What do you picture when you think of the most successful hunter in the animal kingdom? Likely a lion, or a cheetah, with its majestic run, or perhaps a wolf stalking its prey. They are all striking beasts. They are all powerful. They are all deadly. And none of them is even close to being the most successful. The cheetah comes in highest, killing

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.

That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs. I could definitely detect a slight cackle.

There’s a Buddhist proverb. A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs.

argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed.

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

You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance.

The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner. And the letter M itself? It comes from the last name of a player named Paul Magriel.

Indeed, when the economist Ingo Fiedler analyzed hundreds of thousands of hands played on several online poker sites over a six-month period, he found that the actual best hand won, on average, only 12 percent of the time and that less than a third of hands went to showdown (meaning that players were skillful enough to persuade others to let go of