Maria Konnikova

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bomb Left podcast.
My guest today is the iconic sort of the best
seller of the Biggest Bluff. Thanks so much for having me,
Bob So in this COVID nineteen era. Are you playing

(00:24):
any online poker? I am. I actually just got back
from New Jersey a few weeks ago because I'm in
New York, where online poker is illegal, but it's legal
in New Jersey. So my husband and I rented an
airbnb for two weeks so that I could play the
World Series online. Um, you have to be physically located
in New Jersey or about it to do that. So
I spent two weeks in a lovely studio on the

(00:46):
Jersey shore playing poker. And how did you do in
the World Series? Um? I'm I was down by but
just by a few thousand dollars, which to me is
winning because when you are buying in for tens of
thousands of dollars, being just a few feels like a win. Okay,
so how much? Um, it's multiple events. There's an event

(01:07):
every single day. So the way that they did it normally,
this doesn't happen right now. The World Series was supposed
to be happening in Las Vegas. Everyone was going to
be there. It was all going to be live. My
book UM, which came out on June, was originally coming
out the week before the main event, so it was
all planned out perfectly. And obviously you can plan all
you want, and then COVID happens and all of a sudden,

(01:31):
there's no World Series of Poker, there's no live poker period,
no no poker tournaments, and so they scrambled and they
decided to do a semblance of it online, and the
way they did it was to do thirty one events,
one every single day of July UM and the buying's
range from four hundred dollars for the lowest UM to

(01:53):
around four thousand dollars for for the highest and you
can re buy into most of the events. Then they moved.
As of August first, it's still going on, but now
it's on an international platform g G Poker. So I
was planning to go to Canada, but the border is
closed because I wouldn't let us in either. UM. So unfortunately,
I'm not playing, but a lot of people who are

(02:15):
outside of the United States are, and they're the buyans
can actually be higher and they're doing a mini main
event for five thousand dollars, but I will not be
taking part because I'm not in Canada. Well, is it
higher just because it's Canadian dollars? No? No, no, no,
this is all in US dollars. Okay, let's just go
a little slower for the uninitiated. How does the World

(02:35):
Series of Poker work? How do they come up with
the ultimate Champion? So the World Series of Poker is
actually it's a series, so there are lots of events.
So normally for about a month and a half, poker
players from all over the world come to Las Vegas
and play a number of tournaments. And when people talk

(02:56):
about the World Series of Poker, they're usually just thinking
about the main event, which is the single most important one.
It's a ten dollar buying and it determines the World champion.
It determines who the World Champion of Poker is for
that year. And so normally people just think, who don't
play poker, just think the World Series that one tournament,
but that's just the pinnacle. That's the last tournament of

(03:18):
the series. And people can play what's called side events,
but you can also win bracelets. Bracelets a bracelet is
what you win when you win a World Series of
Poker title. But if you win a bracelet in anything
other than the main event, you're just a bracelet winner.
You're not the world champion. Okay, to play in the
main event, you have to qualify in one of these
other events. They're completely independent. As long as you've got

(03:41):
ten grand you can play. And have you played in
the main event? I have. I've played in it multiple
times and done. Um the first year, this is the
opening scene of my book. I came down with a
migraine on the first day and spent the better part
of the second half of the day throwing up on
the bathroom floor of the Lovely Rio Hotel and Casino.

(04:03):
I did not do well. I made Day two and
then probably busted. The next year, I cashed. I actually
came in the top I don't remember, but it was
maybe top five hundred, top six hundred players, but out
of tens of thousands, So I felt pretty good about myself.
And do you like playing poker? I do? I mean

(04:24):
I used to not. I didn't know anything about poker
um as of you know, if you and I were
having this conversation five years ago, Um, I wouldn't have
known what poker is. Really. The only exposure I had
had to poker was Rounders, UM, which I thought was
a great movie, and I thought Matt Damon did a
wonderful job, and I really loved Teddy KGB. And that was,

(04:46):
seriously the only poker I had ever seen. I didn't
know how many cars were in a deck. I had
zero interest in the game whatsoever. I'm not a games player.
I grew up in a household that reads books. We
didn't even have a TV when I was growing up,
so I just grew up with lots and lots of bookshelves,
and for entertainment in the evenings, we read or my
parents read to us. And there wasn't even a deck

(05:07):
of cards around, no board games, no chest, nothing like that.
And so, like I said, five years ago, if you
and I were talking, I would have laughed if you said,
did you know that one day you're going to play
poker professionally? Um. I got into it as a book
project because I became fascinated by the notion of luck

(05:28):
and the role that luck plays in our lives. So
I came to it from from the side, from a
very different angle but I did fall in love with
the game and found that it taught me much more
about life than I thought possible, and I'm still learning.
I think it's such a beautiful game that really challenges
you on a constant level. Um. And to me, the

(05:51):
best things in life are the ones that force you
to grow, force you to become a better version of yourself,
constantly force you to think better. Are the things that
don't let you plateau and don't let you just kind
of past through. And to me, one of those things
is poker. Okay, forgetting the number of what you learned psychologically, etcetera.

(06:12):
How long did it take you to master the game?
To understand what the game was? I'm talking about on
the most raw level. If you're sitting there with someone
who literally knows nothing but doesn't know their fifty two
cards in a deck, how long would it take them
to understand the game? Well, it depends on what you mean.
If you mean learn the rules, not long at all.

(06:33):
Within a week, we can have you playing and knowing
exactly what it's going on in terms of the rules. Um.
If you're talking about really understanding the game. Um. My
coach Eric Seidel is one of the best players in
the world and has been playing since the eighties and
winning since the eighties. And if you ask him, he'd
say that he still doesn't understand it and he still
hasn't mastered it. So you've got those two extremes. Okay,

(06:56):
let's go back to the beginning, as you say, five
years ago, when you didn't even know how to play
at hand. What was the motivation for writing the book.
I went through a period in my life where nothing
seemed to go right. I became sick, and no one
knew what was wrong. It was an autoimmune condition, but
ideopathic was the was the final diagnosis, which means we

(07:20):
really have no idea of unknown origin for being specific.
And I just became allergic to everything. My skin became
allergic to everything. I couldn't go outside oftentimes because I
was just erupt in hives whenever anything touched my body.
I mean by a in hives, I mean face, neck, body, everything.
It was painful to put on clothes, and so I

(07:43):
had lots of time to think about things because I
was at home, not not able to do anything. On
massive doses of steroids. As people tried to figure out
what was wrong and get this under control. And at
the same time as this is happening and I'm trying
to figure out what's wrong with me, my grandmother dies.
And she wasn't sick or anything like that, totally independent, healthy,

(08:03):
living by herself. She just slipped in the middle of
the night. I think she was going up to go
to the bathroom and she hit her head and didn't
wake up. And it was one of these things where
you realize, you know, it's just an accident. You could
happen to anyone and you can't plan for it, and
we didn't without her being sick, no one said goodbye,
you know, we just had no idea. And my husband

(08:25):
lest his job, my mom lost her job. Just all
of these things kept happening, one right after the other,
and it made me stop and just really realize how
important luck is. That when things are going well, we
we like to take credit. So often we say, oh,
you know, I I've worked really hard. You know, I've
been working towards this, um I've earned this. And the

(08:48):
truth is, sure, you need to work hard, but you
also need to get lucky, and things have to go
your way, and luck has to come together in a
lot of different ways. And there's so many things that
are just beyond us, and someone else might have worked
just as hard but not gotten lucky and not be
where we are. And I wanted to write about that
and explore it and figure out a way to learn

(09:10):
to tell the difference between skill and chance, between the
things we control and the things we don't. And when
I started reading about all of these different elements, I
came across game theory, which is an interesting framework for
looking at chance, and learned when I started reading the
foundational text of game theory, the Theory of Games and

(09:33):
Economic Behavior, that John von Neuman, who's the father of
game theory and also one of the geniuses of the
twentieth century, um one of the fathers of the computer.
So you and I would be sitting here talking right
now if it weren't for him. That he was a
poker player, and that poker was the origin of game theory,
that he actually believed that solving poker would give you

(09:55):
a rubric for looking at life's most complicated decisions, and
he the way he described it really intrigued me. It
seemed that poker might be a way to tease the
part all of these different themes I was thinking about.
So I started reading about poker a little bit, a

(10:15):
little bit slower. So all these all these bad things
are happening. What makes you pick up the game theory book?
I started reading whenever I knew that I wanted to
write my next book about luck and about skill versus chance.
That is not a book. That's just a question, philosophical enquiry.
It ain't a nonfiction narrative. Um. You need a story

(10:37):
for any book. You need a way in Um what
I do at the beginning of any project. It doesn't
matter how long or short I might be writing. Uh
often I might be writing a New Yorker piece or
a book. I read a lot. I think that writers
need to first and foremost be readers. And for everything
I write, I've read thousands and thousands of words more

(10:59):
that I've written. And I just started reading everything I
could find that had to do with luck and had
to do with chance. And if you're reading about chance,
game theory comes up. Because game theory is one of
the foremost ways of looking at chance. It's one of
the foremost economic theories of the twentieth century, and it
teaches you about thinking probabilistically. It teaches you how to

(11:23):
make decisions in uncertain environments. And I knew this. I
have a PhD in psychology, so I knew that game
theory is where I went. For those who are not
up to speed, what exactly is game theory? Game theory
is just a way of looking at the world where
you try to figure out, how do I act in
a way that no one else can exploit or take

(11:45):
advantage of my decision? That's it. Okay, give us a
couple of exact, non poker examples where game theory would
come into play. Nuclear war, that's actually that was mon
Nouman's example. He thought that solving poker would help you
avoid nucle your war. If you're trying to figure out
whether your opponent Cuban missile crisis that actually happened, that's

(12:06):
game theory. What is Kruschev going to do? What is
Jeff k gonna do? How far can we push them?
How far is he going to do? Go? Is he
actually going to press the proverbial red button and fire missiles?
Is he bluffing? So this is a perfect quintessential game
theoretical example. How can you gather information to try to

(12:26):
figure out what the payoff matrix and game theories speak
looks like, how can you gather information to figure out
how we can get to a point in the matrix
where neither one of us has any incentive to deviate?
How can I figure out if he's bluffing or not?
How can I figure out how far he's willing to go?

