Poker: The high-stakes way to unlock your potential | Maria Konnikova | Big Think Edge

Welcome everyone to Big Think Live! I'm Winston Brown. I'm an actor, writer, and director. It is my great pleasure to be in conversation today with best-selling author Maria Kova. Today, we'll be talking about her new book, The Biggest Bluff, the story of Maria's journey of going from never having played poker to becoming an international poker champion and how mastering poker skills can help one see new patterns and opportunities, solve problems, manage emotions, and win in life beyond the game.

Welcome, Maria! It's so good to have you.

Thank you so much, Winston, for that lovely introduction. It's an honor to be interviewed by you. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, Maria and I will chat for about 40 minutes, and then we will turn to audience questions. If you'd like to ask one, please write your question in the comments section of whatever platform you are watching. You can start writing your questions immediately, and I'll get started talking with Maria.

Maria, in the hero's journey, they talk about the call to adventure. What called you, a total novice, on your poker journey?

That is an excellent question, especially since I'm someone who had zero interest in cards, zero interest in poker, to be perfectly honest. Zero interest in games before I embarked on this journey. Um, I was someone who grew up with books. Reading was always what I wanted to do rather than, you know, play a board game or something like that. Whereas other people might, you know say, "Oh, let's play a game tonight!" When the board games come out, I have this sinking feeling in my stomach. Is someone going to make me play this?

And so I came to poker from a very different angle than most people because most of the poker players I've since met are games players, and they are people who came to poker from chess, or because someone in their family was a poker player, or because they loved playing Magic: The Gathering or some other game that I only learned about when I entered this poker world. For me, it was because I became fascinated by the role that luck plays in our lives, by the line between skill and chance, between the things that we control and the things we don't control.

I had a pretty rough year where I had health issues, my grandmother died suddenly, multiple people in my family lost their jobs. Just all of these things kept happening one after the other after the other. It really made me appreciate just how reliant we are on the goodwill of the universe, on luck going our way and being on our side, and how often we completely take it for granted. You know, you don't normally wake up every morning and say, "Ah, you know I woke up and I'm healthy. You know everything feels fine, everything's in the right place, good. Um, lucky me!" It's just so easy to take for granted.

I really wanted to write about it and to explore it, but I needed a way into the topic. I started reading a lot. So this goes back to me as a reader; that's what I always do whenever I have anything new that preoccupies my mind. I read anything I can get my hands on. At one point, um, I started reading about game theory, and I decided to read the book that is the foundational text of game theory. It's called The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and I learned that one of its authors, John von Neumann—who's the father of game theory—was a poker player.

Not only was he a poker player, but poker was the basis of game theory. Von Neumann, like this brilliant guy, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, believed that poker held the solution to the most complex human strategic decisions. That if you could find a way into that game, you could find a way into life, into decision-making in real life because he believed that poker was the game, out of all the universe of games, that best mirrored life.

Because it was a game of incomplete information where you have to make probabilistic decisions, decisions that don’t ever have a 100% certainty of playing out a certain way. Unlike chess, say, where you do have certainty because it's a game where all the pieces are on the board and where you can actually compute the move. In poker, that's not the case, and in life, that's not the case. There are always things you don't know. There are always things that I know that you don’t know, things that you know that I don’t know. And then it's a game of people; it's a game of psychology.

So here's this mathematician, and he's saying the reason I like this game is that it's not just about math. You can't solve it just with math because you have to solve the human element, and that’s not possible. We can try to model it; we can approximate it, but we can't crack it. This intrigued me. My background is in writing; it's in psychology; it's in people. And so I thought, "Huh, this is really, really interesting. Let me read about poker. And when I started reading about poker, something just clicked. I thought, Why can't this be my way in? Why don't I learn to play, get someone really, really good to teach me?"

Let me ask you that next question. Um, this book exists because you convinced champion poker player Eric Sidell to spend a year teaching you, a total novice. You say you did not know how many cards were in a deck when you started. How did you go out there and get yourself possibly the world's best mentor? Why did you pick Eric?

