Book Review-The Biggest Bluff By Maria Konnikova

This long-anticipated book had an unusual buzz surrounding its publication because both the psychology and the poker world were expectantly waiting for the publication. Maria Konnikova is a respected journalist who has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, amongst many other publications. She has a PhD in psychology, and she was advised by Walter Mischel of the marshmallow experiment fame ˗ her pedigree is impeccable. This is her third book, but the excitement around this book is different than most other non-fiction books on psychology and her other books. She has done media podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews with numerous luminaries in the psychology and journalistic world before; this time there are media podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews with numerous luminaries in the poker world in addition. The heterogeneous interest level can be explained by the subtitle  of this book: How I learned to pay attention, master myself, and win.

The book easily surpasses the initial hype through the quality writing and honesty exhibited by the author. Konnikova’s story has been told numerous times, but it bears repeating here. She had gone through some devastating personal travails, as a result  she wanted to investigate her own decision-making process and how other people make decisions differently. This has been her research area during her professional life as a psychologist and as a journalist so it isn’t surprising; she did narrow her focus in this investigation on how personal biases affects decision making and how those biases subtly and unobtrusively change the decisions critically. She decided after watching the film Rounders that the poker is the ideal experimental ground for learning about good decision-making because the amount of uncertainty that envelopes the game all the time. The speed of the  decision-making necessary around the poker table makes it necessary for the players to be brutally honest with themselves if they are to be successful. Their mental calculations acknowledge the role that emotions play in their minds; indeed, they diligently seek out their own weaknesses in order to make their decision-making process better.

The book presents the events chronologically as we follow her adventure in poker playing around the world. Remarkably, the author talks about her complete lack of poker knowledge: she did not even know the number of  cards in a deck of cards when she started. Her goal, which is to compete in the World Series of Poker, WSOP, seemed to be impossible. When I first heard about the challenge, I thought it was a very  ambitious goal. It was not until after I read the book that I realize just how ambitious it was. The book was a great primer in the vagaries of the poker world, not just the game itself, but the interactions amongst the players, the variety of the games and the tournaments themselves. The sheer number of tournaments and variety of tournament rules were astonishing for an outsider.

Fortunately, she found a mentor who was willing to take a chance on her. Eric Seidel is well known as an extraordinarily successful poker player, but he is not well known as a teacher of his craft, for him to take on this task was a surprise. He has said in interviews that he was surprised that he was asked, but he read some of her articles and he liked the way she explored the topics that she wrote about, so he was in.  He ended up being a perfect mentor as he was gentle and yet also honest about what she was doing to herself on the poker table. In her telling of the tale, he acted the roles of the teacher, the confessor, the conscience, and the critic without making her feel like she did not belong, nor did he destroy her confidence. She did more self-deflation on her own. Seidel came off like such a Zen master that he seemed almost a caricature of Yoda,  except we all know that he is not a caricature at all, in other words, Konnikova kept her writing about him real.

She started out playing online poker games which taught her the basics of the game of poker and taught her the strategies and tactics she needed to survive, without having to deal with the real uncertainties: the other players. She read poker books voraciously. Fortunately for her, and as a bonus of the project, she had the opportunity to meet and interview many of these authors as a journalist, so she was buttressing her poker knowledge through their books while also exploring the authors philosophies.

Konnikova recounted many of the mistakes that she made during the entire year of playing, all  the mental and technical miscalculation as well as her psychological observations of herself, yet as she is describing her initial foray into online poker, she appeared to be overwhelmed and the reader is feeling overwhelmed with her. I had never known that as simple of a game as poker is, there are so much that goes into the game. The game itself has many variations; in its simplest incarnation can surprise, taunt, and torture the players if they are not adequately prepared.  

As I was learning about poker in all its complexities, I kept thinking about the engineering approach to solving this complex problem,  thinking algorithmically, in mathematical terms, in  probabilistic ways. The author disabused me of that mode of thinking. She explained that I was not the first one to think about creating probabilistic models, there is a crew of numerically inclined poker players out there. The problem, according to Konnikova, is that poker is not just a game with finite uncertainties that are strictly governed by the laws of chance, it is a game that has the infinite uncertainties that comes with combining the numerical uncertainties with the broad range of varying psychologies associated with the players themselves. Her contention that strictly algorithmic approach may be successful, but only to a point; a good and perspicacious opponent will still do better than a strictly mathematical player. Which brings us to Konnikova’s main proposition:  despite the uncertainties involved with a game like poker ˗ the luck of the draw, where you sit at table, the different players, etc. ˗ winning at poker demands the most skills from a player. Skills is defined as the player’s ability to work with the hand that they are dealt, no matter how bad a hand it is, no matter how far behind the player is in chips, and no matter what the other extenuating circumstances can be.

In poker, the best hands do not necessarily win every time; that is, many times it is the worst hands that win because the player with the best hand end up folding. So why is that?  Often, people are handcuffed by their own biases and they will make the bad decision because they are driven by their biases; more insidiously, they are rarely aware of their own biases. A major part of the skill to winning at poker is to identify and recognize how your mind is tilted. The word tilt came out of the book as it is used to describe how a player let their  psychological tendencies tilt their decision-making. The other skill is for the player to have the ability to read and recognize the psychological tendencies of all the players sitting at the table, i.e. their tilt. The final skill is to have the wherewithal to combine their knowledge of themselves and their opponents while also grappling with the uncertainties from where the cards fall.