(12:48):
And in order to do that, you need to input
a lot of things into that mental model. This is
why game theory isn't just about math. It is about math,
but it's also about psychology. It's about trying to put
numbers in probably abilities, on human emotions, on human actions,
on human decisions. And that's why von Neuman turned to poker,

(13:09):
and that's why game theory can give you an approximation.
But it's just an approximation. Everything in life is an approximation.
He realized that you can't solve anything, So let me
just you ask let me answer your question. So, if
you think about something like a Nash equilibrium, which is
when you actually find that square where no one deviates,

(13:31):
it exists in theory, but in practice it's almost impossible
to reach that square because people are people, and you
can think that you understand them, but Ultimately, there's always
the chance that you don't UM, and so it's a
probabilistic answer. It's not a definitive answer. Well, in game theory,

(13:51):
is there a specific paradigm or is it as simple
as you say, we're gathering information talking about the nouns
and the unknowns. What do you mean by that? Specifically?
You talked about the matrix? What did you know you
talk about game theory. It's like, I'm about the matrix
the movie. So you actually you actually draw a matrix.
So you have Bob on one side and you have

(14:14):
Maria on the other, and in the simplest one, you
have four squares. Let's say yes, no, yes, no. And
if we're trying to figure out what will Bob and Maria,
you know, what will their payoffs look like in the
four little squares of that matrix? So if both of
them say yes, then agree to whatever proposition. UM, let's

(14:34):
say you know that. Let's say we're choosing ice cream
and we're trying to and if you and I agree
on an ice cream flavor, we both get sent gallons
of this ice cream flavor. We can't talk to each
other beforehand. Obviously, in real life, you can but in
your so ideally you coordinate, but if you can't coordinate,
So if you and I both come up with the

(14:54):
same flavor, we get into the yes yes box, right,
and our payoff there. Let's say it's of four is
four and four. We're both really really happy, right if
But let's say you and I or actually it might
not be four and for because what if our two
flavors are different. What if I know that your favorite
flavors chocolate, My favorite flavor is vanilla, but I want

(15:17):
some ice cream rather than not having any ice cream.
And so if I know your chocolate, and I don't
think that you know that I like vanilla, I might
say chocolate. So we both get into that box. But
it's a four for you and it's actually one for me. Right,
So now now it changes, so you just get different
ice cream flavors. So let's say now we're in the
yes no, you stay chocolate, but I say vanilla. Well,

(15:39):
all of a sudden, we're in a different box, and
we're in a box where your payoff is lower in
mine is higher, and we need to try to figure
out how do we get to the box where we
both kind of maximize it. Maybe both of us kind
of like vanilla, it's in the middle. Maybe vanilla would
be a three for both of us. That would be great,
not vanilla, sorry strawberry, but we need a new flavor.
So maybe strawberries actually second best for both of us.

(16:02):
So strawberries are three for you and a three for me, Well,
then maybe we should try to coordinate on strawberry, right,
because that's actually going to give us the most the
best optimal mutual payoff because the total of that box
is six, whereas your chocolate my vanilla boxes just five. Right,
So we can start playing like that, and then you
have to try to figure out Okay, well, how are

(16:22):
you thinking? How am I thinking? I use the type
of person who's gonna want to coordinate on strawberry if
I can't see you or talk to you, um, and
should I risk it? Or are you the kind of
person who's just gonna go chocolate all the way you're
going to You're going to betray me, so to speak.
So we can't coordinate because you want that chocolate and
you don't care if I don't get any ice cream.
So that's a very silly example, but you can that's

(16:45):
kind of how you. That's how you that's how you
look at the matrix. You assign different ways well articulated.
So you're reading the book and he mentions poker. Does
a lightbulb go off in your head? Or is it
an evolutionary process to decide to write a book? Um,
it's both. At the beginning, it wasn't a light bulb.
When I read von Neuman, I became intrigued by poker,

(17:08):
and I thought, huh, this is interesting. And then when
I started reading about poker, all I did that I
had zero poker books in the house, so I just
googled poker and started reading a little bit about it online.
That's when a light bulb went off, when I just thought, Hey,
this game seems really interesting and it actually seems to
get out a lot of these things that I'm curious about.

(17:30):
It has an element of skill, it has an element
of chance. Von Neumann thinks that it actually has the
perfect balance of skill and chance to make it a
good analogy for life. I don't know much about it,
but if I even thinks so, it's good enough for me.
I mean, the guy's brilliant. So that's when a lightbulb
moment actually went off, and I thought this could be it.
And right away I actually just emailed my agent and said, hey,

(17:54):
what do you think does this seem like a good idea?
And at this point we've been going back and forth
for six months and she'd been saying no to every
single thing I've proposed, and this one she said that
the sounds promising. See what you can find. So so
that was the start of the book. So what what

(18:17):
was the process of actually selling the book? So first,
and this was true of all of my books. Um,
I feel very very strongly that you need to work
very hard on your proposal, no matter how many books
you've written, and no matter what your reputation is, because
you're doing it not just for selling it. You're doing

(18:39):
it for you because it helps you think through the
whole thing. It helps you figure out whether this is
actually going to work as a book, whether it's going
to be a good story. So it's a really good exercise.
And a lot of the proposal is actually writing scenes
and writing parts of chapters to try to figure this out.
And so I actually, before I sold the book, I
spent putiple months playing. So I approached Eric Sidell, one

(19:03):
of the greatest poker players in the world who agreed
to become my coach. And I actually started on my
journey before selling the book because I needed material for
the proposal. I needed to see if it was going
to work. I needed to see whether the game was
actually going to fulfill its promise of teaching me what
I wanted to learn. I wanted to see if I
liked it. I mean, I didn't want to sell a

(19:24):
book and then go play poker and realize that it
made me sick and that I absolutely hated it and
that it bore me to tears. It's going to be
multiple years of my life. Any book is multiple years
of your life, so you better you better think hard
and pick something that's right for you. Um. And so
the process looked like me starting to learn to play

(19:44):
with Eric. I went to Vegas. I even made my
first a little bit slower, a little bit slower told
the book. Yet this stuff be doing because you've already
met Eric Seidell. Okay, how did you meet Eric and
how did you approach him? I'm a journalist. I cold
called him. I had no connection to him whatsoever. I

(20:06):
followed him on Twitter and sent him a message. And
the reason that I chose him was a very sophisticated reason.
I did a Google search of best poker buyers of
all time, and his name came up in multiple lists,
and I did some research because his name wasn't the
only one who came in, and he seemed to check
the most of my boxes. I wanted someone who was older,

(20:29):
who had been around a while, and who had a
more broad approach to the game. I didn't want someone
who was young and just starting out and just had
of the mathematical stuff that's the hot ticket today. I
wanted someone who could really speak to my psychology background,
so that was number one. So I needed someone from

(20:51):
from from the past, so to speak. But I wanted
someone who was still relevant. And Eric was actually the
only person who checks both of those boxes, who was
winning in the eighties and who was a winning today.
I mean, that just doesn't happen. Most poker players careers
are much shorter, and they don't they can't keep performing
at the same high level. Then I looked at videos.
He seemed like a nice guy. He's very quiet, seemed

(21:13):
very self effacing, very humble, and a lot of the
other poker players were out there like in your face, screaming, swearing, yelling,
throwing temper tantrums, you know, throwing cards and trips in
the air. And Eric was just kind of sitting there quietly,
and I thought, I'm going to spend a year with
someone as my mentor. I want someone nice and I
want someone I can get along with. And then I

(21:35):
realized that he was the guy from Rounders, so that
was just a bonus that he was the guy in
the in the red visor in the Rounders videos. And
I thought, wow, it's a Rounders guy. It's they gotta
gotta email him. So I found him on Twitter and
I just contacted him and I said, hey, you know,
I'm a journalist. I was still at The New Yorker

(21:55):
full time then, um and said I'm working on a
new project. I'd love to talk to you about it.
I think it's something that might interest you. Um And
he wrote up and he he was just immediately open.
There were no like tell me more about you. I'm
not sure how much time this is going to take.
That he loves my writing. The guy reads the New Yorker,

(22:15):
he loves the New Yorker. He knew exactly who I was,
so that helped and I didn't realize how lucky I got.
Most poker players do not know what the New Yorker is. Okay,
so you meet Eric. What's the next process in this
run up to selling the book and deciding to do
the book? Well, first I had to pitch Eric and
have him agreed to take me on. So I convinced

(22:37):
him that it was a good idea. Um. The way
I did that was, you know, I told him that
my background was psychology and as a journalist observing people,
and he thought that and I'd studied decision making specifically,
That's what I did for my pH d. And so
I actually had studied a lot of the things that
are important for playing poker, So that was part of it.

(22:59):
And I think for him that was a challenge to see,
you know, can he take someone from zero and can
my background? Can a psychological approach still work? Because right now,
most new players, if not all, entering the game are mathematical,
and I had taken my last math class in high school,
so that was never my strong suit and so he

(23:20):
was curious to see if that approach could still work.
And I think the other reason he took me on
was that he loves the game, and he saw in
me an opportunity to spread the love of the game
to other people, to the non poker world, because I can't.
I wasn't part of the poker community, and the people
who read my books weren't poker players, and so I

(23:40):
think he saw it as a long term investment, so
he agreed to give it a try and to see
if it would work. And we ended up getting along.
So if we learned pretty early on that it was
going to work in terms of us being able to
work together, then I needed material before I could put
together a proposal to sell the book. So he started
teaching me. We started working together. UM, I started learning

(24:03):
to play. So before I sold the book, UM, I
spent a few a few months going daily to New
Jersey back and forth to play online because online poker
is legal in New Jersey and not legal in New York,
which is bizarre, but it's but it's the case. So
I did that, and then I went to Vegas for
my first live real life let's go just a little

(24:26):
bit slower. You you go to New Jersey, you created account,
what are those initial experiences playing online? Like? I hate
playing online, I still do. I'm not I'm not a
fan you it's not what I love about poker, but
why Eric wanted me to learn to play online, and
I think he was absolutely right with the experience. Online

(24:49):
is much faster. You can play thousands of hands these days.
Online players get experience in a month that it used
to take live pros people who didn't do this professional
years to acquire. That's the difference in speed. And so
if you're learning, it's really helpful to see a whole

(25:10):
array of situations and to see an array of behaviors
and to start learning by experience. That's how the human
mind learns best. And so playing online, I got to
see hand after hand after hand, and it was just
at first, it was very, very overwhelming, um and everything
stressed me out. I didn't know how to use the interface.