I got so ridiculously lucky that I picked Eric because I knew nothing. I mean, I did some research, obviously, when I decided I wanted to go on this journey. I thought I need someone really, really good. So I just—but I knew nothing about poker. So I did Google searches. I literally looked and went, "Best poker player in the world" and tried to get a list of names that way. And Eric's name actually kept coming up because not only has he been really successful, he's been really successful for a long time—since the '80s.

When I started digging a little deeper, I realized that that kind of longevity just is not common at all in the poker world. Most people have a brief period where they're the best, and then they fade. He just kept being the best, and I thought that was intriguing. The other part of it, to be perfectly honest, is I looked at some videos on YouTube, and he seemed nice. He just seemed like a good person. So many poker players were just blowing up, having these rage fits or swearing and doing this and like, just mugging for the camera. You could see that they wanted—they were very full of themselves, and they wanted to kind of put on a good show.

There’s Eric just kind of quietly sitting, not saying a single word in the background, just kind of playing and winning. I didn’t understand anything about the strategy, but he appealed to me for that reason.

I was going to ask, many people feel afraid to ask for something as consequential and intimate as mentorship. When you asked Eric, you write that you knew that it would be a complicated seduction. So how did you do it? How did you convince him?

I know how much time and energy mentorship takes because I've mentored people before. I wasn't just asking him to mentor me; I was asking him to basically let me tag along for a year. I mean, it ended up being longer than a year, but at the time I didn't know. Um, and he—you know, he didn't know me, and he had never taken students before. So this was a real stretch. I think that in the initial approach, the fact that I'm a journalist really helped me.

I'm very used to cold calling people and to calling really famous people who are much smarter than I am and who would intimidate me in any other context. But I am not calling for me. I'm saying, "You know, I'm Maria Kova. I'm writing a piece about you for The New Yorker" or wherever I’m writing for, and I'd like to talk to you. It’s never gotten easier in the sense that I still hate it, and it still is very nerve-wracking to just approach someone out of the blue. But at least I know how to do it, and at least I've done it before, so I was able to get over the fear and to approach him.

Then I knew that it was really, really important that I presented it as something of a value proposition for him as well. I mean, it has to be a two-way street, and I had to know that I was—I had to let him know that I took it seriously, that I would really value his time, and I'd give it my all, and that I wasn't going to half-ass this.

Because I think if you agree to mentor someone, your mentee needs to step up and needs to actually appreciate it and be there and be willing to do her part. Um, otherwise, you know, if someone says, "Oh, I just want to pick your brain over coffee," and then you never hear from them again, that's a really one-sided conversation and a one-way street. So I tried to show him that I was really serious about this, that I was going to work really hard, and that I was bringing something to the table.

Yes, I wasn't bringing poker knowledge, but I was bringing psychology knowledge, and from what I'd read about poker, that was really important. I had even done my homework. Um, I had gone through the psych literature and tried to find anything I could on poker, and I found some pretty cool studies that had never really made their way out of academia about poker tells and, you know, different movements and all these things. I brought them for him and said, "Here, you know, I can do my research too. You can read these."

I think that he realized from the beginning that I was willing to do my best to really make it worthwhile for him and that I was excited about the project. I think that's ultimately what really sold him because he loves poker; he's passionate about the game. In me, he saw an opportunity to spread that love beyond the poker community because I wasn't a poker player.

That's a really powerful set of advice that you've just given. I think to put yourself in the other person's shoes and bring a value proposition to them and show how serious you are means a lot to a teacher.

I think it does—to have a student coming up is very powerful. I was going to say that you started before you ever got to a poker table; you started playing online poker, and poker is a game where people are judging and trying to play their opponents from the get-go.

In online poker, they only see your username and avatar. Can you tell me, please, about the choice of your online name and avatar?

Yes, I spent a lot of time thinking about this because I wanted to actually get something psychologically useful out of this. So while some people might see it as an opportunity to dissemble and to be someone else, I saw it as an opportunity to say, "Okay, well, the first thing people are going to see when they play live is that I'm female, so I might as well try to replicate some of that online to try to see how they're reacting to me so that I can start learning right away."