Throughout her narrative, the author was  brutally honest and self-effacing as she describes her moments of failure, her moment of paralyzing fear, her moments of weakness, and her moments of realization, after the fact, that she just gave away money; money she could not afford to give away, all due to her inability to undo her tilt or diagnose the other players. It takes a certain courage to lay out her analytical failure, something that is rare for anyone to admit, but especially so for someone who has insight into psychology by virtue of her academic research and training.  She castigates herself for always playing safely, which is what we all do sometimes, the difference is  a matter of the extent one’s preference for safety takes us. To her great credit, she faces up to her own demons quite often. It makes the reader be on her side, the reader ends up rooting for her to succeed.

In an ultimate courageous decision,  the PhD from Columbia University in psychology, someone who has researched and worked among some of the leading luminaries in  psychology, was brave enough to hire and work with a mental coach to lead her through exploring her weaknesses. She was intellectually honest enough to see that she cannot accomplish what she wants to accomplish alone; she cannot spot enough of her weaknesses to make a difference on her own. It takes an intellectual integrity and being self-aware enough to admit to that ego crushing reality and do something about it.

The author does an excellent job as the reader’s eyes, she describes everything that she experiences in this journey very well: the tournaments, the hands that she won and lost,  and the ethos and chaos of the casino.  She was exceptionally good  at describing the vibes in the casinos and the kind of character is that she ran into in those casinos.

In the end of course,  Konnikova does win her WSOP tournament. The video of her win is on YouTube so you could see it the moment she won it. She is now recognized as a professional poker player; in fact, she still plays professionally. Poker has gotten into her blood, and she firmly believes  that poker is the best way to conquer your own fears in addition to being the best training ground to prepare for making the best decisions.

My only regret is that I lost track of some of the narrative because I am not a poker cognoscenti,  in the moments where she is delving into the technicalities of the hands, I missed some of the drama and failed to recognize the drama of the situation because I didn't know what I didn’t know. Her precis of poker being the best training ground for conquering yourself rang true with me because I ended up buying a copy of the Poker for Dummies book. Baby steps.

Book Review-Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton

This book would never have been on my radar because I would never have thought to look for something in this area. Luckily for me, I was listening to a Vern Gambetta podcast and Vern recommended this book very highly because he said he’d learn a lot about the connection between the body and the mind, which helped him in his coaching and training. Indeed, anything Vern recommends, especially about training, I take very seriously. I am glad that I took heed  because this was a vastly different book than what I had expected about an area that I really had put very little thought towards.

The smaller title of the book is The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. Indeed, this book lays out the symbiotic relationships that we do not directly think about when we think about using our bodies.  We certainly do not think about how the mind enables and affects the body and vice versa.

Scott Grafton Is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also an avid hiker and outdoorsman. He states in the introduction that: To study the mind without the body ignores the greatest pleasure of being alive: experiencing the world directly, as we perform and create.  He follows his own advice when he laid out the book, he describes a trip that he took through the California desert as the backdrop of this exploration through all the mind-body connections, the Physical Intelligence of the title.

The tone of the book is strictly business. There are ten chapters in all, each of the  ten chapters are filled with research result summaries. He buttresses the research results with anecdotes from his lifelong hiking experiences as well as vignettes of this hiking trip in the California desert to illustrate the main points. He can get a little pedantic at times but then again that is a quality, because no time is wasted as he directly supports much of what he has to say in a clinical manner.

He goes into great details on how some of the research has been done to explain how each mind-body connection functions theoretically, and he cites study after study the support the theory. He further illustrates his point by supplementing it with his own experience, thereby creating a small example for the reader to digest simply. He explains the experiments that were conducted to determine that the theories were plausible and viable, he does so with the seriousness of a researcher and he points out the difficulties inherent in conducting the studies and he also points out the pitfalls that could sidetrack the studies.

It is not easy reading because it is not lighthearted, and it is not written for entertainment. It is written to inform; it is written to get the readers to think about the possibilities that are there for us to consider in these mind-body connections. I must admit that I struggled with the first few chapters as I lacked the  fundamentals to fully comprehend the connections. When he moved on to the topics in which he employed the much more familiar feedback control system language, my interest soared, and I was able to understand the topic and the mind-body connection more easily. Once I got to that part of the book, I began to understand some of the framework that the neuroscientists had created to explain the connections.

One unique feature about this book that I had first struggled with but now I completely appreciate, is the fact that the author wrote what he had to say in ten chapters and ended the book. He did not try to write a deep summary of what he had to say because he had already said it in the book. Initially I felt the book ended rather abruptly, but then as I thought about it, I appreciated the fact that he told you what he was going to tell you in the introduction, he told you in the ten chapters, and then he stopped. Nothing wasted.

I will be rereading parts of this book in the future as I will be reexamining these mind-body connections in my effort to understand the physical intelligence for my own specific purpose. It was a great recommendation from Vern and I am grateful for this book.  It is one of those serendipitous things in life where you do not know what you do not know until you learn about it.