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Best Holdem Freaks Radio for Skilled Players new. Real Money Blackjack. Banking options (2) Payout Speed 1-2 days. Listen to online Radio Stations for free! Rock, Pop, R&B, Hip Hop, Jazz, and much more. Holdem Freaks Radio their JackpotCity casino account online, click on Holdem Freaks Radio the Holdem Freaks Radio Banking tab, and complete the details to make either a deposit or a withdrawal. Safe and secure banking can be done via the mobile online Holdem Freaks Radio.Listen now:
*Before she decided to become a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t know how many cards are in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. In psychology, a brilliant coach, and a burning desire to know whether life is driven more by skill or chance. She found some answers in poker — and in her new book The Biggest Bluff, she’s willing to tell us everything she learned.
*The Drunken Donk Weekend Kickoff Password Freeroll Americas Card Room. The Drunken Donk Weekend Kickoff Password. This Freeroll Poker Tournament will be held on Fridays at 8:00 PM EST on Americas Card Room at The Drunken Donk.
Before she decided to become a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t know how many cards are in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. in psychology, a brilliant coach, and a burning desire to know whether life is driven more by skill or chance. She found some answers in poker — and in her new book The Biggest Bluff, she’s willing to tell us everything she learned.
Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.
* * *
I’d like you to pay special attention to this episode, because there will be a quiz at the end. We’re trying something a bit different. If it works, we might start a spinoff podcast based on this idea. The inspiration goes back to the fact that before Freakonomics Radio took over my life, I wrote books. And the thing about a book is, you often spend several years on it — there’s the idea, the research and reporting, outlining, rough drafts and more drafts, and finally, you publish your book. Then, if you’re lucky, you get to go on a radio or T.V. show or podcast to talk about it, to promote it. But as every author knows, this experience can be unsatisfying.
The interviewer often hasn’t even cracked your book. So, you get a lot of questions like: “What’s your book about exactly?” and “So, why’d you want to write this book about” — long pause here while they look at the book — “about, um, behavioral economics?” And then you, the author, get a few minutes to summarize your book and, inevitably, your summary isn’t very good. And why would it be? The words on the page — that’s what you’re good at. Instead, you’re now being asked to ad lib a quickie replica of the book you spent years writing. Now that I’m making podcasts instead of books — at least for the time being — I don’t have to suffer through this process. But I hear a lot of other writers who are still doing a lot of suffering.
I do occasionally hear a great interview with an author that gives me a sense of them and their book — but only occasionally. Usually, my experience as a listener is just as unsatisfying as my experience was as an author. So, I got to thinking — what if, rather than asking writers to summarize their books and ask them a few generic questions, what if we tried something a bit different? What if we had the authors read some excerpts of the book, so listeners can hear the actual writing, and what if we also interviewed the author? Wouldn’t that give listeners a truer sense of things? So, that’s what we’re trying in this week’s episode, this hybrid model. We picked a book and author I think you’re going to love; I certainly did. Remember — pay attention because we’ll have some questions for you at the end.
* * *
I love a book that immediately lets you see what the writer is seeing. Lets you hear what they’re hearing — even smell what they’re smelling:
The room is a sea of people. Bent heads, pensive faces, many obscured by sunglasses, hats, hoodies, massive headphones. It’s difficult to discern where the bodies end, and the green of the card tables begins. The smell of stale casino air fills the room — old carpet; powder; cold fried food and flat beer; and the unmistakable metallic tang of several thousand exhausted bodies that have been sharing the same space since morning.
It’s the first day of the biggest poker tournament of the year, the Main Event of the World Series of Poker
* * *
Stephen DUBNER: Did you truly not know how many cards are in a deck of cards?
Maria KONNIKOVA: Yes, I thought there were 54. This is a true story. It’s not exaggerated for the book.
That’s Maria Konnikova. Her new book is called The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. It chronicles her journey from poker novice to poker professional. The Biggest Bluff is Konnikova’s third book. The others are called Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game, which is about con artists. If you think you’re detecting a theme in Konnikova’s writing — yes, there is a theme. She writes about psychology — in her books and for TheNew Yorker.
