Maria Konnikova

How a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor parlayed a strong grasp of the science of human decision-making and a woeful ignorance of cards into a life-changing run as a professional poker player, under the wing of a legend of the game

How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

The Biggest Bluff

And she certainly brought something to the table, including a PhD in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. .

Selena Yang

The big shift here is from wanting to “be right” to wanting to “get it right”

“It’s a familiar pattern of thought. Luck surrounds us, everywhere—from something as mundane as walking to work and getting there safely to the other extreme, like surviving a war or a terrorist attack when others mere inches away weren’t as fortunate. But we only notice it when things don’t go our way. 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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matej yangwao

What author trying compose was more like learning meta skill, but that's compose out of chunk of other skills where you need to master small ones. Whenever it's matter of variance, probability distribution, active observation, if one is serious about mastering skill, most likely it will happen even due negative odds on the table. How have good head start is having stake in the game, so called skin in the game. That's most likely knocks out to be passive player and loose chips in fear of failure. 

Good outcome from various games played should be how you choose interpret your reality, if it's victor or victim. 

Great takeaway that you're not lucky because more good things are happening, you're lucky, bc you're alert to them when they do.

"less certainty, more inquiry"

Rohit Arondekar

The Biggest Bluff is about a writer with a background in psychology learning how to play poker to learn how to manage the chaos of life. It is a well-written account with enough insights and stories to keep you hooked. Personally, I wasn't interested in the game of poker, and as such found some parts of the book a little boring, but that is entirely on me. There is a glossary of poker terms that does a good job of explaining the necessary poker lingo. The thing about such books. which the author herself acknowledges in passing, is that even with the knowledge and insights of how to make better decisions in the face of uncertainty, actually acting on said wisdom is the hard part, and so while it feels good to read a book like this, I don't know how much I'll be able to put into practice. I think this is a very good memoir that might also help you make better decisions.

Nick Gracilla

I first heard of Konnikova's ambitious project — going from knowing nothing of the game to a Texas hold'em champion in a year through study, mentorship, training, and coaching — on the Freakonomics podcast about creating your own luck. Poker, it turns out, is an interesting model of life, in that decisions must be made but in the context of partial information. There's quite a lot of information, explicit in the cards themselves — here, various mathematical and information theory approaches take the stage — and implicit in how the people play and the signals they give off while playing. Learning how to read others, how to consider their process of decisionmaking, all while managing your own implicit signals — well, here's the game as a bit of life, too. 

But Konnikova doesn't write just one book here. This isn't just a read on decisionmaking, emotional strength, and self-knowledge. It's also a deep dive into the game itself, its tournaments, and its superheroes. This aspect was, for me, the least interesting: I'm not a card player, I avoid most of the places cards are played, and while I find the cast of characters somewhat intriguing, for me, personally, it's not enough to be introduced to yet-another-champion 80% of the way through the text. 

 The third book, though, Konnikova sets out, is a memoir: of her family history, her education, her disabling self-doubt, finally overcome through psychological coaching, and her even more crippling migraines. To me, the storyline mechanics were too much the same: "so I find myself where I haven't been before, surrounded by experts who clearly have, feeling unworthy to be here, painfully aware of this, and making errors and regretting them later." This pattern of psychological self-doubt is eventually rooted out in a "deep dive" psychological coaching experience which surfaces feelings of displacement from kindergarten, etc. 

While I didn't relish that particular story mechanic and its frequency, Konnikova does an amazing job connecting together the many threads of decision-making in the face of it all: understanding probabilities, understanding your motivations and desires, understanding how others are playing around you, and of course, a bit of luck. 

Recommended, with reservations.

Amelia Lin

Smart and engrossing

This book was more than just entertainment; it got me to reexamine how I make decisions in life not just poker.

Dana Kraft

Meh. It's not the author's fault but I'm officially over reading about how our mental biases impact our decision making. There's more in here than that but the lessons she learns didn't interest me.

Volkan Yorulmaz

There’s a Buddhist proverb. A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs. Soon, the farmer’s son falls off one of the feral horses as he’s training it. He breaks a leg. The neighbor expresses his condolences. The farmer just shrugs. Who knows. The country declares war and the army comes to the village, to conscript all able-bodied young men. The farmer’s son is passed over because of his leg. How wonderful, the neighbor says. And again the farmer shrugs. Perhaps.


https://myhighlightz.blogspot.com/202...

Nadine 

And so I learn the name of a new genre “participatory journalism “.
A fascinating foray into the (male) world of poker with some wry observations on the participants & game and insightful learning on attention.

Ricardo Sousa

Vanessa Arenas

Mat Connor

Pierre

Bradley

ian alas

Mehul Srivastava

How a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor parlayed a strong grasp of the science of human decision-making and a woeful ignorance of cards into a life-changing run as a professional poker player, under the wing of a legend of the game Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel - Poker Hall of Fame inductee, winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings - and asked him to be her mentor. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance in her life had pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish what can be controlled and what can't. Seidel was in, and soon Konnikova was down the rabbit hole with him, a journey that would lead her to the following year's World Series of Poker. Then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova began to have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read not just her opponents but far more importantly herself. She found her way to making better decisions and to a place where she could accept luck for what it is, and what it isn't. But she also began to win. She even learned to like Las Vegas. In the end, Konnikova is a student of human behaviour, and ultimately the point of her incredible adventure was to render it into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned is that skill is enough. This is a book that will focus your mind and strengthen your hand.

The Biggest Bluff How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

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