Book Report: The Biggest Bluff

7. Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (2020) (2/5/21)

This is, in part, a book about poker—specifically, No Limit Texas Hold'em—not a game I play, but one that I find interesting for its blend of chance and skill. Which is exactly what Konnikova writes about, and about how, over the course of a year-plus, she set about becoming a tournament poker champion. Konnikova is trained as a psychologist, and she's a journalist (she is the author of two books, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game, about the art of the con, and she used to write regularly for the New Yorker about these sorts of topics), with a journalist's nose for sources and stories. 

In the second chapter of the book she introduces us to poker world master Erik Seidel, a delightful, understated man who becomes her mentor as she progresses from someone who doesn't know the difference between poker and blackjack to winning the 2018 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) championship. Over the course of the book she speaks with many other people, players and academics alike, who offer insights into the game and into human psychology: how we learn, how we approach situations of chance and luck, how we monitor our feelings, how we read other people's behavior, how we adjust our beliefs and understandings of the world in the face of experience, or simply (or not so simply) how to strategize a poker hand. 

In this TED Talk, Konnikova describes poker as a sort of metaphor for life, harking back to the founder of Game Theory, John von Neumann:

Last June she published an article about this yearlong experience, which, truth be told, probably would have satisfied me. Or listening to this Freakonomics podcast. But I had started the book before I learned about these other sources, and I wasn't about to quit, having already invested the time. The book was somewhat confusing in places—especially when poker jargon was invoked (there is a lot of it), but also when she'd mention some concept or person in passing that hadn't yet been covered. There was a tad too much sitting at tables with a motley array of characters—from "fish" to "whales" to "sharks"—as poker hands were played out (and described card by card). It was interesting enough to read about various psychological theories about how we approach uncertainty or apply skill, as well as about various fallacies, biases, and syndromes—the planning, sunk cost, and ludic fallacies, for example, or the beaten dog and impostor syndromes, or the status quo bias—but in the end they only sort of apply to the game of poker—or, for that matter, to life—depending on who you are and who you happen to be playing with, and how recently you had a good meal or how much sleep you got the night before.

In speaking of her experience traveling around the world playing tournaments, Konnikova writes (in this case about Las Vegas, fairly early in her apprenticeship):

Each venue offers a slightly different experience, and with each hand, I start seeing more and more of the patterns I've been learning about play out in real life. It's not all the aggressive shark tactics of the Nugget. There are the passive players, the conservative players, the active players, the loose players. There are the ones who like to drink. There are the ones who like to play and never fold. There are the ones who are vacationing and here to have fun, the ones who take it seriously and are here to win, the ones who are here to take advantage of others, and the ones who simply want to make a few friends at the table. There are the talkers, the stalkers, the bullies, the friendlies. With each game, each bust-out, each hand, I take it all in and write it all down. How do I adjust? How do I make myself known? How do I present myself so that I can finally go from losing to winning?
     I enter a sixty-dollar daily tournament at Bally's [ . . . ] It's small, only two tables' worth of players, but I feel a certain pride in watching the numbers dwindle to a single table, then eight, seven, six. . . . I'm in the final four. And it's hard for me to contain my excitement when I find myself with a flopped set of nines. There's a bet before me, and I joyously shove all my chips into the middle. This is it. All my learning is paying off. I will finally have my first tournament cash. I get called by a flush draw, the flush hits, and I'm out. I'm devastated.

I found myself pushing through to the end (taking breaks with a nifty little Texas Hold'em app for my phone). I'm not sorry I read it, not at all—but now I am ready for a page-turner.