She also has a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She did not get the Ph.D. in order to teach, or to treat patients. She only wanted to be a writer, and she thought that getting a doctorate in psychology would give her good insights into how people think and make decisions; whether our lives are shaped primarily by those decisions or by chance; also: insights into how we present our true selves and how we bluff. These curiosities ultimately brought her to poker.
KONNIKOVA: The deeper I went into poker, the better of a metaphor for life I realized it was, and the stronger of a tool I realized it was to address so many of the psychological questions that had been percolating in my head for years. Because life is a game of incomplete information. You never know everything, and you are able to control a good amount of decisions leading up to the end because you can control how you present yourself. You can control whether or not you play. You can control how you play. But ultimately, you can’t control the cards. And I think that that’s a very good reflection of what goes on in life. There’s so much you can do, but then the ultimate outcome is not up to you. And you have to be okay with that.
DUBNER: What would you say, Maria, is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to you?
KONNIKOVA: That is the question for all questions. I think that it’s a toss-up between two things. I mean, one, it’s really difficult to call this the luckiest thing. But honestly, being born and being born to my parents and having the genetic makeup that I have, I think, is the luckiest thing that happened. But that aside, I think the luckiest thing that ever happened was the fact that when I was 4 years old, my parents decided to leave the Soviet Union and come to the United States. My life would be so different had I grown up in the Soviet Union. I have no idea what would’ve happened or what I would’ve done.
DUBNER: How old are you now?
KONNIKOVA: I’m 36.
DUBNER: So, you’re saying that the two luckiest things that ever happened to you, neither of them were in the past 32 years?
KONNIKOVA: Yes, I think I’ve had a lot of very lucky things happen along the way. But you asked the absolute luckiest. And you have to think what really changed the trajectory of your life in the most profound way? And honestly, being a Jew in the Soviet Union — this was before the Berlin Wall fell — was no fun. I would not have been a writer because you really couldn’t do anything in the humanities. I can’t even begin to imagine what my life would look like.
When her family emigrated, they settled in Acton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. From early on, she was an achiever and an overachiever; she wound up going to Harvard. Afterward, she was a producer on The Charlie Rose Show. But then, back to school for that Ph.D. under the legendary psychologist Walter Mischel. He was best-known for a series of studies built around the “marshmallow test,” which examined the human capacity for self-control. I asked Konnikova why Mischel and the idea of self-control had appealed to her.
KONNIKOVA: There were two things. One, Walter Mischel as a person appealed to me because he was someone who liked to think big and ask big questions about the human mind. And the other thing is, I did feel like self-control was something that could be incredibly useful to me as a human, and just in general, to understand. Because it seemed to me that it was such an important thing in life to learn about emotional management, to learn about how to handle yourself.
DUBNER: You write that an academic career, had you chosen that, would have been a gamble as well, which is a really interesting thought because I think a lot of people when they’re choosing their careers, there is that fundamental fork in the road of the safe or at least predictable one and then the other options. So, what would have been the risk had you chosen the academic career?
KONNIKOVA: I think that you are so dependent on the biases of other people because the academic job market is an incredibly biased place, as is any job market. You’re at the mercy of what types of things do the people who are in this particular place want to study? How do your theories fit into it? Even as I was going into the graduate program to study with Walter Mischel, I knew that I was entering an area that was on the outs because the hot areas were neuroscience, the hot areas were kind of all of the very hard cognition. And even at Columbia, while I was there, all of the tenure offers went to neuroscientists and there were a few amazing social psychologists who didn’t get job offers. And I was seeing this and thought, “Uh-oh, if I actually want to do this, that’s a big, big risk.”
DUBNER: How meritocratic would you say academic psychology is?
KONNIKOVA: I think it thinks of itself as incredibly meritocratic. I think that it’s much more biased than that. I think you need merit up to a certain point, but then it’s personal favorites. Who did you study with? Who do I owe a favor to? The office politics in academia are just insane.
