The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

Members were divided about this book. Some of us couldn’t get past the fact that the author is playing poker in it and they either had no interest in the game or were not familiar with it and found the discussion of it difficult. Others found the book too dense, too much like an academic text, filled with ‘psychological babble’. Others of us were completely fascinated, read it twice, and went so far as to download an app to teach them basic poker.

To summarise the story, the author’s family had a particularly bad year in 2015. Firstly, Maria’s mother loses her job after almost 20 years with the same company and struggles to find a new position because of her age. Then her elderly grandmother dies after an accidental fall. Next, her husband loses his job and the author finds herself supporting her family on a freelance writer’s income. Finally, the author’s own health declines after she is diagnosed with an unknown autoimmune condition that keeps her shut up in her apartment on steroid medical regimes.

The author is a psychologist with a PhD and so in order to try to gain some feeling of control again in her life after all this apparent bad luck she reads widely about chance. In so doing she comes across John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, which was inspired by his love of playing poker. For von Neumann, poker mirrors life. It isn’t the ‘roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information’. In poker, luck is a ‘short-term friend or foe. Skill shines through’. While poker has a mathematical foundation, there is a dose of ‘human intention, interaction, psychology - nuance, deception, little tricks that … help you gain an edge over others’. It is about making the ‘best decisions you can from information that can never be complete’.

Maria Konnikova tells the reader she has been interested in decision making in the face of chance and uncertainty for many years, wanting to know how much of her life she could take credit for and how much was ‘just stupid luck’. She talks about how amazingly unlikely is her birth (to quote the Monty Python lyric) and how with seven billion of us on the planet the ‘once in a million’ outcome is happening every second somewhere in the world, but we don't tend to notice until it happens to us.

She explains that she had been to grad school to develop studies about how people make decisions in the face of incomplete information, spending five years on it as part of her doctoral research at Columbia University. She discovers that people overestimate the degree of control they have over events; and the more they do this the more they fail to learn what their environment is trying to tell them and the worse their decisions become. She found as humans our own life experiences trump probabilities in our decision-making. We don’t heed statistical data so much as use our gut instincts and intuition.

She found her study participants “did what worked in the past, or what they had decided would work - and failed to grasp that the circumstances had shifted so that a previously successful strategy was no longer so. … We humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.”

From her studies and reading von Neumann, the author realises that poker is a good place to learn good decision-making - it is experiential and embodies the way the human mind learns best - through a systematic process over time. There are probabilities you can learn and you have a real stake in the outcome. In a tournament, feedback is immediate and causes real consequences (i.e. you lose or win real money).

She convinces New York world poker champion, Erik Seidel, to teach her to play competitive poker. She admits she doesn’t even know how many cards there are in a pack of cards and certainly has never played poker before but aims to enter the World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournament within just one year (there is a $10,000 entry fee as an incentive to do well when she gets there).

Erik takes her on because of her psychological background which, perhaps surprisingly, he sees as being more useful in playing poker than having a maths or data oriented background. Maria is pleased because she ‘hasn’t done any math since high school’ and counts on her fingers.

The fact that Maria is humorously self-depreciating about herself throughout the book helps us to take her side and follow with interest how she progresses. It needs to be said that she has a wonderful (if unemployed) husband who supports her in taking on the assignment. The rest of the family is also supportive, apart from her surviving Russian grandmother who can’t get past the idea that poker is gambling and not a proper subject for serious study.

Erik Seidel, and the other poker champions Maria comes across throughout the book, are also part of the interest in this book. Some of you may have heard of Erik through the 1990s movie Rounders where he is a poker whiz kid who is beaten by world champion, Johnny Chan. (Then again, maybe not!). Erik is admired for his longevity (three decades) in the game at a world class level. Unlike many champion poker players, Maria finds he is quiet and reserved but constantly curious, flexible and open minded about the game, while also taking a wide interest in a diverse range of other things, including everything culinary or culturally happening in New York.

(If you are a fan of Australian musicians, Angus and Julia Stone, he mentions liking their music.) His advice to Martha: Pay attention.

Maria clearly likes him and doesn’t want to let him down. She discovers she can not skip any steps and must put in hours of hard work, talk to professionals, review their play online, study their books and analyse hands. When she starts to play herself online she finds losing to be a good teacher, particularly when she reviews what she has done in the game with Erik. She does not play a game in the flesh with other players until only a few months out from the WSOP in Las Vegas.

She finds out that playing across the table from real people is a whole new ball game and understands the statistic that the actual best hands in poker win only about 12 per cent of the time while the rest is won by players who persuade their opponents to let go of their hands. (She also finds out that professional poker players have a better return on investment in their line of work than stockbrokers or investment bankers who are paid to do exactly the same thing- !). As a woman, she discovers that one of the reasons there are so few professional women poker players (about three per cent) may be due to the harassment they get at the tables. She discovers a headset is her best friend.

She takes coaching to overcome her ‘social conditioning’ and learn aggression when the strategy warrants it, and how to bring out her ‘inner Sherlock Holmes’ by learning non-verbal communication skills (it’s in the hands, not the face). She also learns how to disguise her own non-verbal signals.

The book teaches a range of psychological ideas about decision- making in the face of chance and uncertainty. It is also scattered with interesting literary references to poker, luck and chance from a wide range of authors and from different times.

While you will learn about the game of poker in this book, the core is about what Maria learns about herself while playing poker. She does gain skill and experience and ends up winning serious money, while also achieving fame through writing and speaking about what she has learnt. However, she also learns how much life can decide things for you. What is The Biggest Bluff? Up to you to decide.

Who is Maria Konnikova?

Maria Konnikova is a Russian-born American non-fiction writer with a BA in psychology and creative writing from Harvard University and a PhD in psychology from Columbia University.

While at Harvard she was mentored by psychologist and popular author, Steven Pinker. Some of you may have read his books.

She has worked as a television producer, written for several magazines including Scientific American and The New Yorker and online publications and audio programs including the podcast The Gist.

She has written three books: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (2013), The Confidence Game (2016), and The Biggest Bluff (2020). She primarily writes about psychology and its application to real life situations.

After winning significant money at poker in 2018 she decided to delay work on The Biggest Bluff to compete in more tournaments, taking up professional poker and playing full-time. She became affiliated with PokerStars, on online gaming site, and became a PokerStars Ambassador with the company sponsoring her in professional tournaments. However she has since quit professional play.