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

For a few years, it seemed like poker might be able to scoot by under the radar. But on April 15, 2011, known as Black Friday in the poker world, UIGEA was put in force for the first time. All three major poker sites that hadn’t yet left the US market—Full Tilt, PokerStars, and Absolute Poker—were indicted and their assets frozen. And that looked l

we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.”

There’s just one sound left in the room, reminiscent of a full-throated courting ritual of summer cicadas. It’s the sound of poker chips.

the thing that unites my encounters (apart from the obvious gender implications) is the lack of agency they foist on me. I’m placed in a position where I’m forced to react. Putting on my headphones reclaims some of that space for me.

They can’t possibly fall yet again. We’ll forget what historian Edward Gibbon warned about as far back as 1794, that “the laws of probability, so true in general, [are] so fallacious in particular”—a lesson history teaches particularly well.

Theory of Games is his foundational text, and here’s what I learned within its pages: the entire theory was inspired by a single game—poker. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.

Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will te

Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.