DUBNER: And how would you compare academia to poker, in terms of meritocracy?
KONNIKOVA: I mean, I don’t even think there is a comparison. I think poker is so much more meritocratic than academia. I was about to say a million times, but one of the things that poker taught me is to be precise. So, it’s not actually a million times. That would be an exaggeration.
DUBNER: That would indeed. Let me just ask you, how numerate did you consider yourself before playing poker?
KONNIKOVA: Not at all numerate. I actually still — I know that this isn’t something to be proud of, it’s just the way my mind works — I still count on my fingers. I need that visual and tangible cue to help myself out. The last math class I took was in high school.
DUBNER: When it comes to probability, however, you don’t have to learn higher-order math to understand probability, but you do need to understand probability to play poker. So, how did you grow from innumerate to a good understanding of probability?
KONNIKOVA: I think it helped that I did once upon a time have a good math background. I mean, I took calculus. I was good at math in high school. I just never really liked it and dropped it soon after. So, it was just a muscle of mine that I hadn’t used at all. But as Erik Seidel, who became my coach told me very early on, “All you really need to know how to do is add, subtract, multiply, divide.” And the thing is, you are constantly doing, and the human mind learns best by doing. And in poker, you also have very immediate feedback. If you make math mistakes, you’re going to lose money. And I found that as I was put in these high-pressure situations and was forced to think in that way, my mind eventually un-rusted itself.
* * *
Imagine two players at a table. The cards are dealt. Each player must look at her cards and decide whether or not the cards on their own are good enough to bet. If she wishes to play, she must at minimum “call” the big blind — that is, place as much into the pot as the highest bet that already exists. She may also choose to fold or raise. But who knows what factors she’s using to make her decision? Maybe she has a premium hand. Maybe she has a mediocre hand but thinks she can outplay her opponent and so chooses to engage anyway. Maybe she has observed that the other player views her as conservative because she doesn’t play many hands, and she’s taking advantage of that image by opening up with worse cards than normal. Or maybe she’s just bored out of her mind. Her reasoning, like her cards, is known only to her.
Each decision throws off signals, and the good player must learn to read them. It’s a constant back‐and‐forth interpretive dance: How do I react to you? How do you react to me? More often than not, it’s not the best hand that wins. It’s the best player.
Betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it. And it is one of the best ways of conquering the pitfalls of our decision processes in just about any endeavor. It doesn’t take a gambler to understand why. In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray.
From a misplaced faith in certainty, the fact that to our minds, 99 percent, even 90 percent, basically means 100 percent — even though it doesn’t, not really. Kant offers the example of a doctor asked to make a diagnosis. The doctor reaches a verdict on the patient’s malady to the best of his knowledge — but that conclusion isn’t necessarily correct. It’s just the best he can do given the information he has and his experience in this particular area. But will he tell the patient he’s unsure? Maybe. But more likely, if his certainty reaches a specific threshold — a different one for different doctors, to be sure — he will just state his diagnosis as fact.
But what if he had to bet on it?
* * *
DUBNER: Describe quickly for me the year 2015 for the Konnikova family.
KONNIKOVA: It wasn’t a great year. The year started off with my mom losing her job and my grandmother dying. So, that was quite a shock because she had been healthy. She was completely self-sufficient. She was a volunteer in World War II and had survived so much during the Soviet era. And she died because she slipped in the night. She put one foot wrong. My mom had never lost her job, ever. And so, that was quite a shock that she was just let go during a private-equity acquisition. My husband lost his job. And at the same time, I had this really big health scare and it was really just horrifying.
DUBNER: So, that was a really bad year. I’m sure the work of Tom Gilovich and others, with headwinds and tailwinds. Tell me, do most people believe that the good things that happen in their lives are because of their abilities and the bad things that happen in their lives are because of bad luck?
