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365 reviews for:
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
4.0 AVERAGE
365 reviews for:
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
4.0 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Enjoyable, but I think I expected more - the blurb sold it as an examination of decision making through poker as an exercise and there was quite a bit of that but... at times I found it was really mostly about poker and a bit less about psychology. I did enjoy the many interesting characters though and it is a brilliant story.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
This book actually made me want to try to learn poker. I've never been a gambler and am quite risk averse in that way, but it made it clear that it involves luck, but isn't in the same class as most gambling. I feel like there could be a lot to learn through the process (though it seems like a huge time investment). I found this book to be an interesting combination of educational and reminiscent of a memoir/autobiography. It was not a mind blowing book by any stretch, but it was good and enjoyable.
I read the author's earlier work on how people get conned, and this looked interesting. It was, very much. I still don't really understand much about poker, but hardcore poker people would probably really like this. Konnikova set out to see how poker could help her make decisions in other areas of her life, and I found it useful in the same way. As a statistics nerd, I could relate to her approach. Fans of this might look into How Not to be Wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg, but if I remember correctly, you need to be even more of a math geek to get as much out of that book.
The Biggest Bluff is, forgive me for my straightforward analogy, a sort of bluff. Konnikova promises the story of her (impossibly good) first year of playing poker, which saw her playing at internationally competitive tournaments that only a select few thousand will be able to play (and even fewer to make money at) each year. In this sense, she's made a hefty pre-flop bet, because literature-starved poker afficionados (yes, that's me too) are on the constant lookout for anything worthwhile to read about poker; unfortunately, as soon as the flop comes, she's drawing dead all the way to the river.
The narrative is not strong enough (or, rather, written strongly enough) to support her frequent meditations on psychology and human behaviour, and those meditations are in turn not insightful enough to warrant the narrative (most often they are in reference to well-known studies which provided interesting outcomes; they stand interesting on their own, but are only bound to the narrative through Konnikova's linking of them to her present situation). This is the real tragedy of the book because Konnikova herself is obviously brilliant, yet she was still unable to make an interesting read out of one of the most interesting player stories of the last twenty years.
I honestly spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made the narrative crawl, and I think the most likely answer is the summarisation of tournaments and metanarrative (by which I mean the story of the story; the time that Konnikova spends talking about writing the book). Maybe a more minute, captured narrative would have worked better, in which Konnikova recounts a more detailed tournament experience with occasional departures to past lessons with Seidel or meetings with other professional players.
The strongest parts of this book, if you couldn't tell, are the anecdotes. Witnessing Kevin Hart placing side-bets on push-ups at the WSOP and meeting with these interesting, often washed-up and down on their luck professional poker players is juicy content. A more straightforward narrative with emphasis on her most notable poker experiences (with the Psychology-Philosophy interwoven) would have made for a better read.
Tl;dr: The book can't compete with the poker canon (Alvarez, McManus, Yardley) but is enjoyable as a light self-help guide written through the experience of a professional poker with a strong background in academic psychology. I really wanted to like this book.
The narrative is not strong enough (or, rather, written strongly enough) to support her frequent meditations on psychology and human behaviour, and those meditations are in turn not insightful enough to warrant the narrative (most often they are in reference to well-known studies which provided interesting outcomes; they stand interesting on their own, but are only bound to the narrative through Konnikova's linking of them to her present situation). This is the real tragedy of the book because Konnikova herself is obviously brilliant, yet she was still unable to make an interesting read out of one of the most interesting player stories of the last twenty years.
I honestly spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made the narrative crawl, and I think the most likely answer is the summarisation of tournaments and metanarrative (by which I mean the story of the story; the time that Konnikova spends talking about writing the book). Maybe a more minute, captured narrative would have worked better, in which Konnikova recounts a more detailed tournament experience with occasional departures to past lessons with Seidel or meetings with other professional players.
The strongest parts of this book, if you couldn't tell, are the anecdotes. Witnessing Kevin Hart placing side-bets on push-ups at the WSOP and meeting with these interesting, often washed-up and down on their luck professional poker players is juicy content. A more straightforward narrative with emphasis on her most notable poker experiences (with the Psychology-Philosophy interwoven) would have made for a better read.
Tl;dr: The book can't compete with the poker canon (Alvarez, McManus, Yardley) but is enjoyable as a light self-help guide written through the experience of a professional poker with a strong background in academic psychology. I really wanted to like this book.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Fantastic writing by Konnikova in this one. I don't think someone could do a better job of blending together her development as a player with the inner workings of the human mind. It's a truly unique read and I quickly found myself enraptured by the tales from the table just as much as the complex discussions of human decision-making.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I found this hard to follow along because I don't understand Texas Hold 'Em as well as I thought I did. I was a bit lost on the passing and opening, as well as the blinds. Rather than look it up, or watch a YouTube video on it, I just muddled through. Besides, I was really most interested in the psychological insights. I don't feel like I came out of this with any new insights.
This book most definitely wasn't for me.
This book most definitely wasn't for me.
I am developing a pet theory that a book about anything can in fact be a book about philosophy. This is a book about poker, kind of. The author, who presumably leveraged the credibility granted her as a regularly contributing writer to the New Yorker to gain access to the mentorship of many poker greats (I am taking her word/Penguin Press's fact checking for it) as she set out to learn how to play poker, but in fact, learned so much more than she ever expected about herself. Because poker provides thousands of opportunities to apply and learn from in a very practical way concepts that the author picked up getting her PhD in psychology.
This sounds kind of cynical, and it is, but I also really enjoyed this book and will carry some things forward with me. The idea that letting go can be a truly strong act. The idea that the more you learn, the harder it gets, because as you learn more, you see flaws you weren't even aware of that now you need to fix. There's this idea of an inchworm, where you slowly push your best work, your average work, and your worst work forward. The mantra "less certainty, more inquiry."
This sounds kind of cynical, and it is, but I also really enjoyed this book and will carry some things forward with me. The idea that letting go can be a truly strong act. The idea that the more you learn, the harder it gets, because as you learn more, you see flaws you weren't even aware of that now you need to fix. There's this idea of an inchworm, where you slowly push your best work, your average work, and your worst work forward. The mantra "less certainty, more inquiry."