The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
✒️ Author: Maria Konnikova |. 📖 Published: 2020 | 🗓 Read: September 16, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 368
Summary
How a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor parlayed a strong grasp of the science of human decision-making and woeful ignorance of cards into a life-changing run as a professional poker player, under the wing of a legend of the game.
Why You Should Read It
This is a fascinating look at what it takes to master poker. Much less about the mechanics of the game and more of the psychology, the strategies. It’s the latter that yields the most significant insights.
Notable Highlights
What his single piece of advice would be to aspiring poker players—his answer is two words long: pay attention. Two simple words that we simply ignore more often than not. Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.
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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: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.
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In other words, 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.
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People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.
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It’s called the description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and even then, we often ignore the numbers in favor of our own experience.
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We believe what we want to see, not what research shows.
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What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has. If you were in New York City during Hurricane Sandy, for instance, you are far more likely to purchase flood insurance. If you weren’t, you may invest in a beachfront property in Malibu even though the numbers say your beach will be gone soon, and your house along with it.
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Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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Because in life, there is never a limit: there’s no external restriction to betting everything you have on any given decision. What’s to stop you from risking all your money, your reputation, your heart, even your life at any point you choose? Nothing.
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“It’s all about thinking well. The real question is, can good thinking and hard work get you there? And I think it can,”
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no matter how psychologically you want to play, much of the game is about statistics. You need to understand odds, how good your hand is, how good it is relative to others’, how likely it is to improve, and so on.
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In a way, it’s as much a test of life philosophy as anything else. The qualitative side of things versus the measurable. The human versus the algorithmic.
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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.
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in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win. No other way is possible.
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In his final poll, on November 8, 2016, he gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning—and Trump a 29 percent chance. Twenty-nine percent. That’s a whole lot of percent. That’s nearly a third. And yet most people saw the 71 and read it as certain. The complexity of the alternative is just too taxing to take into account every time we make a judgment. To the vast majority, 71 is synonymous with 100. Clinton is winning.
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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. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.
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Hyper-aggressive play, he tells me, can be a short-term boon. But most of the time, those players go broke. And at the highest levels, they don’t last more than a heartbeat.
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Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.
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There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation.
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Normally, people think of stack sizes in terms of big blinds. M takes it one step further, by quantifying your risk of going broke. How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner.
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Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky—it’s as simple as that. You just won’t.”
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You need a way of testing your thought process. Before I get fancy with strategy, with the curlicues and trappings of expertise, I need to answer something far more basic: Am I thinking correctly?
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“You’ll see a whole bunch of superstars from ten years ago, and you’re not going to find any with money today. They were superstars because they were able to bring it to the edge, they had ability, but when things went a little bit wrong they either fell apart or didn’t know what to do with the money and spent it all on drugs and sports betting. So were they actually courageous? No.”
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Nothing is personal. Everything should be treated like a business. My goals need to be pure: to run the best business I can.
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“As a professional gambler, you have to understand: if you don’t have an objective evaluation of what’s going on, you’re a loser,” he tells me.
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What’s crucial, Dan says, is to develop my critical thinking and self-assessment ability well enough that I can constantly reevaluate, objectively, where I am—and whether where I am is good enough to play as I’m playing. It’s not about winning or losing—that’s chance. It’s about thinking—the process. Dan himself is a living illustration of how true this is: he quit not during a downswing but at the top of his game.
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“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”
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Understand the dark side of variance first: that’s the only time you’ll actually learn to process your decision making well.
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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. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other.
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Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.
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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.
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“Even a few seconds of reflection, that’s all you need to just go through every action. Stop and take a breath and think through your alternatives. Am I folding? Am I calling? Am I raising? Everything is always a possibility. You have to be careful you’re not acting too fast.
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I’ve never really thought about a single situation in my own life in this light, but now it actually makes sense. Before any campaign, or, indeed, even minor military action, you need to evaluate the situation, the territory, the nature of the enemy. You can’t just plow ahead with one strategy because it worked in the past or you’ve seen someone else employ it successfully. Each time you act, you have to reassess based on what is now known versus what was known before. You need to have a process, a system, a plan—one that evolves with feedback. If you don’t, how will you know whether the outcome of your battle—a bad one in my case, but successful ones, too—is the result of skill or luck? If you’ve just lost your chips, was it because you chanced upon an unlucky situation—or because you planned a poor campaign?
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Dynamic boards need you to tread lightly and think ahead more carefully; static boards allow you to be more shortsighted without suffering the consequences too greatly. That single-suit board might be great for bluffing if I were heads up, playing against a single opponent—but multiway, it becomes a swamp for me.
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“I look at it like you’re part of a jazz band.” Not what I was expecting, but then again, things with Erik rarely are. “You’re trying to play connected and in sync with the rest of the players. It has nothing to do with you, really. That’s not the jazz part. It’s all about what are these guys doing, and how do I respond to it?” He continues, “I think there have been players that are successful because they have a style. But to the best extent that you can, you have to be a free thinker. You don’t want to have one style, you know?”