KONNIKOVA: This goes back to an idea called the locus of control. And it was the work of Julian Rotter. And Rotter found that there are two types of locus of control. And by that he meant where you think control over events resides, internal and external. So, if you have an internal locus of control, when good things happen, you take credit for them and you say, “Yeah, that was me.” And an external locus of control, you say, “Oh, no, no it was events in the world. I had nothing to do with it.” Most people, he found, have an internal locus when it comes to good things. They take credit for their success. But an external locus — they — switch when things go wrong. They say, “Oh, it wasn’t my fault. Here are all of the reasons why this went wrong.” But there are exceptions. There are people who have an external locus always. That’s not good at all. There are people who have an internal locus always. That’s also not good. And the normal signature is also not great, because if you always take credit for the good things and don’t take blame for the bad things, you’re going to be overconfident. So, you need to learn how to balance the two.
DUBNER: It sounds, though, as if you’ve just drawn an unsolvable puzzle. You say both extremes are poor, but also the compromise or the moderate version is poor. So, how do you optimize external vs. internal?
KONNIKOVA: I think that the important thing is to have an internal locus most of the time in the sense that you understand that you do control a lot of things. But that also means keeping that internal locus for some of the bad events. But also, I think the way that you solve that puzzle is through decision-making and analysis. You actually learn that both modes of thought are possible. And so, before you jump to any conclusions, you break it apart and you say, “Okay, what was my decision process? What did I control here? What didn’t I? What was the outcome? And am I responsible for that outcome or not?” Because sometimes it will be something else and sometimes it will be you.
DUBNER: And pre-poker, how would you describe yourself on the internal vs. external scale?
KONNIKOVA: I was probably someone who was more external on a lot of the good things and more internal things on a lot of the bad things.
DUBNER: So, the good things that happened were luck and the bad things were “my fault.”
KONNIKOVA: Yes. I think that was a lot of the way that I thought about things I’d actually hadn’t asked myself that question until you just asked me. But now that I think about it, I think that that was a lot of my mindset pre-poker, which isn’t ideal.
* * *
There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves. Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.
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.
If you think of yourself instead as an almost
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Best Holdem Freaks Radio for Skilled Players new. Real Money Blackjack. Banking options (2) Payout Speed 1-2 days. Listen to online Radio Stations for free! Rock, Pop, R&B, Hip Hop, Jazz, and much more. Holdem Freaks Radio their JackpotCity casino account online, click on Holdem Freaks Radio the Holdem Freaks Radio Banking tab, and complete the details to make either a deposit or a withdrawal. Safe and secure banking can be done via the mobile online Holdem Freaks Radio.Listen now:
*Before she decided to become a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t know how many cards are in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. In psychology, a brilliant coach, and a burning desire to know whether life is driven more by skill or chance. She found some answers in poker — and in her new book The Biggest Bluff, she’s willing to tell us everything she learned.
*The Drunken Donk Weekend Kickoff Password Freeroll Americas Card Room. The Drunken Donk Weekend Kickoff Password. This Freeroll Poker Tournament will be held on Fridays at 8:00 PM EST on Americas Card Room at The Drunken Donk.
Before she decided to become a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t know how many cards are in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. in psychology, a brilliant coach, and a burning desire to know whether life is driven more by skill or chance. She found some answers in poker — and in her new book The Biggest Bluff, she’s willing to tell us everything she learned.
Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.
* * *
I’d like you to pay special attention to this episode, because there will be a quiz at the end. We’re trying something a bit different. If it works, we might start a spinoff podcast based on this idea. The inspiration goes back to the fact that before Freakonomics Radio took over my life, I wrote books. And the thing about a book is, you often spend several years on it — there’s the idea, the research and reporting, outlining, rough drafts and more drafts, and finally, you publish your book. Then, if you’re lucky, you get to go on a radio or T.V. show or podcast to talk about it, to promote it. But as every author knows, this experience can be unsatisfying.
