Book Review-Thinking In Bets By Annie Duke

I came upon this book when I read Stuart Firestein’s interview with Annie Duke in Nautilus magazine. The interview got me curious about the ideas in this book and I was fascinated by Annie Duke’s unusual background: being both a psychology graduate student at one time and a successful poker player. Graduate studies I know about, professional poker playing I did not. So the unique combination piqued my interest.

It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics. Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references, other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s academic training.

The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that as a foremost compliment.

The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life. In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.

Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision making is objective and accurate.  She delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.

Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable in Ms Duke’s narrative.

The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.

One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points. Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however, the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was not only necessary but critical.

I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus would be very good.

I obviously liked the book.