What’s in it for me? Learn how to take control over whatever cards life deals you.
It’s the spring of 2016. Maria Konnikova has never played a game of poker in her life; she doesn’t even know how many cards are in a deck. So how did she convince world champion poker player Erik Seidel to be her mentor?
Unlike other poker hopefuls, Maria wasn’t interested in winning millions. Instead, as a writer with a PhD in psychology, she was interested in understanding what poker could teach her about life and its uncertainties. And so, under the guidance of Seidel and other poker experts, she set out for a year of training in preparation for the World Series of Poker, or WSOP.
In these blinks, you’ll find out how Maria went from poker novice to high-earning champion – and the lessons she learned along the way.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
what wisdom has sustained Erik Seidel’s three-decade career;
why a poker face won’t hide your bluffs; and
how to be resilient when the odds are against you.
No Limit Texas Hold’em mirrors our probabilistic universe.
In No Limit Texas Hold’em, each player is dealt two cards facedown. There are also community cards, which are dealt faceup in the center of the table. The three community cards dealt after the first round of betting are known as “the flop.” Over the course of the game, two additional community cards are added to the table.
In a tournament, poker chips represent a player’s financial stake in the game. The goal is to win as many chips as possible.
Going clockwise around the table, each player has to decide whether to play or fold, which means you discard your hand. If you decide to play your cards, you have the option to call, or match the prior bet’s amount. Or you can raise, which means upping the amount of the prior bet. Over the four rounds of betting, you can try to estimate how your cards stack up against other players’ cards based on their behavior. At the end, the player who holds the best hand of cards – or who hasn’t folded – wins the game.
No Limit Texas Hold’em is the most popular variant of poker. But Maria chose to pursue this particular game because of its parallels to daily life.
The key message here is: No Limit Texas Hold’em mirrors our probabilistic universe.
One of the features that differentiates No Limit Texas Hold’em from other kinds of poker is its balance between known and unknown factors. Between your two cards and the community cards, you have enough information so that the game isn’t entirely unpredictable.
At the same time, there’s nothing definite about the game – even if you learn the mathematical probabilities of certain hands. The resulting ratio between known and unknown factors makes it a game balanced between skill and chance. As the twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann argued, poker mirrors the probabilistic universe that governs our daily lives.
Another distinguishing feature of No Limit Texas Hold’em is that there’s no limit to the amount you can bet. At any round of the game, you can place an all-in bet, meaning you place all of your chips in the pot. Life is a similarly high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Nothing stops us from investing all of our money, heart, or even life itself into investments with no guarantees.
If you’re confused about the rules of poker, don’t worry. It’s a complex game. Even Maria needed months of rigorous study to understand it fully. Luckily, you don’t need to be a master poker player to apply its wisdom to your own rulebook.
Losing well is key to learning how to win.
If you want to learn a new skill, the best place to start is by finding a good mentor. Maria’s mentor, Erik Seidel, holds the fourth-highest tournament career winnings in the history of poker. He also has a place in the Poker Hall of Fame. In other words, Erik Seidel knows how to win.
Many poker champions have eventually gone bust or spent all of their earnings. But at the time of publication, Erik was still around after over thirty years. Some consider him the greatest poker player of all time. So what’s the secret to his lasting success? It turns out that Erik’s strength is not only winning, but also knowing how to lose.
The key message here is: Losing well is key to learning how to win.
When it came to teaching Maria poker basics, Erik sent her to meet with Dan Harrington. Harrington wrote the classic poker textbook Harrington on Hold’em. In the text, Harrington details the different playing styles in poker. But his advice in person was more philosophical. To conquer poker, he warned, Maria would first have to conquer herself. And by conquering herself, he meant learning her weaknesses by losing – over and over again.
When it comes to mastering a new skill, failure is the best teacher. Early triumph has the risk of building overconfidence or delusion. But failure forces you to examine your process so that you can continue to learn and grow. In poker, the ability to be objective about your situation comes in especially handy when you’re dealt a losing hand during the game.
