The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

Maria Konnikova graduated from Harvard and has a PhD in psychology from Columbia.  Her interest in psychology leads her to study poker. She teams with Eric Seidel, among the most famous and successful poker players ever, to study the game.  Her purpose is not only to learn how to play but also to understand the interaction of chance and skill and how our thought processes affect us.  She also discovers how to make better decisions and the importance of knowing what you can control.

Here are my takeaways:

• People often overestimate their skills relative to luck.  They think they have more control than they do.  Instead, people suffer the illusion of control.  Their perception is flawed.  Making it worse, they ignore facts or information that would alter their decisions if they didn’t rely too heavily on their inflated sense of skill.  As Konnikova asserts, “we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.”
• Studies show that people often ignore statistics and probabilities in favor of their personal experiences, intuition, or “gut feelings.”  They make decisions based on their prior experiences, or the experiences of people they know, not what the data shows them.
• Konnikova believes that Texas hold’em is the poker game that best represents life.  It is the perfect balance of chance and skill.  Like Texas hold’em, life is no limit.  There are no restrictions, and anybody can go “all in” at any time.
• Poker is not gambling.  You can win with the worst hand and lose with the best hand.  With other games, you must have the best to win.  Konnikova explains, “And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling one.”
• Betting is vital to poker; it is how we learn.  Konnikova: “Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.”  And what we learn in poker, among other things, is probabilistic thinking.
• Additionally, poker develops the abilities of critical thinking and self-assessment.  You must learn to objectively evaluate your situation in each hand and how to play it properly.  It is especially important to remain objective when you’re losing.  Always remain objective - don’t let winning go to your head or blame losing on luck.
• View poker as an inquiry.  There isn’t one way to play a certain hand every time.  The same hand can be played different ways against the same opponents in the same position.  Each hand and each play must be carefully analyzed and stand on its own.  Konnikova says, “It’s a constant process of inquiry.  A hand can be played any number of ways, as long as the thought process is there… There is no certainty.  There is only thought.”  Consequently, poker teaches self-awareness and self-discipline.
• Poker teaches you to be comfortable with uncertainty.  You don’t know what card will be dealt next or what cards your opponents have.  You have to embrace that uncertainty.
• Poker teaches you to focus.  You must continually focus on your opponents to learn their behaviors and betting patterns.  Focus is a mitigator to overconfidence; it forces you to reevaluate your knowledge and make different decisions as you gather more information. Konnikova observes, “In an age of constant distraction and neverending connectivity, we may be so busy that we miss the signals that tell us to swerve before we’re in the bad beat’s path.”  We must remain focused to avoid missing vital information.
• Your attitude helps dictate your success.  If you see your losses or bad beats as the consequence of fortune, you’ll miss what you could have done differently to win.  Don’t blame your success or failure on outside forces.  Always be thinking about how your decisions led to the result and how it can be done differently next time.  It’s about the process, not the result.
• We instantly make judgments about people we don’t know when we see them.  Those impressions are based on stereotypes and our past experiences with people with similar traits.  For example, Konnikova played poker with a bald guy with tattoos.  She assumed he was an aggressive player; instead, he was among the tightest players on the circuit.  How often do we make incorrect judgments about people we don’t know?
• Fluidity is a tell.  Confident people, or players with strong hands, move quickly and decisively.  It usually means their thought process is clear.
• We must learn to control what we can.  “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,” says Konnikova.