Sublime

the sensible object of the player is to gain as much from the game as he can, safely, in the face of a skillful opponent who is pursuing an antithetical goal. This is our model of rational behavior. As with all models, the shoe has to be tried on each time an application comes along to see whether the fit is tolerable; but it is well known in the

Thomas Schelling in his wonderful essay “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

Look for a side suit in the dummy that has shortness — zero, one, or two cards (a void, singleton, or doubleton) — and then check to see whether you have more cards in that suit than the dummy. When you find such an unequally divided suit, you’re in business.

The decision tree must constantly be pruned. Move from one variation to the next, discarding the less promising moves and following up the better ones. Don’t jump to another before you’ve reached a conclusion on the move you’re analyzing; you’ll waste precious time and risk confusing yourself. You must also have a sense of when to stop. Discipline

Chess is easy if you think ahead, the further out the better. You have to weigh the strengths you have. Decide what pieces can be sacrificed. Choose what pieces need to be protected. But the key, Scott preached, if playing against any skilled opponent, was the fake. You had to convince them that you were moving down one path—maybe a dumb path, an

John Boyd’s OODA loop playing out at the table instead of in the air. Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop.

By far the best theory for describing the principles of our irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory. Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people choose between options that involve risk, like in a negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure things over