Maria Konnikova

INSIDE THE BIG IDEAS

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay
Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARIA KONNIKOVA IS THE AUTHOR OF

Mastermind and The Confidence Game. She is a regular
contributing writer for The New Yorker, and holds a PhD
in psychology from Columbia University. Her writing has
won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in
Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality
and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest
Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and
the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings.

A LETTER FROM RUFUS GRISCOM

Dear NBIC member,

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman once said, “Starting a company is like

jumping off a cliff and trying to assemble a plane before you hit the ground.”
After many years of building digital media companies, this feels about right to me.
When we attempt to do new things, in business and in life, we take on a lot of risk.

Much to my mother’s dismay, I have never minded risk. I have long thought
that risk from a distance is scary, but studied up close, it starts to look like proba-
bility, which can be understood and used to advance our goals.

Nonetheless, many questions remain. How much does luck factor into our suc-
cess? Can I really trust my gut in high-stakes decisions? And what should I do
when it’s too risky to move forward, but too difficult to turn back?

If you have questions like these, you will be fascinated by Maria Konnikova’s new
book, The Biggest Bluff, which is a riveting and surprisingly useful take on risk man-
agement and strategic thinking. Since I haven’t yet mastered the art of airplane as-
sembly, I’ll be consulting this book for years to come—and I suspect you might, too.

All my best,
Rufus Griscom
Co-Founder & CEO, Next Big Idea Club
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OVERVIEW
Ace in the hole… Raise the stakes… When the chips are down… Sweeten the pot…
Play your cards right… The English language has a surprisingly deep affection for
poker terms. Even if we have never actually played poker, we acquire a certain
intuitive grasp of the game thanks to our linguistic inheritance.

Which is a bit strange, isn’t it? Our everyday parlance isn’t peppered with idioms
from roulette, for example, or other games you might find in a casino. Is it possi-
ble that there’s something special about poker, something that allows it to reflect
and pervade real life like no other game can?

Maria Konnikova would likely answer with a resounding yes. As a New Yorker
writer with a PhD in psychology, she has spent years studying how people deceive
one another, solve complex problems, and make good (or not-so-good) decisions
under pressure. And in The Biggest Bluff, Konnikova takes on perhaps her biggest
challenge yet: Starting as a total novice, can she use her knowledge of human be-
havior to become a professional poker player? And in the process, can she learn to
minimize uncertainty, manage risk, and harness the fickle power of luck?

Equal parts scientific deep dive and just-crazy-enough-to-be-true storytelling,

The Biggest Bluff is an insightful, inspiring, downright fun tour through the human
mind and into the heart of elite poker. Ready to get started? It’s time to ante up.

Read on for 8 Big Ideas from The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention,
Master Myself, and Win. And be sure to visit the Next Big Idea Club Member Li-
brary to take our original e-course taught by author Maria Konnikova.
 8 BIG IDEAS
1. A Philosophy of Betting
In his final poll before the 2016 presidential election, statistician Nate Silver
gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning, and Trump a 29 percent chance.
He later faced harsh criticism for being so “wrong,” but his poll may have actual-
ly been right on the money—and poker helps us understand why.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed bet-
ting as a way to confront the probabilistic nature of reality. It helps us combat false
confidence and our tendency to see the world in black and white terms. Kant offers
the example of a doctor asked to make a diagnosis. The doctor reaches a verdict on
the patient’s malady—but that conclusion isn’t necessarily correct. It’s just the best
he can do based on his knowledge and the available information. Still, if his cer-
tainty reaches a certain level, he will likely state his diagnosis as simple fact.

But what if he had to bet his own money on the accuracy of his diagnosis? Now
that he has something real at stake, his confidence is shaken, and he has to reeval-
uate just how sure his opinion really is. Suddenly, we have a corrective for many of
the follies of human reason. Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion
that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no
possibility of being mistaken? Even our deep convictions seem a lot less certain
when something so real is at stake.

Now let’s return to the case of Nate Silver. Ordinarily, we might read his 71
percent as a virtual guarantee of Clinton’s victory. After all, our minds love to see
the world in black and white terms. But would you bet on a 71 percent certainty
as if it were 100 percent? Or would you realize that there was a more than nota-
ble margin of error? It turns out that Trump’s 29 percent chance of winning was
roughly the same as the odds of flopping a pair in hold’em—and you only have
to play once or twice to realize that that’s a far cry from zero.

