Notes and excerpts from the book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova

This book opened my eyes to the interesting connections between poker and psychology, human behavior and strategic learning. My big takeaway is that learning poker can be a great way to learn about yourself.

Thanks to this book, I now think of poker as an avenue for sophisticated feedback, a tool to help eliminate all the noise from learning which I talked about in Learning opportunity.

Here’s a great interview with the author, Maria Konnikova, on Freakonomics: How to Make Your Own Luck [Ep. 424] that gives more perspective on the themes presented in the book.

I really enjoyed this book, and it made me want to keep learning about poker — recommended reading even if you’re not much of a gambler.

Three excerpts

First, the author frames poker as neither all luck, nor all skill — it’s a dynamic and disorderly mix of both. It reminds me of the pluralistic nature of freedom and necessity (or free will and determinism) I read about in War and Peace. From the Chapter, Ante Up, p. 21:

For poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life. It isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two. Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives–chance and control. Anyone can get lucky–or unlucky–at a single hand, a single game, a single tournament. One turn and you’re on top of the world–another, you are cast out, no matter your skill, training, preparation, aptitude. In the end, though, luck is a short-term friend or foe. Skill shines through over the longer time horizon.

Second, the following concept builds on the big lesson I learned from my Ice Baths in Iceland adventure earlier this year: to carve out time to focus on yourself. From the Chapter, Reading Myself, p. 226:

Through careful observation, you not only have to learn how to tell the difference between your faulty intuitions and real data, but understand how to exploit what you’ve seen–and how to know if you’re being exploited in turn.

That last part is the one I seem to have momentarily forgotten. I’ve been so busy reading others that I’ve missed the step of stopping to read myself. [Blake Eastman, “a former psychologist turned professional poker player turned behavioral analyst,” one of the author’s coaches] can tell me only what I’m giving off physically. He doesn’t have enough to go on to unravel my inner psychology and understand the internal tug-of-war that may be governing my actions. In each hand he analyzed, imagine everything that was going on inside my head that I wasn’t even aware of. I’ve done the work of physical profiling. But what about psychologically? What about understanding the why?

In turning my mind to tells and reads at this stage in my learning, I may have missed a crucial step: that the first person you have to profile–psychologically, not physically–is yourself.

Third, another connection to ice baths: poker, like cold exposure, is another example of how stress and trauma can be leveraged for healing and strength. From the Chapter, Full Tilt, p. 252:

Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove your triggers so that you don’t have that emotional response in the moment.” [quote from Jared Tendler, psychologist and mental game coach] Here’s what Jared proposed to do for me: work through my underlying emotional holes and teach me to be a one-woman bomb squad defusing the emotional bombs and getting rid of them before they show up and cloud my judgement.

We talk. And I tell him about my end goal. “This WSOP [World Series of Poker] didn’t go as well as I’d hoped,” I acknowledge. “So what I want to do is work on figuring out where I’m going wrong emotionally. And then I hope I’ll do better next year.”

Jared stops me. “That word you just used.”

What word?

“Hope. Hope has its place in the world, but when it comes to poker, it really doesn’t belong,” he says. “As far as hope in poker, fuck it.”

Interesting. I’d thought hope was a tenet of mental health.

In some sense, yes. But not in the sense of making me a mentally strong player. “You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just do.” That phrase resonates. It’s what Erik [Seidel, the author’s primary poker coach] was getting at with his admonition about bad beats–the worrying about what could and should have been, the hope that replaces analysis and actual reflection. It crystallizes why I shouldn’t have played the Main [Event WSOP tournament], not this year–it was a decision based on hope. The doing part of me knew I had a lot more to accomplish before I was ready. I find myself nodding in agreement. It’s time to stop hoping and start doing.

And so we begin our work.