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His implies that you will be playing together for quite some time, and that you will evolve together as well. Respond to each other, grow over time. It explains his success—if a new player comes in or you switch from big band to cool jazz to free jazz, you have to learn the new language to survive. And he always has.
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The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy are actually opposite sides of the exact same coin: positive recency and negative recency. We overreact to chance events, but the exact nature of the event affects our perception in a way it rightly shouldn’t.
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People who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes, often more than they actually do, whereas people who have an external locus of control think that what they do doesn’t matter too much; events will be what they will be. Typically, an internal locus will lead to greater success: people who think they control events are mentally healthier and tend to take more control over their fate, so to speak. Meanwhile, people with an external locus are more prone to depression and, when it comes to work, a more lackadaisical attitude.
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Once you gain proficiency, you also lose perspective. You go on autopilot—I’ve got this covered; I can even check my phone while behind the wheel, I’m that good. You forget that what you’re doing is actually exceptionally difficult, and how much chance is involved. That, of course, is when you’re most susceptible to bad luck.
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The trick is to get past the plateau. The relationship between our awareness of chance and our skill is a U-curve. No skill: chance looms high. Relatively high skill: chance recedes. Expert level: you once again see your shortcomings and realize that no matter your skill level, chance has a strong role to play. In poker and in life, the learning pattern is identical.
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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—that is, environments like parks as opposed to actual woodland—can have a similar effect, lowering the stress hormone cortisol, heightening our sense of pleasure, improving our ability to solve difficult problems.
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Casinos in general—and poker tables in particular—are germ incubators. They are probably worse even than a preschool, since there the surfaces at least get disinfected when the cleaning crew comes through. I’ve touched chips that seem to have been in use since the 1970s without so much as a rinse. Once, I had to tell a player not to touch me after he wanted to demonstrate that he’d washed his hands in the bathroom—by placing a wet hand on top of my arm.
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True skill is knowing your own limits—and the power of variance in the immediate future.
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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.
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If you suffer a bad beat in life, it may set you back considerably more—and last a lot longer. All of a sudden, your framing matters significantly more. A victim of the cruel cards? This may serve as something I think of as a luck dampener effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it. Potential opportunities pass you by; people get tired of hearing you complain, so your social network of support and opportunities also dwindles; you don’t even attempt certain activities because you think, I’ll lose anyway, why try?; your mental health suffers; and the spiral continues.
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If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time.
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And thinking how much emotional energy I could have saved and invested productively had I just followed that simple piece of advice: no bad beats. Forget they ever happened.
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“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.
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The connection to bad beats runs even deeper. The more focus you can bring to something, the more attention you pay, the more you maximize your skill edge before the bad beat can even happen—and so you minimize the times when you leave your fate in the cards.
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But paying attention is one of the best ways I can see of minimizing the window for negative variance to peek through. In an age of constant distraction and never-ending 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.
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You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.
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“What you need to know first and most important of all is that poker is storytelling,” he says. It’s a narrative puzzle. Your job is to put together the pieces.
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For short-term profitability, a rote-based approach is key. For long-term growth, I need to revert to my inner Sherlock Holmes.
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“You have to poke holes in the story he’s trying to tell, and from that, deduce what he’s trying to hide.”
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“You’re constructing your own story at the same time, doing everything you can to make sure it will add up.” In other words, before you do anything, think ahead to how that action fits into your narrative arc.
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Always ask why: Why is someone acting this way? Why am I acting this way? Find the why and you find the key to winning.
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“That’s my challenge to you,” Phil says. Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it. And never judge anything others do without asking the same question.
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How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react. And how much money we’d save on bills for our shrink if we paused to ask the same about our own actions and motivations. Don’t forget the why, I
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“Too much studying without playing makes it hard to fully absorb knowledge,” he tells me. It will leave me with a head full of statistics and facts—and a mess when it comes time to execute.
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You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert.
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“You need to be playing for the win, not for the min cash. If you’re cashing this much and then busting soon after, you are doing something wrong. You’re getting to the bubble short-stacked.”
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“Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players. You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. It’s just not possible.”
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The more you learn, the harder it gets. The better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper. It’s fine to be proud at some milestones, like cashing in an international event—but it’s also important to stay focused on the bigger picture, and remain aware of how much you have yet to accomplish. It’s important not to let a minor victory lull you into thinking you’re doing great, when all you’re doing is better than before but not good enough to actually make it count.
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Too often, we settle for the minor tokens that mark our accomplishment—the participation trophy rather than that podium finish—and let them make us feel that just fine is good enough.
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Erik isn’t discouraging me. Quite the opposite. He’s moving my target ever higher. He’s fighting my complacency before I realize I could possibly become complacent. Min cashing is great, and a good goal before, just to show that I could actually play in this field. But now I’ve shown I can. We move the goal higher. We move the target further. We become more ambitious. Fuck participation trophies. We go for the win.
