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A review by icecurtain
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova
5.0
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?