So I wanted a screen name that would actually communicate to people female. I ended up going with the psych chick, um, all one word. And I did it for a few different reasons. You know, chick, obviously female, and psych, my background. But it also kind of—if you're not really looking and you're not really literate—it looks like psychic.

So some people might think that I'm actually seeing myself as a psychic, that I think I can see the cards, which is great for me if they think that I'm someone like that because then they'll think that I'm a very irrational person. So that's great. Also, psych—psycho. They might think—there are lots of different associations there. The avatar was a puppy, and I chose a photograph of a really cute puppy because I looked, and I saw that people actually respond differently to different avatars.

And so the puppy was a really nice way. It wasn’t, you know, a picture of a female, but it was something, you know, very cute and female, and I loved that picture of the puppy. I'm allergic to dogs. I'm allergic to all animals. So it was very fun for me to just get to look at this really adorable puppy over and over. And so that was my thinking process.

Right away, I saw that there were elements of it that were working. I mean, people started really yelling at me online; there’s a chat function. So right away, I decided, "Okay, I'm never going to use the chat function. I'm not going to engage." But other people engaged with me, and I'd get a lot of vitriol. I'd get called a lot of really bad words. Um, there in the chat, people were definitely responding to the fact that I seemed female. They were also more aggressive towards me; I think they thought they could take advantage of that, and eventually, I was able to use that to my advantage.

Some of the tilt, or emotional upheaval—I'll describe it as that—that you describe in your book came from being profiled as a woman, and you came to a deep realization about your own social conditioning. You write, "We are socialized into our passivity after all, don't we want to be liked so that we will be hired, and make money, and make a living?" Talk about how poker has changed your social identity.

That was one of those lessons that I didn't think I needed to learn. I mean, I've always thought of myself as a strong female, as someone who, you know, has a backbone and is able to stand up for myself. I'd studied biases; I knew all about social conditioning and all about how we internalize stereotypes. This was something that in my work in psychology I knew intimately, and I'd written about it.

I've actually written pieces for The New Yorker on what it means to be female, on negotiating while female, on all of these different things. So it's was like I've got this covered. And then I'm placed in this new world—this high-stakes environment—where I have to make decisions quickly, and there's a lot of pressure, and there's a lot of emotion, and there's money on the line. I feel like there are expectations—not just my own, but I've got Eric Sidel and all these people who are helping me out.

All of a sudden, I started noticing things about myself that I didn't know were there. Sometimes, you know, I would have problems being aggressive. I would have problems bluffing. I would have problems even with my strong hands when I wasn't bluffing. I'd have problems getting enough money because I didn't want people to think, "Oh, that's the chick who always raises me." You know, I wanted people to like me. I wanted them to think I was nice. I wanted them to enjoy playing with me. And I definitely didn't internalize the rule that there are no friends at the poker table, that you’re there to play and you're there to win.

I made horrible decisions, and I could find I just felt myself not being willing to put myself out there, folding to bullies. You know, I would just say, "Okay, okay, you take it. I don’t want the confrontation." It was a very painful realization in two ways: one because it taught me something about myself that I really didn't want to believe was true, and two because I was losing money. So I was actually financially painful; I wasn't being a very good poker player.

And so those two things actually coming together forced me to learn, forced me to confront it in a way that I wouldn't have had to do otherwise. Because if you don't have money on the line, if you don't actually have to make decisions, if you don't have to take this into account right away, then you're not really incentivized to change or to do anything about it. You're not incentivized to acknowledge it; you can just kind of move on and pretend it's not there.

Here I couldn't pretend; I had to actually adjust. So I started working on it. I thought, "Wow, this is terrible. This is a problem." This is clearly—I’ve been socialized much more than I ever wanted to admit to myself. Um, and so how do I work on it? How do I resolve this? I had to work hard; I had to not just acknowledge it, but then figure out, "Okay, what am I going to do to counter it? How am I going to turn this on its head? How can I use this as a strength rather than a weakness?"