Learning the art of losing is also the key to sustaining a career in the long run. One of the reasons Erik is still in the game is that he’s able to lose gracefully and pick himself back up again. Many other players take loss as a personal defeat and deflect the blame away from themselves, but Erik continues to see loss as a learning opportunity.
Losing well is a skill Erik has used on and off the poker tables. In 1987, Erik lost his job on Wall Street after the stock market crash, just as his wife got pregnant. Instead of wallowing in the misfortune, he reassessed his options. Having been a skilled backgammon player, he pivoted to studying poker. It wasn’t long before he started winning and earning a name for himself as an international poker champion.
Playing smart means not caring about what others think of you.
As Maria began her journey learning poker in the fall of 2016, her life in New York City assumed a new routine. A few days each week, she joined Erik for a walk near his apartment on the Upper West Side. When she wasn’t meeting Erik, she was taking the train to New Jersey. Online gambling is legal there, and she would play poker on her laptop in various coffee shops.
Online poker affords novice players the opportunity to practice without having to travel to live tournaments. Plus, Maria could record her games so that she could review her hands with Erik.
The key message here is: Playing smart means not caring about what others think of you.
In one of her online matches, Maria made an early bet using a jack and a ten – and ended up with a hand called an open-ended straight draw. There are a variety of ways she could have played this hand. But instead, she focused on concealing the fact that she was a novice. Not long after, she was forced to fold.
Later on, Erik asked her why she had bet on the jack-ten so early in the game. Her reasoning was that he had mentioned the jack-ten was a good drawing hand. And hadn’t she won with it before? As soon as the words had left her mouth, she remembered another piece of Erik’s advice. A better strategy would have been to hold on to her position and see how the other players reacted before she played those cards. By raising the jack-ten based on it being “a good hand,” she was clinging to certainties rather than making her own decisions.
The truth was that Maria didn’t have sound reasoning for any of her decisions. She had been preoccupied with convincing Erik she wasn’t a weak player. Meanwhile, all Erik wanted was for her to think through each decision carefully.
A few weeks later, Maria received a proposal to write a magazine article for a small sum. In the past, she had asked the same editor for more money immediately – and been turned down. But this time, she mentioned that she hadn’t been taking on much freelance work since she was working on a book. By waiting to play her cards, Maria was offered more money from the editor for the first time.
Social conditioning may be affecting your playing style.
With her background in psychology, Maria had some ideas about the masculine world she was getting herself into. She had read a study revealing that men in online poker bluffed 6 percent more frequently when another player’s avatar was female. With this in mind, Maria made her online poker username “thepsychchic.” That way, she could prepare herself for the realities of how she would be treated at live poker tournaments.
What she didn’t realize until later on was how her social conditioning as a female informed her own performance at the poker table.
The key message here is: Social conditioning may be affecting your playing style.
As a complete beginner to the game of poker, Maria believed she had an advantage. She had no bad habits or prior thought patterns. She was a blank slate ready to learn from the best minds in the game. Yet, when it came to playing, she struggled with exerting an aggressive style.
At her first live tournament in New York, Erik pointed out that she needed to rev up her assertiveness. For example, instead of folding, she should consider bluffing in certain situations. He suggested that using an aggressive playing style could be an advantage. Why? Because male players are likely to think a woman isn’t capable of aggressive moves.
Ultimately, Maria realized that her failure to play aggressively had to do with her social conditioning as a woman. As it turned out, she wasn’t a blank slate at all. Instead, she had brought to the game a lifetime of internalized behavior, learned from a world that punishes women for behaving aggressively.
Research by Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has found that women in leadership positions are perceived more negatively than their male counterparts when they act in a way that comes off as assertive. As a result, women are conditioned to behave passively.
As a successful author with a PhD in psychology, Maria had believed that she had overcome this social conditioning. But playing poker showed her this was not the case.
At first, this realization was so painful that she even considered ending her poker endeavor. But after a night’s rest, she felt reinvigorated to challenge stereotypes and prove herself to be a worthy champion.