(25:32):
I don't like timers, and you have timers, how long
you can take to make a decision. All of this
stuff was very stressful, but it started teaching me how
to play. It started teaching me all of these different situations.
And the really good thing about it is I could
actually record all of my sessions because you can just
screen record. So i'd play a tournament, I'd record the

(25:53):
whole thing, and then I'd be able to take it
to Eric and we could go through it and he
could help me, so we could go through decision by decision.
What I was doing to start teaching me how to
think through things and how to think about poker. So
in that sense it was invaluable. But in the sense
of am I having fun yet? No, I wasn't having
fun and I didn't love going to New Jersey. To

(26:15):
be perfectly honest, you want to be able if you're
already playing online. You want to play from the comfort
of your home. You don't want to be sitting in
a Starbucks with strangers looking over your shoulder and asking, hey,
what are you doing, which is exactly what happened to me. Okay,
So what is the difference between the people who play
online and what did you learn about people and luck

(26:35):
in those initial sessions? Very little? I mean, this is
just me learning the ropes. This, This is why this
journey ended up taking three years instead of one. Um.
So this at this point I'm not I'm not learning much.
I'm just still trying to figure out whether it's straight
piazza flush or flush pizza straight. You have to remember
that I'm a total notice. I have to I don't

(26:55):
even know the rules of the game. So look, starting
online is me trying to figure out what I'm doing.
And we're not even at the scale versus chance yet.
Right now, we're still at the very rudimentary stage of
how do you play? Okay, So, in your online career
in New Jersey, before you get to Vegas, how much
did it cost you to learn how to play? Oh?

(27:17):
I ended up winning two thousand dollars, a little over
two thousand dollars, okay, But before you were up in
the black? How far deep in the red were you?
If at all fifty dollars was minnitial deposit. I never
re deposited. That's pretty good. So how long do you
play online before you decide to hit the big world
in Vegas? A few months? And how frequently? Um? Three

(27:41):
or four days a week? And so how do you
or does Eric decide you're ready to go to Vegas? Um?
Part of it was bankroll. So when I saved up
enough money because Eric wanted me to take it seriously
as a profession, and so he said that I had
to earn my way up, and so we waited until
I made enough money where I could finance my trip

(28:03):
to Vegas all through what I already what I want
from poker? Is that the same same two thousand dollars? Okay,
so good a thing I want. I withdrew it all
and we we went to Vegas. I mean, Eric was
in Vegas most of the time, most of that time anyway. Okay,
So you go to Vegas. Where do you stay? Um?

(28:25):
I stayed at different places I made. I spent multiple
months in Vegas, so I stayed in airbnbs, I stayed
at the Aria. So it just depended, okay. And the
longer you stayed does the hotel cut you a rate? Really? Really? Okay?
So you go to Vegas. Go to Vegas, and what's

(28:46):
the first step, Um, start playing baby tournaments, the dailies
that cost you know, thirty five dollars and the nightlies.
So I'm not allowed to play any of the more
expensive tournaments. I have to start from the bottom. And
until I start winning those, says Eric, I cannot make
my way up to any further stakes. Well, well, you're

(29:06):
a high achiever. How did it feel to be in
the little league? Oh, I don't care. I'm I'm not
I think there's not a there's it's a very it's
a it's a very different thing to be a high
achiever and to be embarrassed to be in the little leagues.
I'm never embarrassed to be in the little leagues. I
think that's how you learn. I mean, I've spent my
whole life saying I don't know how to do this.

(29:27):
Please tell me, and please teach me. I don't understand.
That's what I do. I write about people who are
much smarter than I am and who know much more
than I do, and I interview them and I write
articles about them and about their work. So I love
not knowing. Um, for me, it's fine. I got to
start at the bottom. You have to learn everything. You

(29:50):
talk about these baby tournaments, and that's where you start
to learn. You wonder what effect being a woman is
in the game. Certain people try to intimidate. Could you
amplify that a little bit? Sure? Of course, are we
still talking about selling my book because at this point
I've told my book. Okay, so literally literally, where in
this process did you sell your book? After? After I

(30:11):
had been in Vegas for a little bit, then I
went back to New York sold the book and then
came back to Vegas. Okay, how much to make it worth?
I'm not going to get how in terms of the
number that the company gives you. Are you saying, well,
I need enough to live for X per year and
that's that's the criterion. Nope, that's not how it works.
I mean my books sold that auctions. My third book,

(30:33):
my first two were best sellers. It was a It
was a pretty straightforward process. I have a good agent. Okay,
so that now that you're deep into the process, you're
not worrying about cash. You have enough to live on. No,
I mean you always have to worry about cash, especially
because I left the New Yorker, so my income went
to zero completely, and you have to even at the

(30:54):
New Yorker, there's all writers are freelancers. So no that
if it's no health insurance, this is all stuff I
have to pay for. And I have suddenly stopped writing.
I've realized that I need to be playing poker full time,
and so all of my income streams went to zero.
When you get a book advance, it's not what you

(31:14):
think it is because you have no idea how long
the book is going to take, So you need to
make sure that it will last you. You don't get
it all, you just get a quarter of it goes
to your agents. So so there's that you pay your
own taxes. So there's that I leave in New York City,
so the tax right is very very high. So there's that,
and you need to I have a mortgage. You need

(31:35):
to kind of know that you're paying for planning for
all of these things. So no, I have zero dollars
to spend on poker. Okay, so you you played online,
you went to Vegas, you sold the book. The next
step is starting starting to uh grind my way up
until I can start winning these little baby tournaments so

(31:56):
that I can make money, so that I can actually
see if I can move up to the next level
in the poker tournament. Because my advance is going towards
paying my mortgage and my health insurance and all these
other things, it's not going towards paying my poker tournaments.
I did put a little bit aside because I knew
that for the book, I wanted to play the main
event that you and I started off talking about, So

(32:17):
I knew that ten thousand dollars was going to be
budgeted for that no matter what, UM, and so that
was put aside. Otherwise I needed to earn my way
up or not as the case. Maybe Okay, going back
to those initial experiences in the baby tournaments, what did
you learn? I learned this is where I really started
learning a lot um. At the beginning, I wasn't doing

(32:39):
well for a number of reasons. I mean, first, I
was intimidated. Playing live is not like playing online. UM.
I didn't know how anything worked. I didn't know the mechanics.
I felt like a literal fish out of water. I
say literal because in poker or the term for bad
players who don't know what they're doing is fish. And
I was definitely a fish, um. And so I and

(33:02):
I felt it. I knew that I didn't know anything.
And it would have been one thing if it had
been just this really warm and friendly and welcoming environment
and people said, oh, it's okay, like you're you're okay,
we'll help you out, um. And that's what it was.
At the highest levels, they are excitels of the world.
They opened their arms wide and they were all incredibly
generous and helpful. All of the big high stakes players

(33:26):
gave me their phone numbers, said they'd help me, and
we're really excited about my whole journey. When you enter
a random casino off scrip and are playing in a
thirty five dollar tournament, those aren't the same players. These
are people who are here to have fun. They're drinking.
They are mostly men. The poker world is male um,

(33:49):
and they don't really care for a female at the table,
And if you're already there, they're not gonna mind their
manners because they're here to have fun and they shouldn't
have to act differently because a woman is at the table.
So I initially I wasn't playing well because it was
really intimidating, and I would let them bully me, and

(34:12):
I didn't want conflict. I wanted people to like me,
so i'd fold, and even when I had good cards,
I wouldn't necessarily bet as much as I should because
I didn't want them to think, Oh, that's the bitch
who was always so aggressive. You know. I wanted them
to think I was a nice person. That's not the
way to play poker. That was not that's not the
game theoretical answer, And I was I was just letting

(34:36):
them walk all over me. And then it took a
while for me to realize what was happening, And it
took a while for me to realize that this was
actually an advantage. That they were all underestimating me and
what I was capable of, and correctly, at the beginning,
they weren't underestimating me because I did exactly what they

(34:56):
wanted me to. You know, they'd bully me and I'd fold.
They do this, and I'd go away. You know, That's
that's what they wanted, and they got it. But once
I realized that I was able to take that dynamic
and put it up and turn it around and really
figure out, Okay, fine, if you think I'm just a girl.

