The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

Hardcover
4.01

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Beschreibung

The New York Times bestseller!

A New York Times Notable Book

“The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself.” —The Washington Post

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker.

But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas.

But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.
Haupt-Genre
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Sub-Genre
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Format
Hardcover
Seitenzahl
368
Preis
22.50 €

Beiträge

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Alle
4

Recommended. The Biggest Bluff is a great book that falls just shy of being perfect - in my opinion, at least. I honestly wish I had read this book years ago, when I started my PhD, but of course it wasn't written then. I will certainly be recommending this to all my students beginning their postgraduate studies, and I'll explain more on why later in the review. For now, there is one big question that this book needs to ask itself, and that any potential reader will need to ask when considering if they want to read it: Is this a book about poker, or is this a book about decision making, using poker as a model? The answer is that it's both, and it's neither. The Biggest Bluff doesn't really seem to follow the Poker in enough depth to really be 'about' Poker, although I came into the book knowing absolutely nothing about the game and now feel I have a decent understanding - not enough to play - but enough to more fully appreciate the game and eject some false beliefs I had about it. Although the book discusses the rules and promotes familiarity with poker terms, I found the glossary sub-par and frequently got lost/skimmed some of the poker highlights, because I couldn't remember what terms meant and/or couldn't appraise a hand the author was telling me about. Terms are defined the first time, but I wished the book eased into it more. I have 0 background in card games, let alone poker, and quickly felt overwhelmed. If the author said her hand was a jack-queen, I guess that means she had a jack and a queen, but I never really got comfortable appraising what that *meant* strategically, so some of the play-by-play descriptions the author was clearly excited to share with me went over my head. That being true, this didn't really impact my enjoyment or understanding all that much, so it was never a deal breaker or anything of the sort. Also, since I was reading it via e-book, the glossary was a pain to use, so I would recomment the physical version for this one. But at the same time, The Biggest Bluff doesn't strike me as really being a book about Decision making either, because it doesn't follow that in enough depth either - certainly not in as much death as something like Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Flow*, which is closer to what I was expecting. Konnikova has a Ph.D in Psychology focused on decision making, so I was expecting the scientific literature and psychological theory to play a much, much bigger role in the book than it did, using poker as an example model and test case. Although Konnikova does refer to some scientific studies every now and then, they are briefly described and used only as examples in passing. The central narrative is still about poker, and the science of decision making is used to prop up the poker, not the other way around. In the end, The Biggest Bluff is far more a narrative journey, a kind of focused autobiography, more than a book *about* poker or a book *about* decision making. Yet despite not being quite what I was after when I bought it, I did really enjoy it for what it ended up being. Konnikova came into poker knowing nothing, and so more than learning about decision making we learn about *skill acquisition.* To go from know-nothing to playing on the world stage with the pros in a couple of years is a massive achievement -- and one PhD students are expected to do all the time, from first starting out to having multiple, peer-reviewed, articles published in international journals. The way I see it, Konnikova essentially did a PhD in Poker, complete with a nervous interview with a potential supervisor. I found a lot of Konnikova's journey paralleled my own, learning a difficult skill-set from scratch for my PhD with worries and anxieties about not being good enough, and I think if I had read this book during the first year of my PhD it would have been a great help to know I wasn't 'alone' and to see what the same journey arc looked like for someone else. I'm not the only one with impostor syndrome. I'm not the only one making silly mistakes to avoid looking the fool in-front of my supervisor, even though those very mistakes make me look the fool. The book makes much about what we can learn about life and decision making from poker, and it is right to do so. But there is also a lot to learn from watching someone go through the journey of developing a new skill, especially when I am in the process of doing the same thing. But hey, maybe that's a common theme of autobiographical books and not unique to The Biggest Bluff, but this is the book that taught me those lessens, and it's the one I'll be gifting all my future PhD students on their first day.

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