Poker: Punishing Delusion

Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, author of the best selling books “The Confidence Game” and “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.” She has a B.A. in psychology and creative writing from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.  

If that’s not enough, she delivered a speech entitled “The Psychology of the Con: How Not to Get Fooled “ to the world’s movers and shakers in Davos. In her speech she explained that she had become a professional poker player, and quipped, “I like to say it’s one of the best uses of a Havard degree of all time.”   

Ms. Konnikova’s chronicle of her couple years of poker prodom is “The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned To Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.”  The author didn’t know a thing about poker or any other card game for that matter before she started. She joked during a podcast that she thought a deck contained 54 cards rather than 52. What she wanted to explore was the intersection of skill and luck. She had no math background (like many poker pros) and was a psychology nerd. She’d never been to Las Vegas and hated the town when she first hit town to play. Sin City has grown on her.

Her story is pure Cinderella in terms of table success, making her book compelling from start to finish. But,  “Bluff” is not just a telling of “bad beats,” “bluffs,” and “big pots.”  Konnikova weaves plenty of psychology and behavioral economics into her narrative. Her start and inspiration was the founder of game theory, John von Neumann, author of “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” developer of the math behind the nuclear bomb, inventor of the computer, and a lousy poker player. Von Nuemann believed if “he could figure out how to disentangle the chance from the skill,” Konnikova writes, “how to maximize the role of the latter and to minimize the malice of the former, he believed he would hold the solution to some of life’s greatest decision challenges.”  

Konnikova’s book is reminiscent of Annie Duke’s “Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts.” In Duke’s case she was a retired poker pro and was a dissertation short of her psychology Ph.D..  Both authors write often about human biases and how they work against us in all decision making, whether at the poker table or anywhere else. Konnikova writes early on about “the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.” 

We are just “not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty” of statistics. “There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment--just personal experience and anecdote.” When I wonder what’s going through the minds of Covid-19 deniers and mask refusers, Konnikova has the answer. “You can show people all the charts you want,” she writes, “but that won’t change their perceptions of the risks or their resulting decisions. What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has.” 

Experience teaches us, but “doesn’t teach us well.”

The author provides a different take on the 2016 presidential election and the polls leading up to Trump’s win.  Clinton was given a 71 percent chance of winning and Trump 29 percent. Most people see 71 percent as equal to 100 percent, but 29 percent is almost a third of a chance. Konnikova explains,”turns out that the odds of Trump winning are 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 the odds of flopping a pair are a far cry from zero.” 

When it comes to investments, Konnikova cites Daniel Kahneman. Consider this when thinking about your 401k, “There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not--and few of them do--are playing a game of chance.” Yes, your retirement is a crapshoot.  

There is plenty of wisdom in “Bluff” but perhaps the keenest is “It’s Disaster that’s the anecdote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are imposters. They are results that are subject to chance.”  The only way to have a chance at long-term success is to lose early giving us a shot at objectivity. 

The author’s poker teacher, Erik Seidel, tells her, “The beauty of poker is generally, delusion is punished.” 

If the book has a theme, it’s, “less certainty, more inquiry.” To embrace this is to listen, to adjust, and to grow. “Seidel’s first bit of advice to Konnikova was “pay attention.” The only thing certain is your thinking, everything else is chance. 

“Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past,” Konnikova explains elegantly. “But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.”

So, professional poker players who master all of these insights and more, must be rich, right? No, Konnikova writes, “ The reality is that more poker players than not go broke--even the pros.” Seidel tells her, “They should know better, but they spend way too much.”  

Stuey “The Kid” Ungar was perhaps the greatest poker player of all time and was definitely the greatest gin rummy player. Just 18 months after winning his 3rd World Series of Poker (WSOP) title, he died in a seedy downtown Las Vegas motel with only $800 in his pocket and the clothes on his back. Unger won $30 million playing poker, but a collection was taken up to pay for his funeral. 

Konnikova began her journey in 2016 and by 2018 she was ranked in the top five female tournament players in the world. The ride is improbable and the story illuminating.