(35:19):
There was a guy who kept calling me little girl
over and over and he really got to me. Um.
Good for him, you know, he he got me to
make bad decisions. That's what you're supposed to do. Um,
but he he really got to me. And but then
I realized, if, okay, if you think of me as
a little girl, then I can get away with things

(35:40):
that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to get away with.
If you think I'm incapable of bluffing, I'm going to
bluff more. I'm going to run big bluffs because you're
going to fold. Because if you think that I couldn't
possibly be doing that, then you think I must have
a strong hand. If you're someone who would rather die
than fold to a girl or be bluff by a girl,

(36:00):
well I'm not going to bluff you because that would
just be throwing money on fire, because you're going to
call me no matter what. But when I have good hands,
or even marginally good hands, I'm gonna bet a lot
because you're gonna call me, and you're gonna call me
with hands that are worse than mine. If you're someone
who doesn't want to take my money because you want
to be a gentleman, there are guys who are very
condescending and patronizing and telling me all the things I

(36:23):
was doing wrong, um, and wanted to help me out
by calling me honey and showing me their cards. You
know you made a good fold, honey, here you go,
here's my hand, um, And I'd say, okay, fine, this
is great, thank you for showing me your cards. Information
is very important, so I love seeing what what cards
you hold. But also I now know that when you

(36:45):
bet a lot, I should fold, even if I have
a pretty good hand because you don't want to take
my money because you're a gentleman, or you'd like to
see yourself as a gentleman. Once I could figure out
how people saw me and how they wanted to see themselves,
you know, do they want to see themselves as a
big macho ga or asked the gentleman? Or is this?
Or is that? Once I could figure out those more
human elements, that I started being able to really take

(37:07):
advantage of them. And that's when I started winning and
making real money. And when you made this money, did
the men get angry? Yeah, of course, that's a simple answer.
Not all of them, Um, I mean Eric was ecstatic
when I won my first tournament, as was my husband,
as where all of the players who Eric had introduced
me to, I mean everyone who Everyone was always very

(37:31):
very supportive and excited. The guys I was playing against, no,
they weren't. In the first tournament I won, Um, it
was a baby tournament. I don't remember how much. The
entry fee was around fifty dollars at Planet Hollywood. And
when we got to the final table, um, I was
the chip leader. I had most of the chips in play,

(37:53):
and they all started pressuring me to chop, which means
stopped playing and just divide up the money. Um, and
I didn't really know what that was. Eric and I
had never talked about it because I'd never been in
that situation. And I was going to agree because okay,
you know, I want to be nice, I want to
be amenable. Then one of them just turned to me

(38:14):
and said, yeah, you know you don't you know you're
gonna just lose all those trips. You're in a position
of power now, but you're just gonna lose them. And
I was like, okay, well screw you. No, I'm not
gonna chop. So they were not happy. They and then
they just kept and then another one of them busted,
and another one and they just kept pressuring me to chop.
But at that point nothing was going to compel me
to chop. So I ended up winning and I was

(38:35):
and they were not happy because they just wanted me
to give up my money and give it to them.
But you know, we talked about the arc from being
intimidated to winning. Uh, you know, it takes a psychological
makeup to be at the top and endure others people's

(38:58):
hate or anger or that you how did you learn
how to cope with that. How did you gain a
thick skin? Well, I mean part of it was my training.
So my graduate advisor, who I worked with for many
years and who then became a close mentor and friend
of mine, was Walter Michelle and two people who aren't

(39:19):
familiar with the name, they're probably still familiar with the
work because it's become part of the popular culture. The
Marshmallow test the famous psychological experiment that had little kids
set at a table with a marshmallow or another treat
whatever they liked the most in front of them, and
there was a bell next to the treat, and they

(39:41):
were told, you can you can ring the bell at
any point and you're allowed to eat your treat. But
if you don't ring the bell, if you just wait
for us to come back to the room, we'll give
you many more treats and you'll be able to eat
as many. You'll be able to eat more of them.
And what they wanted to learn was how long would
this child weight? A three year old or four year
old and there's this delicious things setting right in front

(40:03):
of you, it's really hard to wait, and one minute
feels like an hour. I mean to a kid that young,
it's actually really hard to delay gratification. And what Walter
found was that the kids who were able to wait
the longest had much better life outcomes. So they followed
these kids. They're still following them. Walter unfortunately died a
few years ago, but the kids are still being followed. Um.

(40:27):
And so now it's you know, over forty years later, um,
and they were the kids who waited longer, did better
in school, better SAT scores, went to better colleges, have
better health outcomes, are just much more successful in life.
And so this was kind of the foundational study of
self control and of how important the ability to regulate

(40:50):
your emotions and regularly cool hot stimuli. So the marshmallow
in this case is the hot stimulus. You want it,
it's right in front of you, yourity to wait, your
ability to cool it off. There were kids. I love
the interviews with the kids. So home said, you know, oh, well,
I put a frame around it in my head because
you can't eat a picture. Others that said, you know,

(41:12):
oh I pictured it. I pretended that it was a cloud,
and you can't eat a cloud. Others just turned the
chair around so they weren't looking at it. Now, these
are kids coming up with these strategies spontaneously. But Walter
found you could teach them. You could actually teach these strategies,
and kids who learned those strategies were just as successful
as the ones who had them intuitively. And so I've

(41:33):
been doing this work for a long time, and so
I think I had a lot of the arsenal and
the vocabulary for realizing what was going on and having
some techniques in play so that I could remove myself
from the situation that said, I mean, I wasn't successful
from the beginning. I had to work hard, and I
ended up actually working with a mental game coach, someone

(41:56):
who could help me, someone who could see me objectively,
because even if you're me, I mean, I was very
I think I was a little overcompetent at the beginning
of my ability to regulate my emotions because I thought, oh,
you know, I have a psychology PhD. This is what
I studied. I'm a natural. Well, when you're at a
poker table in a new environment and there's lots of

(42:18):
pressure and the stakes are rising, you're gonna you're gonna
mess up. And I realized that I did need help,
and so I a lot of the things that I learned,
I only learned because I was I had someone on
the outside who I could talk to and who would
be able to in a sense, mirror me back to me.

(42:41):
But to to say, oh, so, it seems like, you know,
you get really upset when these guys are trying to
bully you. It seems like when you're in those situations,
you default to this more passive thing. And I'd say, oh,
I guess you're right, because he was right. He just
I would just explain what happened and tell him the day,
but he could synthathize it in a way that it's

(43:02):
very difficult to do when it's you who's going through it.
Which is which is all to say that, sure, I
had a lot of the skills and a lot of
the knowledge, and I think that helped me, and that
helped me ramp up more quickly. But I still need
it outside help. I still needed someone who could help
talk me through it. Um. And I think that that's

(43:22):
something very important to realize. Whether you paid or not,
what is someone like that normally charge for their help? Um.
It depends on the person. Uh, there's there's a huge
scale and mental game coaches. I mean it starts at
a few hundred dollars an hour, and I know some
I never worked with them who charged over a thousand
dollars an hour. Okay, Just so there's a point in

(43:45):
your book that a lot of people are interested in
that does not directly relate to poker. You have a
line there we say you don't believe in the ten rule?
Could you go a little deeper there? Sure m. I
spent a lot out of time arguing back and forth
with Andre's Eriksson, who is the father of of the

(44:06):
research into into deliberate practice, who recently passed away. He did, yes,
he died a few weeks ago. Unfortunately. I liked him
a lot. He was a great guy. We disagreed on everything,
and we never got into a fight because he didn't.
He would just listen to you and he just never
raised his voice, and he just would not and say, yeah, no,
I don't agree, and he would and he would go on,

(44:29):
and it was it's so rare, you know. And I
was attacking his work because I wanted to challenge him
on a lot of the things that he was saying,
and he just he was okay with that, and that's
I really admired that. I think that's such a rare
characteristic for a researcher. So what is what is your
actual belief relative? So I think that I think that

(44:52):
practice is absolutely important. No one is saying that it's not.
You need to work hard, and you need to need
to practice, and you need to practice deliberately. I think
Honders was brilliant in so many ways in figuring out
that these components matter. However, he insisted that that's all
that matters, And what I say is that's absolutely not true.

(45:14):
Genetics matter, Talent matters. Who you are when you start matters.
The same amount of hours done in the exact same
way as not going to translate for person A to
person BE, and PERSONNE might need a hundred hours to
get amazing. Person B might never get to that level
even with a hundred thousand hours. So there are lots

(45:36):
of individual differences. There's a lot of variability, and yeah,
you have to work hard, but that's not enough, and
you have to also figure out where your skills are
and you have to figure out what you're able to do.
Had I decided that I wanted to write a book
about playing golf, there'd be no book. My hand eye

(46:00):
coordination is zero. I cannot hit a golf ball, for
the love of my life, and I can't, especially for
a baseball book. If a ball is flying at my face,
I mean, I duck, I can't. I can't do that.
I'm not someone who's good at any of that. And
believe me, even if I practice for ten thousand hours,
even something like golf, which is a very which is

(46:22):
something that's very amenable to learning, never going to be
able to hit balls with tiger woods or or go
on any sort of a decent level. I know that,
and I and I'm willing to bet a lot of
money on it. And that's the difference between me and uders.
Unders would say that's absolutely not true. You can be
tiger Woods, and I'd say, no, only tiger woods can

(46:44):
be tiger Woods. And he said, no, Well, you didn't
practice well or you didn't practice deliberately enough. Okay, Uh.
There's a lot in the psychology in the book. One
thing we didn't cover is the game you're playing is
Texas Hold Him. You make a big point in the
book where you're analogizing that to life, and you believe
it's the best analogy in in games. It's not me,

(47:05):
it's von Neuman. So let's just let's just get that
straight because I didn't make it up. I just stole
his uh with with full attribution, but it's his idea.
So which we're looking for is what is the balance
of known information to unknown information? What is the balance
between the things that we have in common and the

(47:28):
things that we have in private. Because poker is a
game of incomplete information, like life. So there are things
that you know, there are things that I know. There
are things we both know, and we need to make
the best decision possible knowing that we don't know everything right,
we can only guess at some of this hidden information.
Other games like chess are really bad analogies for life.