In this way, poker is such a powerful window into probabilistic thinking not in
spite of, but because of the betting involved. Our minds learn when we have a real
stake in the outcome of our learning.

2. Pick Your Spots

When Konnikova first started playing poker for real money, she was intimidated.
She felt like she was out of her depth among such lifelong pros, and she tended
to play far too cautiously and conservatively. That strategy didn’t win too many
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hands, but she also noticed that the hyper-aggressive players weren’t always win-
ning either. So what was she supposed to do?

Her coach, Erik Seidel, offered a simple piece of advice: “Pick your spots.” It means
you have to be a strategist, working to figure out exactly when and how to be aggres-
sive. After all, anyone can win if they have the best cards. But you only get dealt the
best cards every so often, and if you wait for them every time, your chips are sure to
run out. So while you shouldn’t barrel your way through everything and everyone,
you do have to be aggressive against the right people, in the right circumstances.

In order to do that, you need one of the best decision-making aids you could
possibly have: maximum information prior to acting. A perfect model for gather-
ing and utilizing information comes from the U.S. Air Force. Fighter pilot John
Boyd coined the term “OODA” to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through
his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly Observe, Orient, Decide,
and Act. OODA. And the way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside
their OODA loop. You have to figure out what they are observing, how they are
orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result.

Because at the end of the day, making good decisions—at the poker table or in
real life—comes down to information. For example, when Konnikova got inside
an opponent’s OODA loop and discovered that he tended to bet aggressively
with mediocre hands, she wasn’t scared off when he raised. Instead, she respond-
ed by calling his raise, staying in the hand, and coming out on top.

3. The Danger of Going with Your Gut

While completing her PhD in psychology, Konnikova worked on a study in
which she asked thousands of people to play a simulated stock market game.
They would have to invest a small amount of real money in one of two stocks, or
in a bond, and do so over hundreds of trials.

What she found was that over and over, people would overestimate the degree of
control they had over the outcomes. Not only would they decide ahead of time
how they were going to divide their investments, but they would decide based on
incredibly limited information which stock was “good” and stick to their guns—
even if they started losing money. The more they overestimated their own skill
relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell
them, and the worse their decisions became. Other studies have shown that even
professional investors have a remarkable ability to ignore statistical information in
favor of their own intuition. As a result, most funds underperform the market.
Why do we tend to think that we’re in the know, even when we’re not? A basic
shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we find statistical probabilities deeply
counterintuitive. Instead, we lean too heavily on gut feeling and first-hand ex-
perience, a tendency called the description-experience gap. For example, if you
lived through 9/11, your fear of terrorism will be understandably high—but it will
also be vastly overblown. The data reveal that you are actually far more likely to be
harmed by a slip and fall in your shower. Even so, we tend to believe what we see,
not what the research reveals. You can show people all the charts you want, but if
your friend knows someone who died in the Twin Towers, it will be very difficult
to convince them that their shower poses a greater danger to their well-being.

So how can we learn to see the world in a more accurate, more probabilistic light?
This brings us back to poker: Used in the right way, first-hand experience can be
a powerful ally in helping to understand probability. The experience just can’t be a
one-off, haphazard event. It has to be a systematic learning process, one that takes
place over a long stretch of time—over years of playing poker, for example. Armed
with an understanding of the description-experience gap, a readiness to question
our gut feelings, and a willingness to take many different events into account, we
can begin to disentangle key information from distracting noise. As a result, we
can make quality decisions that are guided rather than distorted by our experience.

4. Don’t Tilt
The concept of “tilt” in poker applies to all sorts of situations. It means that
you’re letting emotions—incidental ones that aren’t integral to your decision pro-
cess—affect your decision-making.

We tend to imagine the tilted player as the angry cowboy with a raging temper.
But when it comes to making solid decisions, emotions aren’t inherently bad;
they can actually be useful markers for making the correct choice. In fact, neuro-
scientist Antonio Damasio has found that the absence of emotion—the actual,
clinical inability to experience emotion caused by lesions to the brain—can cause
people to go broke on a gambling task. Not caring about the negative emotional
effects of large losses, they don’t learn to distinguish the better decisions, and
instead go for bigger swings and larger wins. We experience emotions for a rea-
son, and the goal is not to stop experiencing them. Instead, the goal is to learn to
identify our emotions, analyze their cause, and, if they’re not part of our rational
decision process, dismiss them as sources of information.

