The Things We Can’t Control Are Beautiful
Poker players like to brag they win with skill not luck. So do investment bankers. Scientists. And writers. Skill, we insist, is our ticket to success. Who can blame us? It’s a useful delusion to bank our identity on skill, says Maria Konnikova. We can’t stand trembling in the chaos. And skill does matter. That skill can ever be enough, though, is “the biggest bluff,” writes Konnikova in her new book by that name.
A contributor to The New Yorker, Konnikova spends her 326 pages wisely. She recounts learning to play poker and in just over a year beating the pros. Thankfully The Biggest Bluff doesn’t strain to picture a Las Vegas underworld of social outcasts schooled in smoky Tenderloin bars. The poker outlaw is fable; tournament halls now glisten like Silicon Valley conferences, with the occasional woman, and celebrity.
Konnikova tells a contemporary story of the poker world, peopled with players sharp in math and psychology, notably her mentor, poker pro Erik Seidel, who sounds like a sage gent. Best of all is the personal arc of Konnikova’s poker education, textured with research from the scientists who resonated with her as she earned a Ph.D. in psychology, and had roles in her previous books, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, and The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time.
The first serious thoughts Konnikova gave to poker came while reading Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician and pioneering computer scientist John von Neumann. In The Biggest Bluff, Konnikova quotes the great scientist, who saw poker as the ideal model for game theory. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote.
In an early draft of , Konnikova spiked the conclusion with a few too many stabs moving is the newly successful poker player staring into the face of uncertainty. I crafted my questions for Konnikova to talk about her psychological journey, and she obliged with candor and cheer.
