The Biggest Bluff

Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action.

Some minds are not meant to be changed.

We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness.

Other men don’t think I have any business being there. I should be washing dishes or changing diapers. They want me gone. So they bully and bluff and push.

The good thing about poker is there’s enough luck that you never have to admit it’s your fault you lost.

Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure.

Vegas is the true America in another way

Because the world is much messier than the poker table, it’s far easier to blame something else. It’s easy to have an illusion of skill when you’re not immediately called out on it through feedback. Poker rids you of the habit in a way nothing else quite does—and in so doing, it improves decisions far afield from the game itself.

turns out that the odds of Trump winning are roughly the same as the odds of flopping a pair in hold’em—and you only have to play once or twice to realize that the odds of flopping a pair are a far cry from zero.

There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment—just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare in this part of the country, and you have a 2 percent chance of encountering one, and an even lower chance of being attacked; we learned instead to deal with brute emotions such as last night there was a tiger here and it looked pretty damn scary.