(47:50):
Von Neuman dismissed it completely because chess is a perfect
information game. There's always a right move. You can solve it.
And he said, if you give me enough computing power,
I'll tell you exactly what you're supposed to do. And
of course chess has been solved, and so he said,
that's not life. Life is not a chess game. You
can't see all the pieces, you can't see the board.
You know, you might think you're looking at a queen
and then while the disguise comes off and it's actually

(48:12):
a bishop or or whatnot. So life is full of deception.
Life is full of things you don't know and things
that are concealed, and so you need an imperfect information
game to be like life. But within poker, there are
lots of different variants. And the reason that no limit

(48:33):
hold them is the one that I chose, and the
one that seems to be the best is the exact
balance of knowns to unknowns seems just about right. There
are other variants of poker where there's too much unknown,
and so it becomes too much of a gamble. So
if there are five cards that every single person has
that you can't see, all of a sudden, they're just
too many X factors and it becomes too much about

(48:56):
a guessing game and too little about skill. If there's
only one card. There's some variants where there's only one
whole card. Then it becomes too mathematical, too much like chess.
There's too little that's unknown, and and hold him in Texas,
hold him. He thought that this was actually the variant
with the best balance, and the reason that you choose
no limit as opposed to limit. So the differences in

(49:18):
limit your bets are limited. There's always a cap to
what you can you can bet, and no limit there
isn't he said, Well, life is no limit. You can
always go all in, you can always bet everything. Nothing's
keeping you from it. So if you want an analogy
for life, it better be no limit. Okay. A couple
of things you brought up. You mentioned a couple of
times math and the people with mathematical skills. To what

(49:40):
degree do they have an advantage and where are they
in the poker hierarchy and sphere. Well, it depends. Um,
I think that you need both. I think that you
need both math and psychology. And I think that the
best players have both. And the best players know which
one is their skill and that's where they've focus, that's
where their edges. But they also learned to master the

(50:03):
other thing to the best of their ability. So for
someone like Eric Seidel, he's a psych guy and he's
not a math guy, and yet he has the most
advanced mathematical software that he uses to try to figure
out what the math guys are thinking. Someone like Stephen Chidwick,
who is currently considered one of the best tournament players
in the world. He's much younger. Um, he's a math guy,

(50:26):
He's the one who knows exactly how to set up
all of these simulations. Or someone who I worked with, Um,
who's just a great guy and a great player at
someone like I Caxton. They know the math, that's their
strong suit, that's where they've run all the simulations. Their
numbers leave me and Eric far behind, but their psychology

(50:47):
might not be quite as strong because they are much
more in their heads about the math and might not
be picking up on some of the physical cues, might
not be picking up on some of the psychological dynamics. However,
at the top, I mean, I actually think that Stevie
and I probably are picking up on all the psychology
because there I've just named two of the best players

(51:08):
in the world, But almost everyone else is not them.
And there are people who rely way too much on
the math and they miss a lot, and I can
actually sometimes they're the easiest to play against at the
table because you know what they're thinking, you know what
they're going to do, and you know that they're missing
a lot of information because they've already figured out mathematically

(51:29):
exactly what they need to do here, and there are
people who don't care about the math at all. They're
also easy to play against because you can exploit them
because they're going to make bad mistakes because they don't
care about the math. They don't care about the odds.
They're just playing the man. And you need to understand
the math. And you need to understand that part as well.
You mentioned at the beginning you hadn't taken a math

(51:50):
course since high school. To what degree have you? Uh,
you know, spit up and become accustomed to and learn
the math. I mean I count on my fingers and
Eric still do. And Eric told me at the very
beginning that there's no hard math the math. He said,
it's so easy that a sixth grader can do it.
If you can add, subtract, multiplind, divide. So I have

(52:12):
not picked up any advanced math skills, but I have
become better at because I've had more practice. Is mental
math um and I I'm someone who was always fine
at math. I mean I took advanced calculus. I just
took it in high school and I haven't taken it
since I always could understand the math. I just didn't
like it. It wasn't interesting to me. So I have
those muscles somewhere back there, UM, and I was able

(52:35):
to wake some of them up, so I can calculate
POD odds pretty quickly. At the beginning, it took me
a while and I'd have to be sitting there counting.
Now I still use my fingers, but I do it
very very quickly. Okay. Another element you talked about in
the book is aggressiveness. So, uh, is that something that

(52:56):
people just tend to play aggressively and they don't modulate
their behavior And are the aggressive players a certain type
that you can then adjust to? Well, it depends once again,
it depends on the player. So at the beginning, I
feel like players start off in one of two modes.
Some are way too aggressive now I'm talking about amateurs
who are just starting out, and some are like me,
way too passive. UM. So I was too scary, UM

(53:19):
and not nearly aggressive enough. And there are a lot
of players, UM, and I think actually most players are
on the other end. They play too many hands, they're
too aggressive, they like bluffing and they enjoy that. And
as you learn more about the game, UM, there are
players who keep being super aggressive always and back in

(53:42):
the day um as Area told me it was before
my time, but he said that that used to work
because all the thinking players would think, go, well, if
you're being that aggressive, you know you must have a
really good hand. Um And so there was once upon
a time when the whole general level of the game
was lower. Super aggression got people very very far are
Once people started catching on, they, as you said, adjusted,

(54:04):
they started realizing, wait, this guy is just running everyone
over because no one's standing up to them. Now, if
you start standing up to them, all of a sudden,
the aggression is not paying off anymore. Because you are
people are pushing back, and you have junk you have
you don't have a strong hand at all. You're bluffing
way too much, and all of a sudden you start
losing money. And as Eric said, the guys who failed

(54:25):
to adjust, who stayed super aggressive, wint bust. They went broke,
they lost all of their money. And so the best
players are players who This is actually a similar answer
to the one I gave about math and psychology. The
best players are players who figure out what their natural
level of aggression is and who figure out what works
for them, what feels comfortable to them, and then who

(54:47):
are able to do that and to adjust to other players.
So someone like Eric is not someone who's an aggressive
person in real life and not someone who's like a
maniac at the table. The at certain tables, he's capable
of very maniacal plays because he's very good at adjusting.
He's good at reading what people are doing and what

(55:08):
people think of him, and so you need to learn
to use people's perceptions of you against them. So if
people are sitting there thinking underestimating Eric, thinking that oh,
he's someone who's you know, he's never going to go
maniac on me, well then it's time for him to
go maniac on them. Um Or there are other tables
when you're at a table with maniacs, and in those tables,

(55:29):
you become very quiet and you wait for a very
strong hand, and that's when you fight back. You don't
fight maniacs with maniac tendencies. That's a mistake that people
often make. Okay, how about tells. Tells are something that
is not nearly as important as people think, and very
different from what people think. So originally, you know, everyone

(55:53):
always thinks poker face, right, you you have to stare
at people's faces and the eyes are the window to
the soul. My last book was about con artists, and
let me tell you, if someone's a good liar, you're
not gonna find out. Um. I spent multiple years with
people who deceived on a daily basis, very very intelligent people,

(56:14):
and when I met them, I knew who they were,
and I was still taken by them because that's how
good they are. And the psychology tells us that people
are really really bad at spotting liars. We spot liars
on average, no better than chance. Where we suck at
learning to tell whether someone's being deceitful or not. And
the face is actually the worst place to look because

(56:36):
the face leads you astray because the face has fake cues,
even if people don't mean to have them there, Their
face tells you something because subconsciously we look at faces,
and there are certain traits that communicate certain things like trustworthiness.
Certain cuts of the jaw and certain eyebrows say trustworthy,
others say aggression. It's not something we're consciously aware of.

(56:59):
It just something that we experience and react to within
just micro seconds, within fractions of a second of staying
a face. And so when people are trying to stare
someone down saying, oh, is your left eyebrow twitching? Is
your nostril doing this? That's wrong. It's probably not going
to tell you anything. It's probably gonna screw you up,

(57:20):
and you're gonna make mistakes. That said, the human body
does convey a lot of information, but most of it's
not coming from the face. And it turns out, um,
I met this really cool researcher um who actually studies
secrets and was looking at tells in poker, because poker
is natural secret keeping, right, You're you're trying to keep

(57:41):
other people from guessing how strong your hand is. And
so he looked at videos of people playing the main
event of the World Series of Poker. He had people
analyze them and ask how strong someone's cards were, how
strong was their hand, And he had them look at
unaltered videos. He had them look at just the face,
and then he had them look at just the arms

(58:01):
and hands. And what he found was when people just
looked at the video, the unaltered one, they were no
better than chance as predicted. When they just looked at
the face, they were worse than chance. So the face
screwed them up. They actually thought that they knew much
more than they did, and they made they made bad
mistakes when they looked at the hands, though they actually

(58:25):
improved and they were predicting at much better accuracy. And
so he found that the hands are giving off a
lot more information than any other part of the body.
And he's done a lot more work on that since then.
And it turns out that it's not just in poker,
that when we look at hands and a lot of
different contexts, we can predict a lot about the behavior

(58:46):
of the person. So do you employ that information when
you play? Do you look at the hands and what
might you see that might affect your play. It's all
about how people handle their cards and their chips, how
they under their bets, how they know how smooth their
motion is. And this is really important. You have to
observe someone over time. One time doesn't mean anything. You

(59:11):
have to see how their actions and how the way
that they move changes from normal. Right, So how do
they how do they normally bet? Is this same or
is it or is it smoother? Or is it you
know or is it less smooth? So a lot of
it is about deviations from baseline and in order to

(59:32):
be able to see if someone is deviating from baseline.
You need to establish a baseline. How do you do that.
You do that by looking at people over and over
and over and observing hands even when you're not playing
with them, even when you're just when you don't have
any cards and you're just looking at them when they're
playing against someone else. Okay, Now, one of the big

(59:53):
stories in the book is before you make it to
the big game, you're playing I believe it planning Hollywood,
are one of these so called baby games, and you
have an incredible hand, but you're beaten by a better hand,
and you go to tell Eric the story and I'm
beaten by a worse hand. That's hence the bad beat.

(01:00:14):
So when my when the money gets in, I have
the best hand, and I should be winning there most
of the time. I should be winning there over the time,
and actually even more. I think at that point I
was in almost favorite, and this person hits their miracle
card and wins, and I'm knocked out of the tournament.

(01:00:35):
That's what's called a bad beat. When you get your
money in as a favorite, statistically speaking, and then the
other part of the variance happens. Because there's no such
thing as I've gotten my money in as favorite and
I've lost. So two percent happens, and it happens a
lot more frequently than you think it will happen. So
so this is one of these things where you're supposed

(01:00:59):
to Vaughan and say I made the right decision, and
then variancet and go my way. That's not what I said.
I ran to Eric and I started telling him as
they started crying to him, not literally crying, but complaining, saying,
oh my god, I can't believe this happened. And he
shut me up. He said, I don't want to hear it,
and I just I couldn't believe that he didn't want

(01:01:19):
to hear what I had to say. I mean, he's
my coach. He's supposed to listen to me. And he
asked me, he said, do you have a question about
how you played the hand? And my answer was well no,
I mean, you know I had top set, which is
about as strong as it guts. And he said, well
that's it. Hand over, and he said, let's make a deal.