Focus on how you played – not on the cards you were dealt.
In the winter of 2017, six months before the WSOP, Maria traveled to Las Vegas for the first time to practice live poker on a daily basis.
As soon as she arrived in Vegas, she began planning visits to casinos like the popular Caesars and MGM Grand. But Erik quickly redirected her to casinos where the buy-ins were at her level. The small blow to her ego subsided when she realized how much more she still had to learn.
The key message here is: Focus on how you played – not on the cards you were dealt.
At a small $60 tournament at Bally’s casino, Maria made it to the final four. She was excited when she found herself with a good hand called a flopped set of nines, and placed an all-in bet. But just when she thought she would win her first tournament cash, it turned out that someone had a better hand of cards; Maria was busted out.
Back at the more prestigious poker ground of the Aria, Maria found Erik on a break during a $25,000 buy-in event. She began to rehash her downfall, but Erik interrupted her. Did she have a question about how she had played? Not exactly, she responded, before starting to describe the cards she had been dealt. Once again, Erik uncharacteristically stopped her. If she didn’t have a question about how she had played, he told her, he wasn’t interested.
Erik explained that it’s a bad mental habit to obsess over bad bets or hands that seem great but lose anyway. Instead of focusing on luck, he said, Maria should focus on her process.
Reflecting on the advice later on, Maria considered the ways in which our thoughts about luck affect our emotions, decisions, and worldview. Resilience, she observed, helps us overcome past misfortune and better prepare for the future.
In poker, your attitude toward bad luck matters. Do you see yourself as a victim of bad luck, or a victor for making the best decision under tough circumstances? In the worst case, you might spiral to believe that trying is futile when luck is stacked against you. The same can be said of life: if you focus too much on luck, you might end up wallowing in your misfortune. Instead, focus on the parts of your life you can control, and find opportunities to move forward.
Bluff better by focusing on your execution, not your face.
In 2013, a graduate student at Tufts University conducted a study using videos of professional poker players at the 2009 WSOP. The goal was to find out how people act when trying to hide secrets. The study asked undergraduates to guess how good a hand was based on the player’s behavior. Some videos were altered so that they only showed a player’s face. Others videos were cropped so that they only revealed a player’s arms.
Many of us assume that bluffing well is about maintaining a good poker face. But the study at Tufts revealed that a player’s face doesn’t say much about their cards. When the participants looked at the cropped videos of hands, they had a much more accurate reading of how strong or weak a player’s cards were.
The key message here is: Bluff better by focusing on your execution, not your face.
The fact that a poker face doesn’t make a champion poker player was obvious to Maria. After hours of playing at a tournament, maintaining an expressionless face becomes a tiresome exercise. But she was guilty of attempting to read her opponents by their immediate appearances. More often than not, these readings were based on her own implicit biases.
Focusing on other people’s hands is one thing you can do to gain insight into their cards. But Maria also wanted to make her own bluffing less obvious. So she consulted with Blake Eastman, a behavioral analyst and former poker player. Eastman analyzed hours of videos of Maria playing. He revealed that she had a habit of rechecking her cards. This signaled that the hand was too complicated to remember with a glance.
Maria also had a tendency to play too consistently early on in the evening. Any deviation from her behavior thus became a tell, especially later on in a match when she was tired. Instead of trying to act robotically throughout the entire game, Eastman suggested that she focus on being consistent in her execution. He advised her to pause with every action – not just whenever she was thinking harder. Forcing herself to pause would also help her fight fatigue and keep up her performance over the course of the evening.
At the WSOP, Maria failed to practice the art of letting go.
When Maria set out on her journey, her goal was to master the craft and attend the WSOP in Las Vegas in a year. After all, one year sounded good for the purposes of the book she was writing.
The problem was that the WSOP 2017 wasn’t a neat twelve months away. When she began playing in early fall, the June event was only seven months away. Sure, she had begun doing better in some tournaments, including placing 193rd at a €1,100 – roughly $1,300 – National Championship in Monte Carlo. But in the weeks leading up to June, it became increasingly evident that she wasn’t quite ready for the $10,000 buy-in at the WSOP Main Event. She wanted to do it anyway.