I actually worked with a mental coach to help me do that. I realized that I needed help with not just the poker strategy but the mental strategy and the emotional strategy. I came up with different techniques; I came up with ways that I could counter this. I also came up with a way to reframe it all and to realize that, you know, it's not a sign of being a bad person or a sign of this or of that. It's a sign of being a strong person and a good player and someone who understands these things.

I started taking a lot of the biases that I was seeing at play against me and turning them on their head. I said, "Okay, well, if you see me as a female first—maybe at the beginning I will let that intimidate me, which I did—but then I can actually use it. I can take advantage of it. I can say, fine, how do you see women then? If you see me as a woman, how do you see women? Do you see women as someone incapable of bluffing, incapable of playing hands that aren't strong in a way that suggests that they're strong?" Some people saw that.

If I saw them at the table and if I realized that's how they were experiencing me, guess what? I can bluff. I can bluff a lot. And for others, it's the exact opposite—they think that I'd rather die than be caught folding to a woman. You know, I'm the man at this table. And so against those people, well, you can’t bluff because they’re going to call you with anything, but you can bet a lot with both strong hands and weak hands as long as you have anything you can bet because they’re going to call you because they’re not going to want to fold. So you can extract much more money than you otherwise would be able to.

Whereas against thinking players who probably realize that if you're betting this much, you have a really strong hand and fold, this person just can't see that. They can't see past their own biases, and I worked out lots of strategies like this and a lot of mental strategies for how do I prevent this from getting to me?

You mentioned the word "tilt," which I think is a wonderful word for injecting emotion into your thought process. Once you identify the things that make you tilt, you can work to prevent that from happening; you can work to control those emotions so that you are able to take them out of the decision process. I started doing that.

You mentioned that your coach, Jared Tendler, your mentor coach, asked you to map out your emotional process. Why did he tell you to do that, and how did it help?

A lot of people, including me, think that it's a big waste of time to actually write things down and map them out. You think, "Yeah, I understand my emotional landscape. I understand how I react to things. Why do I actually need to physically write this down?" He gave it to me as a homework assignment, and I'm a good student, so I said, "Fine, fine, I'll do it."

I realized that a lot of my reluctance had to do with the fact that writing it down forces you to think through it in a way that just vocalizing it in your mind doesn't. Because in your mind, you can have a lot of gaps. You don't actually have to think through things logically; you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I understand. Yeah, yeah, I know." That's why if you're a teacher, one of the best things that you can do is have your students explain what they've just learned to someone else because that way you can see if they've really understood it.

Because a lot of the gaps in their understanding are going to come through when they try to explain it in turn to other people. I think when it comes to your own emotional counseling, so to speak—because poker really is like a therapy session on steroids—so much comes out at the poker table. You also have to do the same thing; you have to actually talk it through and figure out what's going on. Since you're not sitting there talking to yourself, writing it out is a really good way of doing it.

It also gives you a history; it gives you a document of what you were thinking at a given moment that you can come back to. Because you're not going to remember what you were thinking; you're not going to remember what kind of a person you were a week ago, two weeks ago, a year ago. But even a week ago, it's so—we always project our current selves onto our past selves. It's really, really difficult to go back in time and to actually remember what your past self was like. I think that mapping out the emotional process is one of the ways that you can counter that because it shows who you are right then and what things—how you're experiencing the world right there.

Also, by the way, he gave me—um, it was very good for writing the book because I could go back to the moment and figure out exactly what I was experiencing emotionally because I had written it down.

That's great—the unexpected boon. Yes, um, you said that so much comes out at the poker table that it's like a therapy session on steroids. In your book, you say that a knowledgeable person at a poker table could learn more about your risk-taking habits than your friends and people who've known you socially for years. Have you developed a kind of "spidey sense" about other people's risk-taking habits in the real world, and have your habits changed?

That's a very good question. So I think that the reason why poker is an arena where people can really learn about you is because in tournament poker, it's kind of this drama. You're going through a full life cycle in a day or in a few days, and you're experiencing the highs and the lows, and you're able to see someone respond under emotional pressure, which is the best way to really see what they're made of in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to risks.

