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

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.

“Oh, there is one thing. Charity tournaments are shove fests.” Shove fests? “They’re basically turbos. The blinds go up really quickly. You’re going to have to be aggressive. Really ramp it up.”

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.

The Venetian here is the single largest casino property in the world. Its annual profits exceed many countries’ GDPs.

They write, “The observed differences in ROIs are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns.” Success in poker, in other w

There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation. Even seven-deuce—the worst hand, statistically speaking, that you can be dealt—can be playable in the right circumstances. The thing is, the circumstances are usually not right—and the hyper-aggressive player may run over everyone for a while and forget that at some point,

For Erik, the answer is simple: there is no answer. It’s a constant process of inquiry. A hand can be played any number of ways, as long as the thought process is there. And Erik may himself decide to play the same cards, in the same position, even against the same opponents, in a different fashion from one day to the next. There is no certainty. T

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.

Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will te