
Over the last couple of years, I have allowed myself to feel unlucky more than I should. I’ve complained to myself how things just didn’t work out. Other people get opportunities and chances, and I don’t. So I picked up “The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win,” by Maria Konnikova, a book about someone who didn’t even how many playing cards were in a deck learned to play poker well enough to do well in the world series of poker in a year.
I hoped from the title that this was more than just someone talking about learning poker, because while the people who play poker professionally are a great group of characters have no interest in playing poker. I’d rather play, or watch, a game of Magic the Gathering. And it turns out that Maria Konnikova understood that learning to understand luck, or what someone less superstitious might call probability because that exists in far more places than poker.
There are a lot of tidbits in this story about how people deal with the game of poker. One of the major themes is that of bad beats and tilting. Which one might say is how I have been feeling. But the best advice is the simple reminder that probability doesn’t take into account how things turned out last time. If you flip a coin ten times and get heads ten times what are the odds, you’ll get a head the next time. Fifty percent because everything that happened before you toss the coin into the air is irrelevant. And if you can remember that in life, remember that the eleventh or the fiftieth time you try something it’s just as likely, or unlikely, to work as the first then you’re less likely to do something stupid like following a sunk cost fallacy or, possibly worse, giving up on a good strategy because it failed.
Because this is poker, there is also a lot about bending probability to your will because that’s the primary goal of every poker player. And the solution to this is also deceptively simple and hard to do. The answer, or at least the one I got, was to stop trying to force the random elements to come out the way you want and control your own reactions to the random events. You can’t control what cards you get, but you can control how you act when you get them. Sure, you may bust out on that interview when you had pocket aces, but you still have chips and you can choose how to react on the next one.
The balance this book struck pleasantly surprised me. It didn’t ignore the poker. This is after all the story of someone taking time to learn to play poker, but it also never assumed that you cared more about Doyle Brunson than you did about the ideas that the book was exploring. So while there were some gaps when Maria was talking about where they went to eat lunch it was usually part of a bigger point and even when it wasn’t it at least kept your attention until she reached the next point. So if you exist in a world where luck has some effect on your life, then this is something worth reading to gain some simple tips on how to stay in the game until you get good hole cards.