You put them in hot situations; that’s what psychologists always try to do, and it's so difficult to force it and to actually create it experimentally, but poker does it for you. There you are; you’re experiencing these swings, and you can see how people react to losses and how they react to wins. When they lose a lot, when they win a lot, you can see those moments. That's how you're able to develop profiles of people— including other people developing profiles of me and me developing profiles of myself.

So if you start being very cognizant of what's going on in a sense that you're not just aware of other players, which is important, but you're aware of your own reactions—which goes back to what we were talking about just now with the emotional control and what Jared had me do—then you can learn a lot more about your own tendencies as a player.

Something that I actually didn't realize until I started playing poker, I mean, I know that I'm a fairly risk-averse person in a lot of different areas. You know, I would never go skydiving; I don't want to risk my life if I don't have to. Um, I've never done any drugs; I have zero desire to. You know, I'm not—I'm someone who is very careful when it comes to that. But sometimes, I'm very capable of making huge risks, including with my life, if I think that it's actually for something important. I just don't want to do it for a thrill.

Right, so I reported from a war zone when I was in college. That was—it's something that was, I had to have a bodyguard; that—I was actually—in a civil war people were shooting. But I felt like that was worth doing, and so I was— I was actually happy to do that.

So, but I'm capable of doing something like that, and poker actually also showed me that, you know, sometimes I won't be able to bluff in small spots, but then all of a sudden I'll be able to just risk all of my chips in these huge moments. And so I think, "Wait, what am I doing?" and "Am I doing it for the right reasons?" So I realize that sometimes I am doing it for the right reasons, and sometimes I'm not; sometimes it's more of an emotional decision.

And so yes, I've definitely taken that from poker to real life in the sense that I'm much more aware of the process and the process of evaluating risks. Why am I actually taking this risk right now? Is it a calculated risk? Is it a worthwhile risk, not just emotionally but rationally? Am I looking at the probabilities? Am I acting for the right reasons?

One of the really important lessons that I learned came not from Eric but from Phil Galfond, who is another great poker player who was nice enough to work with me for a long time throughout this process. Phil said something that I'll always remember: he said, "Always ask why." Why are people acting a certain way? Why are they doing certain things? And also ask that about yourself. That kind of 'always ask why' was so incredibly powerful, and it's part of the answer to your question.

If you have this 'always ask why' in your mind, then it helps you figure out your own risk propensities in real life away from poker and also about that "spidey sense" about other people. If you start getting into a habit of always asking why—why is this person saying this? Why are they reacting this way? Why are they doing this? Why are they taking this risk? Do they see it as a risk? Do they actually understand?

So it's less spidey sense and more, I think, being more—I don't know if empathetic is the right word—but certainly trying to see what someone else, not you, might be thinking of this exact situation and trying to really understand why they're making a certain decision, why they're taking certain risks or avoiding others rather than judging them. We're so quick to judge. We're so quick to say, "My God, you're an idiot if you're going to do this," or "I can't believe!" And that should never be your first reaction.

Maybe at the end, you will come to the conclusion that this person is an idiot, but at least don’t do it in a judgmental way. Do it in a thought-out way where you actually take the time to ask why and to try to understand.

As you were talking right now, you were describing things that relate to analyzing facts, analyzing evidence that's put before you. In one of your wonderful non-poker examples in the book, you talk about a group of people writing a textbook who vastly underestimated the time it would take them to write this book, and when faced with evidence, they did something that you call irrational perseverance. Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise. Where does listening to facts stop us from dreaming?

Nowhere! It's so funny that this example just hits home because these are such smart people. One of those people is Danny Kahneman, who is one of the most brilliant psychologists in the world. I mean, he has a Nobel Prize for his work on doing this. He was one of those people who was doing the textbook planning and who persisted and decided, "Oh yeah, we'll be able to do it. That's fine. That's right." If even he can fall for that, then it just goes to show how much hope underlies everything.

