The Biggest Bluff | Maria Konnikova

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought...

That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs.

My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can’t bluff chance.

Life is too short for complacency.

The illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging—and before long, the quality of people’s decisions deteriorated. They did what worked in the past, or what they had decided would work—and failed to grasp that the circumstances had shifted so that a previously successful strategy was no longer so. People failed to see what the world was telling them.

We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves. When chance is on our side, we disregard it: it is invisible. But when it breaks against us, we wake to its power. We begin to reason about its whys and hows.

Some of us find comfort in pure numbers. We call it what it is: pure, high-school-math chance. As Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, a twentieth-century statistician and geneticist, pointed out in 1966, “The ‘one chance in a million’ will undoubtedly occur with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.”

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.

Theory of Games is his foundational text, and here’s what I learned within its pages: the entire theory was inspired by a single game—poker. “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.”

Von Neumann did not care for most card games. They were, he thought, as boring as the people who wasted their lives playing them, trying to coax mastery—impossibly—out of pure chance. Games of pure chance, though, were to his mind not much worse than those at the opposite end: games like chess, where all the information could theoretically be gleaned, where every move could be mathematically accounted for in advance. There was one exception to his distrust of gaming: poker. He loved it. To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough skill to make playing worthwhile, enough chance that the challenge was there for the taking. He was a god-awful player by every account, but that never stopped him. Poker was the ultimate puzzle: he wanted to understand it, to unravel it.

Real life is based on making the best decisions you can from information that can never be complete: you never know someone else’s mind, just like you can never know any poker hand but your own. Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions.

In Range, David Epstein reflects on the nature of the outsider: “Switchers are winners,” he writes. Perhaps, as a switcher, I’ll be able to get beyond the myopia that often comes with an insider’s perspective, bring what psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness.”

What I will offer throughout is insight into decision making far removed from poker, a translation of what I’m learning in the casino to the decisions I make on a daily basis—and the crucial decisions that I make only rarely, but that carry particular import. From managing emotion, to reading other people, to cutting your losses and maximizing your gains, to psyching yourself up into the best version of yourself so that you can not only catch the bluffs of others but bluff successfully yourself, poker is endlessly applicable and revelatory. The mixture of chance and skill at the table is a mirror to that same mixture in our daily lives—and a way of learning to play within those parameters in superior fashion. Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and how you can deal with the elements of pure luck—in a way no other environment I’ve encountered has quite been able to do.

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning. It’s why kids learn so much better—and remember what they’ve learned—if they know exactly how or when they’ll apply the knowledge.

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever.

Finding a good mentor is crucial to learning any new skill—and one of the things the best mentors do well is know when to delegate.

In any decision, information is power. The earlier you act, the less information you have. With multiple people still waiting to make their decision, the landscape may well change.

Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’

Nothing is personal. Everything should be treated like a business. My goals need to be pure: to run the best business I can.

One thing is undoubtedly true: while practice is not enough and there’s not even close to a magic number for its effectiveness, you also cannot learn if you do not practice. If you’re serious about anything—playing chess, writing a book, becoming an astronaut, playing poker—you have to learn the composite skills. No one is so naturally gifted that they can just get up and go. Even Mozart needed some lessons. If you’re trying to learn poker, there’s simply no equivalent to playing the game, seeing how hands play out, learning the feel of different

In any interaction, you want to have as much information as possible. When you’re the person acting last, you have the best of it. You already know your opponents’ decisions, their plays, their opening bids. In a negotiation, you have the power. In an argument or debate, you have the power. You know more than they do. They have to initiate. You have the benefit of responding. Position is king.

“For every action, you have to go back and think through everything you know and come to the right conclusion. You can’t act too quickly.”

Everything is always a possibility. You have to be careful you’re not acting too fast. It’s a major hole for a lot of people. Even I’m sometimes guilty of it.”

The point is winning over the long term—and winning as much money as you possibly can with your best hands, all the while losing as little as possible with your worst. And in order to do that, you need to learn to pick your spots: know when to be aggressive, and how to be aggressive. The passive player doesn’t win. And the scared player, who always thinks someone can beat him, doesn’t win. But the openly aggressive player doesn’t win, either; he follows the fate of Aggressive Idiot Asshole. You have to be a strategist. Not playing scared doesn’t mean barreling your way over everything and everyone. It means being aggressive, yes, but strategically so: against the right people, in the right circumstances.

Poker pushes you out of your illusions, beyond your incorrect comfort zone—if, that is, you want to win. “Poker wasn’t designed by a game designer in the modern sense,” Lantz points out. “And it’s actually bad game design according to modern-day conceptions of how video games are designed. But I think it’s better game design, because it doesn’t pander.” If you want to be a good player, you must acknowledge that you’re not “due”—for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is.

High emotion, high impact, high recall.

Car crashes happen most frequently near your home for two reasons: the first is simple base rates—you drive more frequently in your home area—but the second is comfort—if you’re going on autopilot and texting anywhere, it’s in the places that are most familiar.

How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. 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.” The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become. It’s not just a question of semantics: telling bad beat stories matters. Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it.

It’s from my favorite poet, 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.”

Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure.

One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: chance favors the prepared mind. What people often forget, though, is that the full statement is quite different: “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance appears, you will notice it. But that first part is equally crucial: if you’re not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough. The one is largely useless without the other.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, once ran a study where he asked people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs. The self-described unlucky took about two minutes, whereas the self-described lucky took a few seconds. The task was identical, but the self-identified lucky people were much more likely to notice something the others missed: on page two, in huge letters, were the words “Stop counting—There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Prepared mind or not, in the absence of observation it matters little.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because

Everybody has a great opportunity to succeed and prosper at whatever they do, and everyone has some kind of unique gift. And I see that oftentimes, the most difficulty we cause ourselves is kind of fighting against the grain of what is healthy for us.”

“It’s not a real tournament until the antes get big!”

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly.

Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself? And can you really do one without the other?

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. Shot-taking is a tried-and-true thing in poker, where someone plays a tournament at a higher level than before, enters a cash game at higher stakes than before, to see if she can hack it. If you never take shots, you never know when you’re ready to move up. But in a way, these past two weeks were a shot: they were higher stakes, more intense action, huge player pools. And what they’ve illustrated is that, while the seeds of success are there, I’m not yet ready. The smart thing is to pull back, play smaller, regroup, build up, and try again—better, smarter, savvier, more skillful in both the ways of poker strategy and the ways of mental strength. If I take the intent of my journey rather than the arbitrary end goal meant as a hook for a book proposal more than anything else, the conclusion is clear. Postpone.

Less certainty, more inquiry.

Sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title.

The less competent you are in an area, the more likely you are to overestimate your degree of competence. That the less you know about a topic, the more you think you know—as long as you know just enough to start feeling a bit fluent in its vocabulary.

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

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 feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out.

It’s one of the best decision-making aids you could possibly have: maximum information prior to acting.

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.

There’s a Buddhist proverb. A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs. Soon, the farmer’s son falls off one of the feral horses as he’s training it. He breaks a leg. The neighbor expresses his condolences. The farmer just shrugs. Who knows. The country declares war and the army comes to the village, to conscript all able-bodied young men. The farmer’s son is passed over because of his leg. How wonderful, the neighbor says. And again the farmer shrugs. Perhaps.

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 do it ourselves, we cannot control it. We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itself—that, we don’t control.