The interviewer often hasn’t even cracked your book. So, you get a lot of questions like: “What’s your book about exactly?” and “So, why’d you want to write this book about” — long pause here while they look at the book — “about, um, behavioral economics?” And then you, the author, get a few minutes to summarize your book and, inevitably, your summary isn’t very good. And why would it be? The words on the page — that’s what you’re good at. Instead, you’re now being asked to ad lib a quickie replica of the book you spent years writing. Now that I’m making podcasts instead of books — at least for the time being — I don’t have to suffer through this process. But I hear a lot of other writers who are still doing a lot of suffering.
I do occasionally hear a great interview with an author that gives me a sense of them and their book — but only occasionally. Usually, my experience as a listener is just as unsatisfying as my experience was as an author. So, I got to thinking — what if, rather than asking writers to summarize their books and ask them a few generic questions, what if we tried something a bit different? What if we had the authors read some excerpts of the book, so listeners can hear the actual writing, and what if we also interviewed the author? Wouldn’t that give listeners a truer sense of things? So, that’s what we’re trying in this week’s episode, this hybrid model. We picked a book and author I think you’re going to love; I certainly did. Remember — pay attention because we’ll have some questions for you at the end.
* * *
I love a book that immediately lets you see what the writer is seeing. Lets you hear what they’re hearing — even smell what they’re smelling:
The room is a sea of people. Bent heads, pensive faces, many obscured by sunglasses, hats, hoodies, massive headphones. It’s difficult to discern where the bodies end, and the green of the card tables begins. The smell of stale casino air fills the room — old carpet; powder; cold fried food and flat beer; and the unmistakable metallic tang of several thousand exhausted bodies that have been sharing the same space since morning.
It’s the first day of the biggest poker tournament of the year, the Main Event of the World Series of Poker
* * *
Stephen DUBNER: Did you truly not know how many cards are in a deck of cards?
Maria KONNIKOVA: Yes, I thought there were 54. This is a true story. It’s not exaggerated for the book.
That’s Maria Konnikova. Her new book is called The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. It chronicles her journey from poker novice to poker professional. The Biggest Bluff is Konnikova’s third book. The others are called Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game, which is about con artists. If you think you’re detecting a theme in Konnikova’s writing — yes, there is a theme. She writes about psychology — in her books and for TheNew Yorker.
She also has a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She did not get the Ph.D. in order to teach, or to treat patients. She only wanted to be a writer, and she thought that getting a doctorate in psychology would give her good insights into how people think and make decisions; whether our lives are shaped primarily by those decisions or by chance; also: insights into how we present our true selves and how we bluff. These curiosities ultimately brought her to poker.
KONNIKOVA: The deeper I went into poker, the better of a metaphor for life I realized it was, and the stronger of a tool I realized it was to address so many of the psychological questions that had been percolating in my head for years. Because life is a game of incomplete information. You never know everything, and you are able to control a good amount of decisions leading up to the end because you can control how you present yourself. You can control whether or not you play. You can control how you play. But ultimately, you can’t control the cards. And I think that that’s a very good reflection of what goes on in life. There’s so much you can do, but then the ultimate outcome is not up to you. And you have to be okay with that.
DUBNER: What would you say, Maria, is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to you?
KONNIKOVA: That is the question for all questions. I think that it’s a toss-up between two things. I mean, one, it’s really difficult to call this the luckiest thing. But honestly, being born and being born to my parents and having the genetic makeup that I have, I think, is the luckiest thing that happened. But that aside, I think the luckiest thing that ever happened was the fact that when I was 4 years old, my parents decided to leave the Soviet Union and come to the United States. My life would be so different had I grown up in the Soviet Union. I have no idea what would’ve happened or what I would’ve done.
DUBNER: How old are you now?
KONNIKOVA: I’m 36.
DUBNER: So, you’re saying that the two luckiest things that ever happened to you, neither of them were in the past 32 years?
KONNIKOVA: Yes, I think I’ve had a lot of very lucky things happen along the way. But you asked the absolute luckiest. And you have to think what really changed the trajectory of your life in the most profound way? And honestly, being a Jew in the Soviet Union — this was before the Berlin Wall fell — was no fun. I would not have been a writer because you really couldn’t do anything in the humanities. I can’t even begin to imagine what my life would look like.
