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

isn’t actually that long. That’s how long it took between my sitting down at my first tournament and my winning my first tournament. Sure, a baby tournament. But a win is a win.

According to a 2012 study from researchers at Harvard University, the dragonfly manages to capture an astounding 95 percent of its targeted prey.

All too often, we stay in a hand long after we should have gotten out.

Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.

But as you dive into a new undertaking, it’s easy to lose perspective and, in the process, lose part of yourself and part of your reason

Gambler’s fallacy—the faulty idea that probability has a memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.

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.

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

There are the more legitimate booths, too. D&B Poker, a publisher of poker books, is advertising a new book by Chris Moorman, about his path to becoming “the most successful online poker player of all time.” A huge cardboard cutout of what I assume is Moorman himself stands next to a display of books.