(01:01:41):
I never want to know how a hand ends. All
I care about is your decision process. All I care
about is what you were thinking. Are there questions, are there,
nodes are They're parts of the decision that you weren't
sure of. If so, let's talk about it. But the ending,
the outcome, just forget it because that's not what you control.

(01:02:02):
So this goes back to my original question, skill versus chance.
Skill is the process, it's the decision. It's how you
made the decision. It's whether you were thinking clearly, whether
you put your money in well as a favorite, whether
you were using the information that you had to the
best of your abilities. Outcome, that's luck. That has nothing

(01:02:24):
to do with you. Now the money is already in
your decision is done. Now the cards have to cooperate,
and you don't control the cards. That's the chance. And
so we don't care about the chance. We don't. We
don't focus on that. What we care about is the
stuff that we actually can change, which is how we play,
how we think about something. And so that was his rule.
No bad beat stories. He said, that's someone else, that's

(01:02:45):
never you. You are not allowed to tell a bad
beat story. Okay, At some point he says, you have
enough experience to play at the ARIA. I have a
couple of questions here. When you're at the ARIA, not playing.
Does everybody allow you to see your their car or
just Eric? What is the process there, and what is
the process where you ultimately get in the game. And

(01:03:06):
what if somebody who's at one of these baby games
decides they want to play the aria, what happens? Then
anyone can play any tournament. Anyone can play if you
have enough money, just that buy in and there you
are in terms of whether I can see people's cards.
So I had quite a unique arrangement. Eric played in

(01:03:28):
a lot of high roller events at the area. So
these are tournaments that are dollars dollars to enter, so
not not anywhere near the level that I'm playing. And
there are a limited number of people who play those games,
and how many people are there and depends on the day. Um,

(01:03:52):
but we're talking tense. That's thirty would be a good day.
Usually it's fewer. And the way that it worked normally
is tournaments aren't cash games. No one is allowed to
sit behind players and look at their cards. It's not
allowed period. This was in a cash game, someone can

(01:04:13):
sweat behind you, that's fine, No one cares. In a
tournament this this is actually against the rules. However, this
is the area can run its own tournaments, and I
was learning, and Eric said that he wanted me to
be able to see his cards, and the tournament director
there said, if every single person is okay with that,

(01:04:33):
then I'm okay with it. And so I asked every
single person and all of them said sure, not a
problem at all. And so I was allowed to sit
and sweat with Eric to see his cards while he
was playing UM. And then other players as I got
to know them, and as they became friendly with me
and started helping me with different elements of my game,

(01:04:54):
other players would say, hey, why don't you sweat with
me today? So I UM. All in all, I played with,
played with, sweaded with three different players during my time there.
I sweateated with Eric most frequently. UM. I also did
a sweat a few times with Jason Coon and with
I Caxton. Those are two amazing players, both of whom

(01:05:15):
were really helpful to me. But everyone else I've never
seen their cards. Okay, just talking irrelevant of you. All
the high state game poker players know are at the area,
well for that those tournaments, yes, so they're there are
cash games coming up playing happening all the time. This
isn't a cash game, So the high state cash games
are happening at Bobby's room at the Bellagio, at a

(01:05:36):
different casino. That's a different player pool, because tournament players
are not cash players, and vice versa. Just for the uninitiated,
explain the difference. In a cash game, every single chip
is worth a certain amount of money. So you buy
in for a hundred dollars and you get a hundred
dollars worth of chips, and that's exactly how much you have.

(01:05:58):
And if you lose them, you can read, you can
add on whatever you want um and you can walk
away at any point. Maybe you want a huge hand,
and all of a sudden, your hundred trips became five hundred,
and you say, you know what I want to go now.
That's called a hit and run. Then you take your
tips and you leave. In a tournament, trips have zero
cash value. You buy in for certain amounts, a hundred

(01:06:20):
dollars and you get ten thousand ships, and so does
every single person. And the chips are just a way
of keeping score. So they're just like points, and your
goal is to gather all of them, and your chips
are only worth something relative to the chips of the
other players, and you can never you can't get up
and walk away when you suddenly find yourself with a
hundred thousand ships. Nope, gotta gotta keep playing because they're

(01:06:43):
worth zero um. And if you if it's a freeze
out tournament, which means you can't re enter. If you
lose them, you're done. You're out of the tournament. And
of players give or take anywhere from depending on the
exact turn, meant are going to go home with zero
dollars because they will bust before the money and everyone

(01:07:06):
else is going to make money. And in a cash
game that just doesn't happen. That's not the same. Okay,
a couple of things. So let's say I'm at the
area in the tournament begins. Is there a time limit, Yeah,
at the high rollers, Yes, you have thirty seconds to
make every decision. No, I mean for the whole tournament itself.
Oh no, it ends when it ends. Okay. And let's

(01:07:27):
say I'm playing in a cash game and I walk away.
The other players are cool with that, Yeah, they keep playing.
I mean, if you're someone who always hit and runs,
so you're someone who always comes and as soon as
you win, you leave, they're probably not gonna want you
to play with them anymore. Um. But if it's an
open game, they can't do anything about it. If it's
a private game, they can. Then you're saying, these are

(01:07:50):
different players who play cash games and play tournament games.
It's a different it's a different strategy. It's a different
game because in a cash game, you are are always
playing with the same number of blinds. So if you
are playing at a low stakes game, say one dollar
two dollars, it's not suddenly going to become a two
dollar five dollar game or five dollar ten dollar game.

(01:08:12):
Just doesn't happen. In a tournament, the blinds keep going up,
and so it's a very different strategy because your chips,
relatively speaking, suddenly start being worth less and less and less.
It's something that has a beginning. The beginning is like
a cash game because you're deep stack, you have lots
of big blinds, and then it becomes much less like
a cash game because all of a sudden, the blinds

(01:08:33):
are you know, was one, two, and all of a sudden,
it's a thousand, two thousand, and if you still have
your ten thousand and chips, all of a sudden instead
of you know, blinds, you all of a sudden have
five and you're gonna bust. Um. And so the pressure
is very different, The dynamics are different, the decision making
process is different. A lot of players play both. Now

(01:08:55):
I play cash as well, but most people specialize in one.
So ultimately, uh, when you're at the area, do you
what's the biggest buy in tournament that you ever played
at the area. I've only ever played their daily tournaments,
so two forty dollar? Okay? Low? Uh. So ultimately you
go to Monaco and then you go to the Carabean

(01:09:17):
where you ultimately win. UM. Tell us the process there,
I mean, it was just it's more of the same.
I just I kept working and studying and studying with
more and more people, UM, and just improving slowly, UM

(01:09:38):
and slowly working my way up. UM. Once I would
do well at a certain level, so I'd constantly challenge
myself UM. And no one could have predicted that I'd
win a tournament, a major tournament at that UM. And
that's one of these things where you have to work hard,
but you also have to get lucky. And I most

(01:10:00):
of those things had to come together and as a
result of winning, uh, you get on the Poker Stars team.
Tell us about that. So Poker Stars, which is one
of the biggest poker companies in the world, has something
that's called Team Pro. So it's a team of players
which are their professional players that are sponsored by the brand.
So whenever you play, you wear a little patches. Let's

(01:10:21):
say you know, Poker Stars Team Pro. So you're like,
you become like a NASCAR or Formula one where you're
suttenly put putting all these decals on you. Um, but
it's really prescigious and it's something where they kind of
they endorse you and you represent them, but you all
of a sudden also have more of a budget to play.

(01:10:44):
So I never received a salary from them. That's not
how it worked because I didn't want any sort of
conflict of interest. But for their tournaments, I had a budget,
so they'd say, you know, you can spend this amount
on Buyen's for instance. So it enabled me to play
without being quite as afraid of of going broke because

(01:11:06):
I had I had this cushion and I wasn't paying
for all of my own tournaments. At the Poker Stars.
I'm not aligned with Poker Stars anymore. No, no, Um,
I left the team last year. And what was the
decision process there? It was a it was a mutual decision. Um.
I didn't want to be involved with any poker company
when my book came out, I wanted it to you know,

(01:11:29):
I wanted to just promote the book and not anyone else.
I didn't want anyone once again to think there was
a conflict of interest. And they were moving on. They've
actually cut most of their live pros. Um. Their strategy
is now much more online. Um. And I'm not an
online player. Okay. So let's say you get a hankering
to play, doesn't matter who's playing in terms of names,

(01:11:51):
where the location is. Maybe you go to Atlantic City,
you play, or you say, you know, I don't like
the players there. Um, I don't like Atlantic City, I
hardly ever. I mean I so I for me, because
I'm a tournament player. It's not a hankering. I go
where the tour goes. So I look at the schedule.
They're announced well in advance, and I plan out the

(01:12:13):
stops I want to play at. So I I plan
out where I want to be so at any given point,
I mean right now, there's zero going on. Let's just
be clear. In the middle of a pandemic, there's no
live poker. But let's reverse, you know, two years ago
when when this was still a thing. At any given
point in time, there are lots of major poker tours.

(01:12:34):
The World Series of Poker just happens once a year,
but there's a World Poker Tour which has major events
once a month. There's the European Poker Tour, which is
the one that's run by by poker Stars, and that's
happening in Europe. There's an Asia Pacific Poker Tour which
is happening in Asia. Um, there are a bunch in
the US. You've got the World Poker Tour, You've got

(01:12:55):
the World Series Circuit events. So there are lots of
things happening at any given point in time. Time and
so what I would do would be sit down and
map out a schedule, map out what events that what
stops I wanted to go to, because they're all series.
So you go and it's a number of different events.
So if you don't do well in one tournament, you

(01:13:16):
just enter another one and you have many opportunities to
do well. Um. And so that's how I would choose
when to play, and then when I went home, I
really wanted to relax. I mean, in which was the
year that I really spent really playing full time. That's
when I was a Poker Stars Team pro. I was
on the road for over eight months of the year.