When her family emigrated, they settled in Acton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. From early on, she was an achiever and an overachiever; she wound up going to Harvard. Afterward, she was a producer on The Charlie Rose Show. But then, back to school for that Ph.D. under the legendary psychologist Walter Mischel. He was best-known for a series of studies built around the “marshmallow test,” which examined the human capacity for self-control. I asked Konnikova why Mischel and the idea of self-control had appealed to her.
KONNIKOVA: There were two things. One, Walter Mischel as a person appealed to me because he was someone who liked to think big and ask big questions about the human mind. And the other thing is, I did feel like self-control was something that could be incredibly useful to me as a human, and just in general, to understand. Because it seemed to me that it was such an important thing in life to learn about emotional management, to learn about how to handle yourself.
DUBNER: You write that an academic career, had you chosen that, would have been a gamble as well, which is a really interesting thought because I think a lot of people when they’re choosing their careers, there is that fundamental fork in the road of the safe or at least predictable one and then the other options. So, what would have been the risk had you chosen the academic career?
KONNIKOVA: I think that you are so dependent on the biases of other people because the academic job market is an incredibly biased place, as is any job market. You’re at the mercy of what types of things do the people who are in this particular place want to study? How do your theories fit into it? Even as I was going into the graduate program to study with Walter Mischel, I knew that I was entering an area that was on the outs because the hot areas were neuroscience, the hot areas were kind of all of the very hard cognition. And even at Columbia, while I was there, all of the tenure offers went to neuroscientists and there were a few amazing social psychologists who didn’t get job offers. And I was seeing this and thought, “Uh-oh, if I actually want to do this, that’s a big, big risk.”
DUBNER: How meritocratic would you say academic psychology is?
KONNIKOVA: I think it thinks of itself as incredibly meritocratic. I think that it’s much more biased than that. I think you need merit up to a certain point, but then it’s personal favorites. Who did you study with? Who do I owe a favor to? The office politics in academia are just insane.
DUBNER: And how would you compare academia to poker, in terms of meritocracy?
KONNIKOVA: I mean, I don’t even think there is a comparison. I think poker is so much more meritocratic than academia. I was about to say a million times, but one of the things that poker taught me is to be precise. So, it’s not actually a million times. That would be an exaggeration.
DUBNER: That would indeed. Let me just ask you, how numerate did you consider yourself before playing poker?
KONNIKOVA: Not at all numerate. I actually still — I know that this isn’t something to be proud of, it’s just the way my mind works — I still count on my fingers. I need that visual and tangible cue to help myself out. The last math class I took was in high school.
DUBNER: When it comes to probability, however, you don’t have to learn higher-order math to understand probability, but you do need to understand probability to play poker. So, how did you grow from innumerate to a good understanding of probability?
KONNIKOVA: I think it helped that I did once upon a time have a good math background. I mean, I took calculus. I was good at math in high school. I just never really liked it and dropped it soon after. So, it was just a muscle of mine that I hadn’t used at all. But as Erik Seidel, who became my coach told me very early on, “All you really need to know how to do is add, subtract, multiply, divide.” And the thing is, you are constantly doing, and the human mind learns best by doing. And in poker, you also have very immediate feedback. If you make math mistakes, you’re going to lose money. And I found that as I was put in these high-pressure situations and was forced to think in that way, my mind eventually un-rusted itself.
* * *
Imagine two players at a table. The cards are dealt. Each player must look at her cards and decide whether or not the cards on their own are good enough to bet. If she wishes to play, she must at minimum “call” the big blind — that is, place as much into the pot as the highest bet that already exists. She may also choose to fold or raise. But who knows what factors she’s using to make her decision? Maybe she has a premium hand. Maybe she has a mediocre hand but thinks she can outplay her opponent and so chooses to engage anyway. Maybe she has observed that the other player views her as conservative because she doesn’t play many hands, and she’s taking advantage of that image by opening up with worse cards than normal. Or maybe she’s just bored out of her mind. Her reasoning, like her cards, is known only to her.
