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363 reviews for:
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
4.0 AVERAGE
363 reviews for:
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Maria Konnikova
4.0 AVERAGE
Research and story woven together
I picked up this book after first listening to Maria's interview on Freakonomics Radio. Maria has a great way of weaving together research and story. I enjoyed reading about her personal story as much as I liked diving into the research she presented. A word of advice: watch some videos and read some Poker 101 before you read the book if you know nothing about the game like me. You need some knowledge to visualize many scenes in the book.
I picked up this book after first listening to Maria's interview on Freakonomics Radio. Maria has a great way of weaving together research and story. I enjoyed reading about her personal story as much as I liked diving into the research she presented. A word of advice: watch some videos and read some Poker 101 before you read the book if you know nothing about the game like me. You need some knowledge to visualize many scenes in the book.
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
A compelling look inside the world of professional poker players, written by a PhD. psychologist who studies risk and chance. The author decided to apprentice with top player Erik Seidel in order to learn how to compete in an event where only 3% of the players are female. She proposed the idea to her publisher and received an advance for the writing.
Konnikova infuses her internship with interesting data from psychological studies that have analyzed risk and chance, bringing a research base to this glimpse into the world or professional poker.
Konnikova infuses her internship with interesting data from psychological studies that have analyzed risk and chance, bringing a research base to this glimpse into the world or professional poker.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Had good reviews but didn’t really pull me in until the last 2 chapters, not for me !
If you know/like poker, this is a 5 star book; I didn't - so basically all of the poker discussion went right over my head.
However, it was still a really interesting read, and got better as I read more. A psychologist by trade, she jumped into the world of Poker as a means to examine the mind’s responses to conditions involving skill, chance and variance. She intertwines her experience stumbling around the Poker world with her expertise in psychology and makes some pretty insightful points about decision making, biases, human emotion, and chance.
"There’s no skill in birth and death - at the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Most of the world is noise and we spend most of the lives making sense of it. We don’t know what the next cards will be. We don’t even know when we see if it’s good or bad."
“Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?”
However, it was still a really interesting read, and got better as I read more. A psychologist by trade, she jumped into the world of Poker as a means to examine the mind’s responses to conditions involving skill, chance and variance. She intertwines her experience stumbling around the Poker world with her expertise in psychology and makes some pretty insightful points about decision making, biases, human emotion, and chance.
"There’s no skill in birth and death - at the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Most of the world is noise and we spend most of the lives making sense of it. We don’t know what the next cards will be. We don’t even know when we see if it’s good or bad."
“Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?”
An enjoyable tale of a psychologist/journalist who decided to go from knowing nothing about poker to being a professional poker player in a year.
She effectively makes the case that winning at poker requires as much skill as luck. Her own journey is a compelling and entertaining tale, and it's easy to imagine this being made into a movie. She also tries to connect poker with life, helping us learn life lessons from the game. I can sort of see her point. In a short game, a person could find themselves running afoul of the sunk cost fallacy, or learning that portraying confidence can be as useful as actually having it, for example. I'm not sure that learning poker at an expert level would necessarily help people with those aspects in the rest of their life, however. But this book does help them become more real, less academic. If someone that has researched and written about these mental foibles falls prey to them when the pressure is on, how can we assume we are immune?
She effectively makes the case that winning at poker requires as much skill as luck. Her own journey is a compelling and entertaining tale, and it's easy to imagine this being made into a movie. She also tries to connect poker with life, helping us learn life lessons from the game. I can sort of see her point. In a short game, a person could find themselves running afoul of the sunk cost fallacy, or learning that portraying confidence can be as useful as actually having it, for example. I'm not sure that learning poker at an expert level would necessarily help people with those aspects in the rest of their life, however. But this book does help them become more real, less academic. If someone that has researched and written about these mental foibles falls prey to them when the pressure is on, how can we assume we are immune?
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
I really enjoyed the way she related poker skills with general decision making skills. Occasionally I found myself a little lost as she seemed to make leaps between sentences that I couldn’t quite follow, but it was a generally compelling read. And yeah, now I want to pick up poker.