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No, looking and seeming trustworthy is a far cry from actually being trustworthy.
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More often than not, though, we aren’t motivated to correct our mistaken reads. We operate instead by an inflated sense of our own power of person perception.
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It’s too easy to read into something because it meshes with your existing perceptions, but the validity of any information is highly suspect unless it’s layered in expertise.
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For instance, your accuracy at guessing the strength of someone’s hand will be higher if you have some general knowledge of the game—but experience playing doesn’t seem to matter. So it’s good to understand poker, but the perception of strength from hand motion appears to be happening at a more basic and instinctive level. And it helps if you score higher on measures of nonverbal perception. That is, someone who’s more likely to pay attention as habit—not only following Erik Seidel’s advice to put away those cell phones, but being attuned to the physical cues people give off as a matter of course—is more likely to pick up on these cues as well.
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“The way people handle their chips when they are more indecisive, or their bet style at the top of their range—these are the sorts of things we pay attention to,”
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The most telling moment is often at the very beginning of a hand, when players first check their hole cards: how they check and what they do immediately after tend to be the most honest actions a player will execute in the entire hand.
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“Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,” Blake suggests. As long as I always do that, I ensure that I’m thinking through every hand at every part of my range, aces and suited connectors and trash alike. Because I’ve thought before I acted, I act with confidence every time—and I act with a delay every time. There’s no longer the problem of immediate action with straightforward decisions and delays with more complex ones. And the whole process becomes more streamlined and fluid naturally.
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It’s helpful advice far beyond the poker table. Streamlined decisions. No immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. These are the tools that help us cool down rather than act in the moment, that help us stay rational and look at longer time horizons.
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to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA.
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One of the most important lessons of poker strategy, intimately connected to self-assessment, is this: sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title. We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. 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.
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Never feel like you have to do something just because it’s expected of you—even if you’re the one who expects it of you. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned.
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He wants me to focus on what I can control, not the irrelevant noise.
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THE CONCEPT OF TILT in poker is one that’s remarkably malleable: it applies to all sorts of situations. It means that you’re letting emotions—incidental ones that aren’t actually integral to your decision process—affect your decision making. You are no longer thinking rationally. It can be used as a noun (I’m on tilt), verb (I tilted), or adjective (that guy is so tilting), and it’s a pithy way to recognize and describe when your decisions are not what they should be.
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All it means is that you’re experiencing an emotion that is not, strictly speaking, related to your decision.
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Instead, the goal is to learn to identify our emotions, analyze their cause, and if they’re not actually part of our rational decision process—and more often than not, they aren’t—dismiss them as sources of information.
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If I start to understand the sources of my tilt, I have a chance to stop misattributing the emotions I’m feeling to other things and instead to dismiss the emotions as irrelevant. If I’m upset about losing a pot, I can acknowledge that fact and realize it’s not technically relevant to the next hand.
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You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.
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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.
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Acquiescence is not harmless. Because the moment you acquiesce, you give up a bit of control, however tiny, to the process of superstition. And if you actually believe in it, you become a gambler in the real sense of the word, ready to gamble with fate in a way that is the very antithesis of everything poker has taught me about approaching life.
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How you feel affects how you act. And while a hot streak of cards or dice is actually not possible—the gambler’s fallacy remains eternally fallacious—streaks that require actual human performance may indeed exist. The more the realm is subject to individual action, such as creative careers where mindset is one of the central elements, the more this is the case.
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That self-reinforcement can lead to a performance boost in most any field—and poker seems to be particularly well suited as a demonstration. Because at the poker table, perceived confidence often translates to incorrect assumptions on the part of your opponent: if you look self-assured and act with conviction, your actions will garner more respect. People may fold to you more often—and you will win more often. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
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Here’s a cheat sheet. For sushi, Yui and Kabuto. For dinner close to the Rio, the Fat Greek, Peru Chicken, and Sazón. For when I’m feeling nostalgic for the jerk chicken of my local Crown Heights spots, Big Jerk. Lola’s for Cajun. Milos, but only for lunch. El Dorado for late-night poker sessions. Partage to celebrate. Lotus of Siam to drown your sorrows in delightful Thai.
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he believes we cannot use games as models of real life because in life, the rules derived from games can break down in unforeseen ways. It’s called the ludic fallacy. Games are too simplified. Life has all sorts of things it can throw at you to make your careful calculations useless.
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“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born,” Richard Dawkins writes, in Unweaving the Rainbow. “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.” It’s mind-boggling to even consider. “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
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We are here, and we have the chance to experience life, in all its vicissitudes, all its unfairness, all its noise. Out of countless billions—trillions, quintillions, more than the mind is capable of imagining—of possible people who were never to be, we are the ones who are allowed to play at the table.
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Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment. We don’t know what the next card will be—and we don’t even know when we see it if it’s good or bad.
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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.
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The future belongs to those able to learn, to change, to accommodate to this exquisite Cosmos that we have been privileged to inhabit for a brief moment.”