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

What the researchers determined was that the accuracy of the diagnosis didn’t actually improve—but the certainty in that diagnosis became much greater. And that disconnect, the overconfidence in your opinion that comes from thinking you know more than you do simply because you have more information available to you, can be a dangerous thing.
Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning. What do you do if your lucky charm falls down the drain or the cleaners lose the shirt that led you to victory?
Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
If you’re skeptical of any prescriptive advice to begin with, if “less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.
Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and even then, we often ignore the numbers in favor
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“But for its costliness and dangers, no better education for life among men could be devised than the gambling table—especially the poker table.” CLEMENS FRANCE, THE GAMBLING IMPULSE, 1902
Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
“Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,” Blake suggests. As long as I always do that, I ensure that I’m thinking through every hand at every part of my range, aces and suited connectors and trash alike. Because I’ve thought before I acted, I act with confidence every time—and I act with a delay every time. There’s
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Primero traveled across Europe, variably termed primiera, la prime, and eventually pochen, a German name derived from the verb “to bluff.” The French took pochen and made it poqué—and soon, the game would morph into a new form.
Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
It’s called the description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light—and even then, we often ignore the
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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
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