In a seminal study led by social psychologists Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clo-
re, researchers called people in various zip codes to ask them how satisfied they
were with their lives. The zip codes were chosen alongside weather reports. Some
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people were experiencing a sunny day at the time of the call, while others had
a rainy day. On average, people expressed higher life satisfaction when the sun
was out. But crucially, the effect disappeared when the experimenter drew their
attention to the weather, by asking, “How’s the weather down there?” In other
words, if our attention is drawn to the actual cause of our mood, it stops having
an effect on our perception.

Unfortunately, that remedy seems to work only for more subtle emotions. When
it comes to stronger, more powerful feelings, it’s useful to be proactive, rather than
reactive. If you can anticipate how something will make you feel in the future, you
can act to prevent it in the present. In this way, your decisions will be informed
only by important, relevant emotions, not the ones that will lead you astray.

5. The Truth About Bad Luck

In poker, a bad beat happens when you lose despite being the overwhelming
statistical favorite to win. But if you dwell on bad beats, you could fail to see the
things you could be doing to overcome them. Your play will begin to suffer, other
players will capitalize, and suddenly you’ve got more bad luck to mope about.

Instead, the key is to forget about bad beats, and bring your full focus to the here
and now. On their first day together, Seidel told Konnikova that lesson one was
to pay attention. The more focus you bring to a game, the more you maximize
your skill edge before the bad beat can even happen. That way, you minimize the
times when you have to leave your fate to the cards.

One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur, who
said, “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, but that first part is equally crucial: If you’re not observing close-
ly to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough.

We see the truth of this statement in a study conducted by psychologist Richard

Wiseman. Wiseman asked people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky
to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs. The self-de-
scribed 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 news-
paper.” Prepared mind or not, in the absence of observation, it matters little.
In short, you’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening;
you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do. By turning our attention
away from bad beats and toward good decision-making in the here and now,
we’re sure to encounter more good luck than ever before.

6. Process, Outcome, and the Nature of Control

Just as focusing on bad beats can get you into trouble, so can thinking too highly
of your successes. In one classic study, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had
students guess the outcome of a series of coin tosses. With each toss, they were
told whether they were correct or not. Across three groups, all students were told
that they had the same number of correct answers. The only difference was the
order; in one group, the correct answers were distributed in a random pattern. In
the second, there were more correct answers clustered near the beginning, and in
the third, there were more correct guesses clustered near the end.

After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a few questions: Did
they feel they were particularly talented at this task? Did they feel they could
improve their scores over time? In both cases, the obvious answer is no; guessing
the outcome of a coin toss is firmly in the realm of chance, not skill. And indeed,
when students had a random progression, or one where the accuracy clustered
near the end, that’s precisely what they said.

But when the correct answers were clustered up front, students answered very
differently. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would
improve with time. Their early success led to an abject failure of objectivity. They
had succumbed to the illusion of control; they believed that they could actually
predict the results of a coin toss.

Indeed, if we lose early on, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we’re winning,
we rarely stop to think critically about our success. After all, if things are going
well, why question them? So when it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe;
it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster
that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence.

If dwelling on our failures leads to more bad luck, and uncritically celebrating
our successes leads to overconfidence, how should we think about the results
of our efforts? If you truly want to play well and get ahead, the key is to worry
about your process, not the outcomes. You can’t always control the final result, be it
Triumph or Disaster—but you can control the way you think, behave, and make
decisions, even while under pressure. Win or lose, if your decisions were in-
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formed and your strategy was sound, you have every reason to be proud. Sooner
or later, a deep focus on process over outcome will take you to new heights.

7. Know When to Fold

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when
we map out timelines, targets, and goals. We look at the best-case scenario in-
stead of working to determine what a more realistic outcome would look like.
Konnikova experienced this herself in her goal to compete at the World Series of
Poker’s Main Event just one year after first deciding to give the game a try. Be-
fore long she could see that her timeline was far too optimistic, but she decided
to stick to the plan no matter what.

It was a clear instance of the status quo bias at work: She continued with the ac-
tion she’d already decided on, regardless of new information. Seidel had warned
her that one of the most important things about being a good poker player was
flexibility—the willingness to admit that you’re wrong. Even so, she convinced
herself that swerving wouldn’t be a demonstration of her adaptability, but rather
an admission of failure. This was the sunk cost fallacy in action, when you keep
to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.

