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

"Maria Konnikova is arguably the best writer of the group. This is a bold claim, considering that the group includes Chuck Klosterman and Ted Chiang. Her writing is great. I highly recommend the book to any person because it excels at telling stories about three things I love: self-improvement, poker, and decision-making under imperfect information conditions. The Biggest Bluff details her journey from being a journalist to being a professional poker player. That’s an accrual of divergent skills. She explores the role of luck and the importance of differentiating it from skill. That’s so hard; part of the challenge of becoming a professional poker player is balancing your confidence in your playing ability with understanding how much variance and luck are involved with your life. Despite all the noise and variance happening in one’s poker journey, you have to temper your highs so as not to become overconfident and downplay luck, while also avoiding getting so beaten down that you doubt your own abilities, as this will prevent you from improving. Here’s a fun fact — even the best poker players in the world only make money from 10 to 20 per cent of the tournaments they play. They win less than one per cent of the tournaments they enter! If you play a full World Series of Poker events schedule, out of thirty events, you may cash zero and most likely you win zero. With the knowledge of this likely outcome, how do you improve? You have to be systematic in your approach. You have to recognize that when you win, there’s luck involved. Figure out where you got lucky, where you applied skill, see what spots you missed that could have been done better, even when you win. When you lose, you have to recognize there’s luck involved. Don’t let it beat you down. I’ve heard it said that if you’re playing one-dollar or two-dollar poker and you lose $10,000, there is a chance you got unlucky but there’s no chance you’re good. I think it works both ways. If you’re up $100,000 from playing one-dollar or two-dollar poker, there’s a chance you got lucky, but there’s no chance you’re horrendous. You’re better than average and you should go off that affirmation. In many ways, poker is a toy game. It’s a game about imperfect information, but its principles apply to all of life. This is how you improve things. You have to recognize the noise in the world. You have to recognize your bias. You have to recognize that the things that you knew to be true may not always be true. There’s a great book by Dara O’Kearney about playing something called satellite-style poker . Basically, instead of having a tournament where the winners take the majority of the money, or cash games where everyone walks away with what’s in front of them, in a satellite event, you play until there’s a certain number of people left, and they all split the prize pool equally, no matter if you were the chip leader or barely squeaked in. This prize structure completely warps how the toy game is played. It’s the book on satellites and talks about folding aces. Everyone who plays poker has been told their entire life to never fold pocket aces. O’Kearney lists a bunch of reasons why you should fold aces in specific situations. If you take that heuristic and apply it incorrectly, you will likely lose lots of money. But if you take the heuristic and apply it correctly, you will have certainly gained an edge on your opponents."