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

if there’s ever a time to tread a bit more carefully when you’re not quite sure where you stand, it’s the Main. You should, generally speaking, be a little less trigger-happy in calling off light for your tournament life—that is, in making a marginal call that will end your run. Because, generally speaking, people won’t be putting you to that decis

Red is the lucky color; you’d be remiss if you weren’t wearing it. It’s an atmosphere unlike any I’ve encountered. It makes a typical Vegas casino floor seem pale and downright rational.

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 n

In one study of online poker, men bluffed 6 percent more often against someone with a female avatar than a male or neutral one—but, when confronted with that possibility, refused to believe it. In

Jared calls this one my beaten dog syndrome. “You don’t want future Maria to beat the shit out of you, and so you’re instinctively cowering to future Maria’s power.” I don’t have the guts because I’m afraid—still—of looking stupid, of making mistakes, of being judged and judging myself. Here’s how to deal with that beaten beast, he says: “Tell your

Except it really isn’t. Any tactician or strategist would tell you immediately that any edge is huge, and 2 percent is a big deal. What’s more, suitedness makes something a far stronger weapon: it’s easier to play. You have an added psychological edge because now you can navigate many situations much more clearly.

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has found that the absence of emotion—the actual clinical inability to experience emotion caused by lesions to an area of the brain called the VMPFC, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—can cause people to go broke on a gambling task.

Glory Days The Bahamas, January 2018

heads up, any suited hand, especially one with a high card, soars in value.

People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of