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

Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions.

I feel like a total impostor, a fool who lucked into a room where she surely does not belong. Jared wouldn’t approve of my thinking, but I can’t help myself. We worked on this very thing. “Remember,” he tells me. “You haven’t seen those players in the lead-up to their peak. You don’t know that they were staked in their first hundred-K. You don’t kn

It’s helpful advice far beyond the poker table. Streamlined decisions. No immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. These are the tools that help us cool down rather than act in the moment, that help us stay rational and look at longer time horizons. Streamlining my thought process may make me harder to read—but it will also make my thou

Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and men

“Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.”

“Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it. You want to make sure you’re not the person in the poker room saying, ‘Can you believe what happened?’ That’s the ot

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better t