It happens all the time in our lives. We find ourselves in an appealing situation—
and then we hold on to it for dear life, even when any objective, outside observer
would tell us that the appeal is long gone. We start at a promising job, only to be
stymied in promotions over and over—yet we cling to the notion that the job is
great. We embark on a promising relationship, only to find we have less and less
in common with our partner—yet we forge ahead, refusing to admit that what
seemed so right is now wrong. Sometimes, the most difficult thing of all is to stop
playing. All too often, we stay in a hand long after we should have gotten out.

It turns out that one of the most important lessons of poker strategy is this:
Sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title. What you don’t
do rather than what you do, learning to let go rather than hold on—that can be
greatness. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put
good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted, and you
need to make a shift yourself as a result. By staying mindful of the planning fal-
lacy, the status quo bias, and the sunk cost fallacy, we begin to master the art of
knowing when to fold.

8. The Art of the Tell

In poker lingo, a “tell” is a subtle cue that indicates when someone is bluffing. And
while a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to read tells makes for compelling movie
scenes, it’s an exceptionally rare skill in real life. In fact, psychologist Paul Ekman
found that the vast majority of people don’t fare any better than chance at de-
ciding whether someone is lying or telling the truth—and even with significant
training, people are unlikely to spot a practiced deceiver. So if you try to stare
someone down to figure out if they are for real, you’re in for a disappointment.

It turns out that we form impressions about someone from the first moment we
see them. In as little as thirty-four milliseconds—less than the time it takes to
blink—we have already formed judgments on things like trustworthiness and ag-
gression. The process is subconscious, processed by our visual system rather than
the part of our brain responsible for logical assessment.

Psychologist Nalini Ambady called these fleeting perceptions thin-slice judg-

ments, and they’re frequently mistaken. They’re governed by things like facial
structures and expressions, as well as our own past experiences, which often have
no bearing on the current situation. We decide that a person is aggressive, for
example, because they have tattooed biceps like someone who bullied us in the
past—but we don’t actually have any real knowledge of this new person.

So what can we do to improve the accuracy of our judgments? The first step is to
recognize the influence of our subconscious assumptions. The moment someone
new sits down at her table, Konnikova is already predicting how he will play and
adjusting her own moves accordingly. She doesn’t do this on purpose—it just
happens. But if she notices it, she can catch herself and change course if need be.

Our capacity and willingness to learn can also make a big difference. If Kon-
nikova actively strives to learn more about a player by watching their behavior
over time, her judgments about them will gradually become more accurate. By
relying more on actual information rather than first impressions, both our judg-
ments and our decisions will make us more likely to win.

TALKING POINTS
The most memorable and shareable stories, facts, and statistics from The Biggest Bluff.

•  The earliest form of poker was a 16th-century game called primero. As it

traveled through Europe, it was variably termed primiera, la prime, and eventu-
ally pochen, a German name derived from the verb “to bluff.” The French then
took pochen and made it poqué. The game eventually made it across the Atlan-
tic, and in the summer of 1803, some Frenchmen in Louisiana grew listless
aboard a steamship bound for New Orleans. They started up a game of poqué,
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which would soon spread by steamboat throughout the country, eventually

becoming poker.

•  Poker really is a game of skill. When economist Ingo Fiedler analyzed hun-
dreds of thousands of hands played in online poker, he found that the actual
best hand won, on average, only 12 percent of the time. He also found that the
higher the amount of money for which people played, the more that elite skill,
rather than simple luck, led to victory.

•  “For goodness’ sake, it’s just a game!” In his 1870 treatise on gambling, The Gam-
ing Table, Andrew Steinmetz wrote about how, in the throes of emotion, one man
once jammed a billiard ball so far into his mouth it had to be surgically removed.
Another became stuck to a wooden table after biting it with too much fury.

•  Quick tip for your next poker game: Beware a starting hand of a two and
a seven. Statistically speaking, it’s the single worst hand you can be dealt in
Texas hold’em.

•  Sexist biases emerge at the table. In one study of online poker, men bluffed 6
percent more often against someone with a female avatar than a male or neu-
tral one—but, when confronted with that possibility, they refused to believe it.

•  The most successful hunter in the animal kingdom is not what you may
think. Cheetahs kill about 58 percent of the animals they hunt, lions land one
quarter of their intended kills, and wolves take down 14 percent of their quar-
ries. The deadliest killer of all? The dragonfly, which captures an astounding 95
percent of its targeted prey.

