One of the good news/bad news parts of my job as a podcast co-host is that I’m regularly offered manuscripts to read by authors hoping to land an invitation to the show. In the case of Maria Konnikova, it’s all good news. She’s an excellent writer and the first time we had her on the air was a really fun interview.
She came to Richard Munchkin’s and my attention two years ago when she won a poker tournament in Monte Carlo after picking up the game only one year previously. She was offered a PokerStars sponsorship and a number of publications, including Poker News, ran features on her. So we invited her to be a guest on GWAE for May 31, 2018.
She has a very different resume than other poker players. A year previously, she hadn’t played at all and didn’t even know how many cards were in a deck. She was a Columbia psychology Ph.D. who was a journalist for The New Yorker magazine.
She had studied the works of John von Neumann on game theory. I know from personal experience that von Neumann’s works are tough going. Von Neumann used his mathematical theories in actual practice on gambling games, including roulette, unsuccessfully. With kind of a “if it’s good enough for von Neumann it’s good enough for me” attitude, she set out to study whether a raw beginner could get up to speed at poker — which happens to be a pretty difficult game to play well.
She wanted to learn if she could use her background, including her study of von Neumann, to compete on the biggest stages in poker in a year or less. She asked poker pro Erik Seidel to help her. The fact that Seidel said yes is pretty amazing. He doesn’t take students, he rarely gives interviews, and he’s been at the top of the game for more than 30 years, so he gets lots of requests. It was partly her theoretical approach that intrigued Seidel. He’s a curious guy about a whole lot of things and this struck him as an interesting project.
One example was when Erik was recounting a lecture by Mike Caro, known as the Mad Genius of Poker. Caro asked the audience what the object of poker was. Most people guessed “winning,” but Caro said the object of poker was to make correct decisions. Seidel agreed with that, as do I. I’ve been writing about that subject for decades and have not previously found a more succinct or accurate way to phrase the object of intelligent gambling.
Although the process took a bit more than a year, she succeeded, albeit with many ups and downs. Her book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win is about that journey. It’s not a how-to-play-poker book. It’s a book about the lessons from poker that you can apply to the rest of your life: dealing with losses; money management; focusing on what is important; deciphering stories that other people are presenting, wittingly or not, and spinning such stories of her own; explaining successful gambling to others. Many of these are topics I’ve addressed dozens of times. But Konnikova has her own take on them. She presents her answers differently than I would. And I can learn from her answers. So we’ve invited her back to GWAE.
She played online to get up to speed quickly. Why? Because her mentors said to do so. Seidel put her in touch with many of his friends and they all offered advice. Video poker players can do that by practicing on software that corrects you. It’s not the same as playing in a casino, but it increases your skill level much faster.
Erik insisted she be a profitable player online before competing in casinos. Once in casinos, she had to master the lower-buy-in tournaments before he allowed her to enter the bigger ones. Why? Because this is a process and you must learn things along the way. Taking short cuts is not the key to success. In video poker, you don’t have anybody telling you what you can and can’t do. But the same idea applies. Anyone who wants to make money should be able to make money at the lower denominations before moving up. The edges you have in $5 and higher games are significantly less than what you have for quarters and dollars.
Playing in a real casino introduced her to some sleazy characters. As a woman, she gets belittled, hit on, and treated as some sort of second-class citizen at the poker table. Sometimes, people were friendly to her and used that friendship to learn things about her without revealing things about themselves. She found out the hard way that this is an expensive habit at the poker table.
She observed more than one player shooting angles. An earlier book she wrote, The Confidence Game, describes con men of various sorts. Here she was observing them right across the table.
She recorded her hands and regularly took them back to Seidel. Seidel’s conversations with her were somewhat Zen-like. They were not “do this, don’t do that,” but rather, “Let’s discuss if this was the right approach.” Learning how to play individual hands wasn’t important to Seidel. Learning how to think appropriately was.
She learned to apply some of these lessons to her real life as well. It made her a better negotiator. Indeed, some of the lessons rubbed off on her husband with positive results for his life as well.
I have recommended this book to a friend of mine who competed in a speech contest, didn’t win, and was having a hard time dealing with the loss. My friend isn’t a gambler of any sort, but can certainly benefit from the lessons learned by Konnikova and presented so elegantly.
Maria will be joining Richard and me again on Thursday, June 25, talking about this book.
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It is a bit unsettling to see an example of how standing in a skills competition–the Toastmasters speaking contest–is largely determined by one’s poker face. It could be, though, that the skill being examined is communication, and that a good game of poker (with its nuanced ways of communicating) is a key component of the overall score here.
I am reading her book now. It’s terrific, and I’m enjoying it a lot. One of the features of books on Kindle that I like is being able to highlight and save my notes. I will do further research on some of the people and publications she references. It’s the same thing I’ve done with your books and other books on video poker!