(01:13:37):
That's exhausting, and I was I was just I was spent.
Uh So every time I was home, I just wanted
to recharge. I had zero desire to play poker. Okay,
now we live in an arrow. Used to be pre Internet,
you had to go out to have experiences. Now all
the actions at home. But one thing I always say
is when you walk out the front door, you ever

(01:14:00):
know what will happen. Let me give you an analogy
to ultimately form the question there. I have a friend
who got divorced, and to use the vernacular, he'll hit
on anything that moves. So have you learned that it's two?
Is engagement the key? Because of luck, you never know
how the play plays out. Is it about the number

(01:14:20):
of ups, shall we say? Or is it about strategizing
the ups? It's about all of these things. So engagement definitely,
because engagement gives you an edge, and engagement allows you
to take in more information and information with power. Information
is key, but yes, it's also about strategizing the ups
and minimizing the downs. So poker isn't about winning every hand.

(01:14:43):
It's about winning the most with your good hands and
losing the least with your bad hands. And you can
you can take that not just in the immediate hand
to hand, but also in the long term in terms
of tournaments. In terms of the long term. A lot
of players go broke because they go on a hot
streak and they're winning, and they don't realize that there's

(01:15:03):
such a thing as regression to the mean that this
isn't sustainable, that they're just getting lucky. Sure, they're probably
playing well, but they're also getting lucky, and so you
need to plan ahead. You need to figure out, Okay,
how do I plan for the down swain which is
going to happen. A lot of people don't do that,
and instead they say, Wow, I'm great, I'm not going
to play one thousand dollar tournaments anymore. I'm going to

(01:15:24):
play ten thousand dollar tournaments. I'm gonna play twenty dollar tournaments. Hell,
I'm gonna play fifty dollar tournaments. And there goes their money.
Because they can't actually afford to do that. Now you
talk in the book that you are on one side
of psychological training and there's another side which might close
you out of professorships. What's going on there? Oh, I

(01:15:46):
was just so. So that was just me talking about
different schools of social psychology. So the person who was
my mentor, who was my advisor, Walter Michelle Um is
someone who is very adamantly opposed to the person reality
trait research. UM. So there's a school of personality psychology
which says that you know, we have the Big five,

(01:16:07):
the big five traits, and we have certain levels of
extra version and neuroticism and open this to experience all
of these things. And Walter said, bulletshit, that is not true.
That's not how the world works. You can't decontextualized personality.
Personality only matters in context if you're going to predict behavior.

(01:16:28):
And he actually did this back in the sixties. He
wrote a book that looked at the correlation between these
all of these different measures and actual behavior and found
that the correlation was point one or point two, so
predicted ten to of what happened, which is nothing. It's
very low. And yet people were saying, this is the
holy Grail, and he said, here's your problem. People don't

(01:16:51):
have a there's no such thing as someone who is,
you know, conscientious. Maybe you're conscientious that well, your teachers
think you're the neatest person ever, and you never make
your bed, and your parents are frustrated because everything is
such a mess, your clothes are on the floor, and
you're the opposite of conscientious at home. Context. Maybe you're

(01:17:12):
someone who is a risk speaker in certain situations, like
you love to skydive, you like to really do all
you know, go go go full on out there, but
you're incredibly risk averse when it comes too many. And
you're someone who you know who keeps all your money
in a piggy bank because you're scared of the banks.

(01:17:34):
So once again context, and he said that what matters
is behavioral signatures. If then signatures, if we're in this situation,
then this person behaves that way. That all of the
other personality work was really pointless when it came to
actually predicting how someone would behave, and pretty pointless as descriptors.

(01:17:55):
There's an entire school of psychology who hates that and
does not like Walter. I'm attached to him. I was
his last student. When I apply to academic jobs, I
come with Walter's baggage because I represent his viewpoint. And
so if and I never was in academia, I don't
like academia for these very reasons. Um, I think it's

(01:18:17):
it's very I think it's very incestuous, very much who
you know and whose school you're on, and all of
these things. But imagine that I went on the job
market and I applied to a school for someone who's
really big in the Big five of personality is on
the hiring committee. I might have done amazing work in
what I do, but I'm not going to get an

(01:18:38):
interview because that person is very opposed to my point
of view and doesn't want me in their psyche department.
Or I might not even have one of them, but
I might have the department who thinks that all social
psychology is total bullshit and that it's all about neuroscience.
And if I get that person who's making the decision
or listening to my job talk or reviewing my paper,

(01:19:00):
I'm done. I don't have a fair shop. They're not
actually going to look to see if i'm saying anything
interesting or if my research is interesting, because fundamentally they
disagree with what I'm doing. That's one of the things
I loved about poker. Um, none of that matters. Doesn't
matter what you look like, where you went to school,
who you studied with, whether you even graduated, what your

(01:19:21):
last name is, what religion you are. Another matters. If
you play well, you get to play, and if you
can afford it, you can buy into any tournament. No
one can ever block you from buying into a tournament. Now,
you immigrated from Russia at a young age. To what
degree did that and having foreign parents affect your life
and career trajectory? I mean, my life would have been

(01:19:44):
completely different had that not happened. I mean it was
the Soviet Union. I did not leave Russia. I left
the Soviet Union. This was before the fall of the
Berlin Wall. No one knew when that was coming down. Um,
and so how did I stay? And I mean, I'm Jewish,
It's I'm actually saying the reverse. I'm saying, how did
it change someone who grew up or started in Russia

(01:20:06):
had foreign parents as opposed someone who grew up in America.
I can't answer that question. Because I didn't grow up
in America, I know how my life was changed. I mean,
I know that had I stayed in Russia, I wouldn't
have had I wouldn't be a writer, I wouldn't have
had any of these opportunities. What age did you come
to America and did you feel different from kids? How

(01:20:27):
long did it take to assimilate? Um? It took a while.
I mean I didn't speak English, so of course, had
I grown up here would have been different. Um. So
I think I was much more aware of the limits
of our abilities very early on, because I couldn't communicate.
I couldn't say a single word in English. But I
was lucky that I was little, so I was able

(01:20:48):
to learn quickly. I don't actually remember learning English. It
just happened naturally, the way I remember learning some other
languages that I speak now, But my my four year
old brain picked it up eventually. And what did your
parents do for a living in America? Computer programmers? What
they did in Russia, that's what they were trained. And
how many kids in the family? Four? Four that I
grew up with, actually five, okay, well the four that

(01:21:11):
you grew up with the other three. What are where
are you in the hierarchy, baby? And what are their
lives look like? Um? My oldest sister is an m
d PhD. She's an anatologist and runs a lab at
Yale University. My other sister is a veterinarian and lives
in Vermont, and my brother, Um, lives in Sweden with

(01:21:34):
his wife and kids and works for Spotify. Really, okay,
so you go to Harvard, what's that experience like? That's
really you're at the age when Zuckerberg is there in
the Biggle they were so so that was Zuckerberg was
a year below me. Eduardo was my year, and not
only my year. You lived in the same freshman dorm

(01:21:54):
as I did. I've known I know all of those
guys from the beginning. I was one of the first
few hunt producers of Facebook. And what was your opinion
of them? Um? I always I didn't know Mark well.
I liked a Guardo he was always a really nice guy.
And the the Winkle the Winkle Watses were always nice,
but I didn't know them really either. Okay, so going

(01:22:16):
to Harvard was a good experience. I loved it. So
my my husband also went to Harvard and he hated it,
so he and I had very, very different experiences, but
I absolutely loved it. Is that where you met No,
now we met later um through a friend who was
my my co worker and his former roommate. So at

(01:22:37):
what point do you decide you want to study psychology.
I decided I wanted to study psychology when I was
in high school and took an Advanced Placement psychology class,
and the summer reading assignment was Oliver sax Is, the
man who mistook his wife for a hat, And I
remember reading that book and falling in love and thinking,

(01:22:57):
oh my god, the human brain is the most fascinating
thing in the world. I want to be all over
sex when I grow up. Not the doctor part, but
the person who can write that way and who can
describe the human mind that way. So after you get
your PhD. The concept of becoming a writer was instilled
back in high school. Oh, the concept of becoming a
writer was instilled when I was six years old, five

(01:23:19):
or sex. Apparently I had announced it to my family
way back then that I was going to be a writer.
I wrote my first book in first grade. I've always
wanted to write. I study in Harvard, I studied fiction.
I studied fiction writing. I had actually I actually graduated
with a writing portfolio. Okay, So if we look at
the country at large, specifically Trump, the election, etcetera, what

(01:23:43):
does your experience with game theory and psychology tell us
about what is happening in America today. I'm very pessimistic.
I mean and I'm very scared. I am not a
Trump supporter at all. I've done everything I can. I've
written for every publication about I could think of. You know,
I started off with a piece in The New Yorker

(01:24:04):
right after the election, call it saying Donald Trump con
artist question mark. Well that has since changed to exclamation
point written about Trump and his lives for Politico. Um.
You know, I just wrote a piece about Trump and
as a poker player, as a maniac poker player for
Politico just a few weeks back. Um. I've become more

(01:24:24):
and more pessimistic, and I think that we run a
real risk of a second term, which scares me. Um.
I think people cannot get complacent. Um. And this is
just what a what a way to make the conversation
going a really depressing direction. Trump. It's funny because people

(01:24:45):
want to talk about every stuff and other stuff, but
it's all really the people want to talk about. In
terms of game theory, what might you advise the Democrats
to beat Trump in the election? I mean, Trump is
a maniac, and the way you beat mania accident to
be a maniac back it's too fine. Pick your spots

(01:25:06):
and play more conservatively, and but really concentrate on those
few hands that you are playing. Um. I think that
people make a mistake when they go down to Trump's level,
when they stooped to that level, when they actually try
to be a maniac back and return. You can't beat
him at that game. I think you need to be
much smarter than that, and I think you need to

(01:25:29):
be much more patient and try to try to beat
him by by playing stronger hands and playing them well. Okay,
so in terms of engagement, everything is up in the
year because of COVID. Would you tell Biden to debate
him or not to debate Trump? Stay in the basement
because you want to be you want to be as

