I knew very little about poker before reading this, and the book does not really explain the game -- I had to read a bit about it on my own. But once you know the game mechanics, this is a really interesting reflection on how to cope with/thrive in settings where skill matters, but your performance is also significantly affected by luck. Konnikova makes the case that many scenarios in real life (e.g., aiming for a job that is extremely hard to get) fit this description and that poker is a good sandbox to study them. Also, Konnikova goes from knowing nothing about poker to becoming a professional player in just over a year, so there are a lot of lessons tucked away about quickly becoming good at new things.
Lots of takeaways from the book; some of my favorites:
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- Konnikova challenges the preconceived notion (which I had!) that poker is a mindless way to fritter your money away. The difference in ROIs between good and bad poker players is way higher than the analog in investing, implying that success in poker relies more on skill than investing, even though investing is typically held in higher esteem as a profession.
- People consistently and quickly develop an illusion of control even when they don't have any; in an investment simulation, people very quickly formed opinions based on ~no information about which stocks were "good" or "bad" and would stick with their guns even later, when empirical evidence strongly suggested they shouldn't.
- It's really important to lose/fail early whenever you're doing something new to prevent yourself from building the illusion of control when it isn't warranted. In one experiment, students had to guess the results of a series of coin tosses (completely random). If students were told they had a string of correct guesses at the beginning, they believed that they were good at and could improve at this completely random task; the students didn't have this response if they failed early or evenly throughout.
- Poker makes explicit how much it costs to be passive; it's easy to "get by" in life without making big decisions or taking risks, and people often don't regret doing this until much later. In poker, if you do this, you'll slowly lose all your chips without ever making a big amount back.
- Everyone talks about having a "poker face," but people are actually better at telling whether poker players are bluffing by looking at their hands, instead of their faces.
- It's a lot easier to see other people's sunk costs and bad decisions than it is to notice them in yourself as you're making them (kind of obvious, but the kind of thing you have to keep reminding yourself of). Lots of the same ideas as in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed.
- Konnikova talks about being "tilted" -- getting to a state where your emotions completely govern your decision-making and how to avoid this. In particular, she made a spreadsheet with examples of her triggers, her reactions, and how she could have responded better. This initially sounded like overkill to me but also seems to have helped her a lot, and I wonder if it would make most of us reflect a bit more.
- Elite chess players can burn upto 6,000 calories a day in tournaments, just like elite athletes!
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