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

In effect, I’m calling the bet, but I don’t raise. I simply stay in the hand to see what will happen. Three dollars a word, comes the next email. Done. I’ve won the hand and extracted more value than I ever thought I could from it. Thank you, Aggressive Idiot Asshole; you have taught me well.

If you talk to Vanessa Selbst or Liv Boeree, these girls are really brilliant. I mean there are obviously plenty of very bright men as well. But somehow we have a really impressive crop of female players.”

I should challenge myself to be active. To raise. To check-raise. To three-bet.

in any given tournament field, the percentage of women participants consistently hovers around three), but for the most part, it’s the bros in suits who are here to play. The evening gowns and décolletés are here to watch and socialize.

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.

They can’t possibly fall yet again. We’ll forget what historian Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular”—a lesson history teaches particularly well.

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.

Vegas was dreamt up out of almost nothing. Before Hoover Dam gave it steady water and power, it was a struggling town most notable as a stopover for those who wanted to get to the real city, Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until Bugsy Siegel brought in the mob and built the Flamingo that Vegas started acquiring something of a more permanent sheen, as a place that wasn’t just on the way to Hollywood but somewhere Hollywood fantasies could come to life.