(01:25:52):
conservative as possible against a maniac. Don't give him any
don't give him any occasions to uh to lash out. No,
do not debate him. What's that going to do? Okay?
And then let's go back to the nomination process. Obviously,
Biden is a centrist. Bernie and Warren were further to
the left, believing the American needed systemic change. Certainly since

(01:26:16):
that time, Black lives matters happens, there are protests, we
have COVID nineteen, we have all these economic issues. Would
you advise l was a good decision to play conservatively
with Biden. Would a decision further oute there like Bernie
have been a better decision. Obviously it's never gonna happen,
But what's your opinion. My opinion was that Warren was

(01:26:37):
a much better nominee and that it should have been so. So. No,
I don't think Biden was the best decision. Um, but
I don't think that Sanders was the right decision either.
I think I was in the Elizabeth Warren. But let's
make it a little bit less about personality more about,
you know, the vision. Both until she waffled a little bit,

(01:26:58):
both Warren and c Anders were saying, Okay, you know,
we have to break up the tech companies, we have
to be aware of corporations. You know, we need health
care for all, which is certainly different from what Trump
and the Republicans are selling. When you're someone in that position,
can you win with being outside or do you play

(01:27:19):
it safe? I think you can win. I think I
think that playing it safe is not always as safe
a strategy as people think. That was a fundamental mistake
that I made early on in poker. I thought that
I couldn't go wrong by playing it safe, and it
ends up that I could. That I was bleeding chips,
I was bleeding supporters because I was just being very,

(01:27:40):
very timid. So I think sometimes you need to go
out there and realize that extreme more a little bit
more extreme doesn't necessarily mean unsafe, that actually the safe
choice might be the less safe one, because that's someone
who's incapable of winning. I don't think Biden's incapable of winning,
by the way, I'm just saying that, Um, I think
it it's false to think that the quote unquote safe

(01:28:04):
choice is actually safe. Another thing Eric says is essentially
played a win. You don't want to just be in
the money. Tell us a difference there, so, as I
already um intimated, when you're playing tournament poker, it's very
different from cash games because most people are going to

(01:28:25):
walk away with zero, and so there's a point in
a tournament called the bubble, and the bubble is the
point where the next person out gets zero and then
the person after that makes money. So let's say it's
a hundred dollar tournament um and ten people are getting paid.
The person who is out in eleventh place gets zero dollars,
and the person who's out in tenth place gets, say

(01:28:46):
a hundred and twenty dollars. Okay, so they make twenty
dollars because a hundred dollars is they're buying, and they
make twenty dollars. But the way that tournament payouts work
is that they're concentrated at the top. So if you
keep just min cashing, which means being out in tenth
place right after the bubble, if you keep just squeaking

(01:29:07):
your way into the money and you keep making twenty dollars,
you're going to go broke, because what about all those
tournaments that you didn't cash, What about the travel expenses,
what about all these different things you need. Actually, to
a hundred dollar tournament, you need to be making a
thousand dollars or you need to be making ten thousand dollars,
not twenty. And the only way to do that is

(01:29:27):
to make the final table where the real money is concentrated.
Because maybe out in tenth places a hundred and twenty
dollars and first place gets nine dollars. That that's a
little that's a little extreme, but maybe, but it's it's
kind of like that. And so what Eric was saying,
don't try to squeak into the money so that you
can say you cashed, because you want to try to

(01:29:48):
accumulate chirps, to put yourself in a position to win,
to put yourself in a position to actually make the
final table, to actually make a deep run, because that's
how you actually make money in this game. And it's
a very diff strategy. A lot of people will just
start playing very conservatively, unfolding every single hand because they
just want to say they cast they want to make
that men cash. But that's a very short sighted strategy.

(01:30:11):
You need to be more aggressive. You need to actually
be willing to risk more, because only by risking more
earlier are you going to be able to put yourself
in a position to win the most. Okay, let's talk
about different things where the numbers are different. In Gulf,
they pay a long way down. Certainly the person who
wins makes usually double what number two, But then from

(01:30:33):
there people can make hundreds of thousands of dollars being
in the top ten. Okay, and certainly there's costs to
play golf now, a lot of those people play to win.
I'm a fan of ski racing Bodie Miller, who's now retired.
He would play to win, whereas it's a season long
cup and people with lesser victories might win on a

(01:30:54):
cumulative basis. The question becomes, do you at this elite level,
do you have to play to win in order to
succeed or is there a role for the journey person
in this game? Now you have to play to win
um in order to really succeed UM. I think that
the journey person needs to play cash games as well,

(01:31:17):
UM if they want to. Tournament poker is very high variants,
So tournament poker, UM, if you're not, if you don't
have a few big scores every single year, you're gonna
lose money and you're going to go broke. A lot
of tournament players they like playing tournaments, but they also
supplement with cash games, which are much steadier, much lower invariants.
So that's one way of doing it, so, so if

(01:31:38):
you want to go hybrid that that's one way. Another
way of doing it is to just sell a lot
of your actions. So a lot of people who aren't
making those huge scores but who want to keep playing,
they'll sell nine of their tournaments, so they're just playing
for ten percent. They can only lose ten percent, but
if they actually hit that big score, they're only gonna
win time percent of it, and their investors are going

(01:31:59):
to get ninety percent. So there are lots of ways
of mitigating risks. So in that sense, sure, there's there's
definitely room for everyone. And if you're just there to
have fun, I think there's also room for you because
as long as you don't as long as you don't
quit your day job, I think that it's something where
you can learn a lot and where you can actually
become a better decision maker. And I think it's better

(01:32:21):
not to quit your day job. One of the reasons
that I think I was able to improve quickly was
I knew I didn't have to write. I could always
go back to being a writer full time, and I
didn't have to play poker to make a living, and
I think that liberated me to actually play better. So
what did you learn about your initial question, your premise
life of visa VI, luck and chance. I learned that

(01:32:47):
in the short term you have to have luck on
your side. So in poker, poker is a game of
skill and there's a chance element. But over the long term,
the best players are going to win, and that I
think is true in a in a macro sense as well.

(01:33:07):
But in order to get to the long term, you
need to get lucky in the short term. So any hand,
any game, any tournament, a much worse player can win
if they get lucky and if they actually look out.
So I can play against Eric and win. That doesn't
mean I've suddenly become better than Eric. That just means
I got lucky. But if Rik and I play ten times,

(01:33:28):
he's gonna probably win more than I win. If we
play a hundred of times, he's definitely going to win
more than I win. If we play a thousand times,
I'm not gonna have any money left. That's how much
more skilled he is than I am. So over the
long term, skill in the immediate term, look, but you
need to plan ahead. You need to realize that good

(01:33:50):
luck and bad luck one doesn't necessarily follow the other
and you never know how long the long term is.
So it's not like if I got on lucky today,
I have to get lucky tomorrow. Life doesn't work that way.
Probability doesn't work that way. So all you can do
is keep making good decisions and keep putting yourself in
a position to win, and never risk so much that

(01:34:10):
you can't recover. I think that's a very valuable life
lesson because you don't know how long you're going to
have to stick it out while the variance is not
on your side, and you have to just be ready
and be there when luck turns your way again. Okay,
so let's just assume if I snap my finger and
COVID was over, which of course is not going to happen.
Are you a writer? Are you a poker player? What

(01:34:33):
do you anticipate doing after this lull both? I mean
I had no plans of stopping to play poker, never
had any plans to stop writing, and they go very
well hand in hand. I can write anywhere in the world,
I can play poker in most places in the world,
so why not do both? But I think I'm always
first and foremost a writer that's always my my first identity.

(01:34:55):
That's what I love. Um, that's where my heart is,
and that's what makes me I am. But I love
poker and I was still learning a lot and still
really growing in the game when COVID hit um, and
so I fully intend to keep playing, at least for
the foreseeable future, while I'm still winning and while I'm

(01:35:16):
still enjoying it. Why would I stop? And are you
pulling together a new book as we talk? Um? No,
I'm not someone who's thinking about my next project before
I'm done with my previous project, and it always takes
me at least six months to figure out what I'm
going to do next in terms of books, So I
have no idea what's next. I'm working on some other

(01:35:36):
things that aren't books, um, that I can't talk about
right now. But so I am. You will be seeing
creative output for me from me in the coming months,
but they're not It's not going to be in book form.
But the next book is I'm not sure? But is it?
The creative projects are writing yes, okay, into what do
we did the success of the book? Uh? Meat or

(01:35:59):
exceed your expectations? And what opportunities have come along as
a result of the book. I mean, so far, it's
only been a month since it's been out. So Um,
I've been very happy with the with the reception that
people seem to be responding to it and enjoying it.
I didn't know what to expect. It's very different from
my prior books. It's much more personal. I mean, it's

(01:36:22):
a memoir, it's it's a first person book. It's the
first time I've written in my real voice, not just
my journalistic voice, and I've actually shared what's in my head. Um,
And so I think it's always makes you feel very
vulnerable putting yourself out there like that. So I didn't
know if people would like it, and I've been very

(01:36:42):
gratified that I've gotten a good response and that the
poker community likes it. Um. That's also something that I
didn't know, um, whether that was going to work out
or not, because poker players can be a tough crowd,
and so I I'm really glad that they think I've
represented them well for the most part. Um, It's it's
been hard. I mean I had to cancel my book

(01:37:04):
to our, I had to cancel all of my events. Um,
it's not at all like the book release that I
had planned. Um, but you you, the funny thing is
that's what my book is about. Right. You can plan
as much as you want, and then chance is going
to be what it's going to be, and you have
to deal with it. Actually, the human narrative as opposed

(01:37:26):
to the psychology, was the most interesting for me, and
I almost wish there were two books, one without any
of the psychological analysis and one with it, because just
you know, a lot of times I would get really
into it and you, you know, you would talk about
all the theories, etcetera. But I said, you know, what
is a person feeling? You know, what are they gonna do?
What's happening? In any event, Maria, thanks so much for

(01:37:48):
doing this. Thanks for taking time out of your day
tell your story. Certainly fascinating for all those of us
who are interested both in poker in life. Thanks again,
Thank you so much. Bob, It's been a pleasure. Until
next time. This is Bob left Sex

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Bob Lefsetz

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