•  It’s a man’s world? In any given tournament field, the percentage of women
participants consistently hovers around three. Additional food for thought:
Research shows that women, but not men, are penalized for asking for more
money in a negotiation.

•  Brain power sure is energy-intensive. One recent study showed that elite
chess players can burn up to six thousand calories a day during tournaments,
exhibiting metabolic patterns reminiscent of elite athletes.

•  Intermittent fasting may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Though many
productivity gurus swear by it, fasting has been shown to affect our delay dis-
counting ability: We start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting
for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive.
•  The heart of the gambling world lies not in Las Vegas but in Macau. The
Venetian resort there is the single largest casino property in the world, and its
annual profits exceed many countries’ GDPs.

•  Gamblers in Macau often grow out long pinky nails. It’s a way to signal
wealth and status—after all, you can’t grow out your long pinky nail if you’re
doing manual labor.

•  Your favorite teacher may have been bad at their job. Teacher evaluations
have been found not to correlate well with actual student learning. Sometimes
the most popular teachers aren’t the best teachers, and the ones who get worse
evaluations are actually far more competent and end up teaching their students
far more, based on objective assessments.

•  Our minds reset in the presence of greenery. We feel more relaxed after
nature walks; we’re less angry, more alive, more thoughtful. Even urban
greenery—environments like parks as opposed to actual woodland—can have
a similar effect, lowering the stress hormone cortisol, heightening our sense of
pleasure, and improving our ability to solve difficult problems.

READING QUIZ
Quiz time! Studies show that tests and quizzes can boost your recall of what you’ve
studied. So after you’ve finished reading The Biggest Bluff, lock in your learning with
this brief assessment. Good luck!

1. Which of the following is NOT a piece of advice that Seidel gave to Konnikova?
A) “Pick your spots.”
B) “Lesson one: Pay attention.”
C) “Less certainty. More inquiry.”
D) “Wax on, wax off.”

2. Should your emotions affect your decision-making?

A) Yes, all emotions are relevant
B) Yes, but only some emotions are relevant
C) No, emotions are only a distraction
D) Scientists can’t seem to agree
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3. Around what year did poker begin to take shape in the United States?
A) 1788
B) 1803
C) 1837
D) 1873

4. Which of the following hands would win the pot in a game of Texas hold’em?
A) Flush
B) Straight
C) High card
D) Two pair

5. An ideal learning process focuses primarily on which of the following?

A) Our track record of successes and failures
B) Our process for preparation and decision-making
C) Whether or not luck has been on our side
D) “Borrowing” secrets from top competitors

6. Can we really rely on our intuition or “gut feelings” in a given situation?

A) Yes, our gut is usually correct
B) Yes, but only if we have experienced many similar situations in the past
C) No, our gut is never to be trusted
D) It depends; some people are born with strong intuition, while others are not

7. If a poker player wants to make an educated guess about her opponent’s

cards, what should she pay attention to?
A) The opponent’s hands
B) The opponent’s face
C) The opponent’s eyes
D) The opponent’s luscious lips
8. What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
A) Men are more likely to bluff against women
B) Players fold more often against an opponent on a hot streak
C) The more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence
D) The more invested you are in a project, the less likely you are to quit
halfway through

9. True or False: Probability has a memory, so past events will influence the
likelihood of future events. For example, if you flip a fair coin ten times in a
row, and all ten flips come up heads, the 11th flip is likely to be tails.
A) True; the 11th flip is virtually guaranteed to be tails
B) True; the chance of the 11th flip being tails is slightly higher than 50%
C) False; probability has no memory, and the 11th flip is equally likely to be
heads or tails
D) False; the coin is on a hot streak, and will most likely come up heads next

10. What exactly is “the biggest bluff ”?

A) That you always know what you’re doing
B) That you don’t care about failure
C) That hard work trumps natural ability
D) That high skill is enough to succeed

1D, 2B, 3B, 4A, 5B, 6B, 7A, 8C, 9C, 10D
Answer Key:
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INTERACTIVE EXERCISE
Poker Terms Crossword Puzzle

Ready to check your answers? Log in to the Member Library at nextbigideaclub.com/login,

then select the Biggest Bluff e-course and scroll down to “Interactive Exercise.”
Copyright 2020 Next Big Idea Club
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