Each decision throws off signals, and the good player must learn to read them. It’s a constant back‐and‐forth interpretive dance: How do I react to you? How do you react to me? More often than not, it’s not the best hand that wins. It’s the best player.
Betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it. And it is one of the best ways of conquering the pitfalls of our decision processes in just about any endeavor. It doesn’t take a gambler to understand why. In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray.
From a misplaced faith in certainty, the fact that to our minds, 99 percent, even 90 percent, basically means 100 percent — even though it doesn’t, not really. Kant offers the example of a doctor asked to make a diagnosis. The doctor reaches a verdict on the patient’s malady to the best of his knowledge — but that conclusion isn’t necessarily correct. It’s just the best he can do given the information he has and his experience in this particular area. But will he tell the patient he’s unsure? Maybe. But more likely, if his certainty reaches a specific threshold — a different one for different doctors, to be sure — he will just state his diagnosis as fact.
But what if he had to bet on it?
* * *
DUBNER: Describe quickly for me the year 2015 for the Konnikova family.
KONNIKOVA: It wasn’t a great year. The year started off with my mom losing her job and my grandmother dying. So, that was quite a shock because she had been healthy. She was completely self-sufficient. She was a volunteer in World War II and had survived so much during the Soviet era. And she died because she slipped in the night. She put one foot wrong. My mom had never lost her job, ever. And so, that was quite a shock that she was just let go during a private-equity acquisition. My husband lost his job. And at the same time, I had this really big health scare and it was really just horrifying.
DUBNER: So, that was a really bad year. I’m sure the work of Tom Gilovich and others, with headwinds and tailwinds. Tell me, do most people believe that the good things that happen in their lives are because of their abilities and the bad things that happen in their lives are because of bad luck?
KONNIKOVA: This goes back to an idea called the locus of control. And it was the work of Julian Rotter. And Rotter found that there are two types of locus of control. And by that he meant where you think control over events resides, internal and external. So, if you have an internal locus of control, when good things happen, you take credit for them and you say, “Yeah, that was me.” And an external locus of control, you say, “Oh, no, no it was events in the world. I had nothing to do with it.” Most people, he found, have an internal locus when it comes to good things. They take credit for their success. But an external locus — they — switch when things go wrong. They say, “Oh, it wasn’t my fault. Here are all of the reasons why this went wrong.” But there are exceptions. There are people who have an external locus always. That’s not good at all. There are people who have an internal locus always. That’s also not good. And the normal signature is also not great, because if you always take credit for the good things and don’t take blame for the bad things, you’re going to be overconfident. So, you need to learn how to balance the two.
DUBNER: It sounds, though, as if you’ve just drawn an unsolvable puzzle. You say both extremes are poor, but also the compromise or the moderate version is poor. So, how do you optimize external vs. internal?
KONNIKOVA: I think that the important thing is to have an internal locus most of the time in the sense that you understand that you do control a lot of things. But that also means keeping that internal locus for some of the bad events. But also, I think the way that you solve that puzzle is through decision-making and analysis. You actually learn that both modes of thought are possible. And so, before you jump to any conclusions, you break it apart and you say, “Okay, what was my decision process? What did I control here? What didn’t I? What was the outcome? And am I responsible for that outcome or not?” Because sometimes it will be something else and sometimes it will be you.
DUBNER: And pre-poker, how would you describe yourself on the internal vs. external scale?
KONNIKOVA: I was probably someone who was more external on a lot of the good things and more internal things on a lot of the bad things.
DUBNER: So, the good things that happened were luck and the bad things were “my fault.”
KONNIKOVA: Yes. I think that was a lot of the way that I thought about things I’d actually hadn’t asked myself that question until you just asked me. But now that I think about it, I think that that was a lot of my mindset pre-poker, which isn’t ideal.
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There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves. Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.
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.
If you think of yourself instead as an almost
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