The key message here is: At the WSOP, Maria failed to practice the art of letting go.
Instead of asking Erik whether she was ready, she just told him that she was going to play. In retrospect, Maria should have reflected on her circumstances – just like poker experts had taught her to. Even though the WSOP was five months earlier than her original deadline, she didn’t want to face this circumstance and adapt to it. Deep down, she wanted to win the cash and earn the praise for mastering poker in less than a year.
Maria was determined to play. Even when she felt the early signs of a migraine on the morning of the first day, she didn’t pull out of the $10,000 investment. And so, hours after Maria showed up at the event, she ended up on the bathroom floor of the Rio Hotel and Casino, vomiting.
Because of the buy-in for every round, by the time she made it back to the table, her chips had dwindled in her absence. With some luck, she managed to make it to the second day. But at that point, her performance was in shambles.
When she was dealt a top pair of cards, she prematurely raised without pausing to think. Then, when one opponent’s behavior indicated that he had a strong hand, she called rather than folding. It turned out that the opponent held the nut flush, the best possible hand of cards. In other words, Maria had to leave the tournament.
Anticipate your tilts to stay focused in the present.
Maria’s year of poker proved to be more than a mere exercise. After the WSOP, she had no intention of giving up the game that had taught her so many life lessons. She also knew that she needed to reassess. So she took up psychologist and mental game coach Jared Tendler’s offer to meet with him for a few sessions. If her own background as a psychologist wasn’t enough for her to master poker, perhaps a second opinion would be.
When you sit down at the poker table, you bring along all of your emotional baggage. At the end of the day, you’re only human. So if you want to play your best game, you need to understand your emotions before they affect the way you play. With practice, you can anticipate the emotions a situation might trigger and recenter on your decision-making.
The key message here is: Anticipate your tilts to stay focused in the present.
Tendler assigned Maria an exercise to identify her emotional triggers and what reactions, thoughts, or behaviors they caused while she played. To the best of her ability, she was to pinpoint the underlying cause of these triggers. Then she would write a statement that she could turn to when a challenging situation arose.
After some reflection, Maria realized that many of the emotional upsets that had impacted her playing were triggered by men – specifically, those who provoked her with unsolicited attention or patronizing advice. In one situation, a man from Texas asked her out for a drink and continued to proposition her during the game, well after she told him she was married. He even brought up that his son had died before asking once more. When the floor refused to move him to another table, the anger she felt caused her to lose a pot and bust out of the tournament.
Luckily, Maria found a simple solution to tune out of similar situations. In the future, she could put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones before her emotional reaction disrupted her play.
By understanding that even champion players are only human, Maria was able to start overcoming her feeling that she didn’t belong in poker. And, as she gained confidence, she slowly began to improve at the tables. At a €2,200 buy-in event in Prague – about $2,500 – she placed twentieth. And not long after, in January 2018, she won her first major international title, taking home $84,600 as the 2018 PokerStar Carribean Adventure National champion.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
While Maria Konnikova’s poker journey was aided by the best experts in the field, her ultimate mastery over the masculine world of Texas Hold’em came when she turned to examine her own inner thought processes. Konnikova’s exploration of skill and chance reveals truths that can be applied both on and off the poker tables. By focusing on the development of our own skills, thinking, and performance rather than the cards we are dealt, we can get through life’s rough patches and be prepared for when luck is on our side once more.
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What to read next: The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova
As you’ve just learned, Maria Konnikova used her background in psychology to explore the balance between control and luck in both cards and her daily life. But before she became a poker champion, Konnikova was spending extensive time around a different kind of player.
In The Confidence Game, Konnikova delves into the world of con artists, revealing how they make their money by hacking the flaws of human nature. She examines how con artists take advantage of basic human characteristics, such as trust and optimism, and get rich in the process.
To find out why people buy into the unlikely stories of con artists and ignore incriminating evidence, head over to our blinks to The Confidence Game.