And it's so funny. So I want to say two things. First, there was a moment where, um, Jared Tendler, my mental coach, said something very funny. I said, "I hope something." And he said, "Pardon my language, but this is a direct quote: 'Hope has no place in this game!'"

You can't make decisions based on hope; you need to make decisions based on information, facts, logic, process. Um, and hope has nothing to do with it. You can't make a decision because you hope your hand is best or you hope this card will come or you hope this other person will do this. You have to actually rationalize, and not rationalize—you have to actually use a rational process to make that decision because otherwise, you're going to be in all sorts of situations where you're relying on hope, where you're relying on things to work out the way you want them to, rather than confront the unpleasant reality that they could actually go in a totally different reaction.

You know, you might bet and say, "Well, I hope he folds." What if he doesn't? What if he raises you? What if he calls? Then what? And in poker, because it's a game, you can actually think through this. There are only so many variables. Then you can take that and you can apply it to everyday life where it's much more difficult, where hope really gets us to be myopic about so many different things.

And don't get me wrong; hope is a wonderful thing, but a little delusion goes a long way. And I think too much—too many of us are a little bit too diluted, especially about the things we want to believe. My last book was about con artists; it's called The Confidence Game. At the end of the day, I concluded that what con artists sell is hope. That's what enables them to be successful—they figure out the version of the world you want to believe in, not what really exists but what you already believe, and then they mirror it back to you. They sell it to you, and that's why they're so persuasive; that's why you're willing to go along with them.

And that's something that they take advantage of in us, but it's also not something that you could ever eliminate without eliminating our humanity because it's in humans to hope. It's in humans to be optimistic and to hope for the best and to want things to work out.

Would you really want to live in a world without hope? I think the answer is no. At least for me, the answer is no. So it's this double-edged sword where it's this wonderful thing but also a thing that can really steer us wrong, especially in high-stakes situations—whether at the poker table or away from it.

You just mentioned one of your previous books. Another of your previous books, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, delved into the capacious mind of the world's best-known detective. What kind of poker player would Sherlock be?

Hmm, maybe! I don't know! We'll see. We'll see! We'll have to do a fictional match in Arthur Conan Doyle's mind. But I think he would be a brilliant poker player because he has many of the characteristics that poker teaches us. He is someone who is very observant and actually present.

So the book was about Sherlock Holmes, but it was really about mindfulness and about how the key to Sherlock Holmes's success is about being present, being aware, paying attention, being very mindful of what's going on, and making conscious choices about where you focus your attention and what you take in. He was someone who was very good at doing that, and at the poker table, I think this would serve him incredibly well.

The first lesson that Eric gave me was pay attention. That's what you really need to do at the poker table. That's such a powerful lesson because how often do we not pay attention? I mean, we're on our phones; we're doing this; we're thinking about that; we're not really present; our minds are drifting off somewhere else.

So I think for that reason, Sherlock Holmes would be brilliant. The other thing that he's very good at doing is controlling his emotions. A lot of people think that he's just this robot. He's not; he does experience emotions. He experiences love; he experiences affection. You know, he experiences very human things, but he knows it, and he takes it out of the equation. He says, "Okay, yes, she's very charming, but that's irrelevant here. So I'm going to ignore all the feelings of sympathy that her being charming is arousing in me, and I'm going to make this rational choice instead."

So that’s a process that you have to learn as a poker player—how do you take your emotions, analyze them, and then remove them from the equation? I think he would definitely kick my ass over and over, but maybe eventually, I'd figure out a way to get to him. I'm not despairing yet!

I'm going to turn to some of the questions from our live audience. What has poker taught you about your relationships? Do you handle things differently, and are you reading people all the time?

Um, so it’s taught me a good number of things about my relationships. One, which actually stems directly from what you and I were just talking about, Winston, which is paying attention to other people. I think poker has made me a much better listener; it's made me much more in tune with what people are telling me because at the poker table, you have to constantly listen to what players are saying and not just their words but their bodies.

You know, are they comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they excited? Are they scared? You have to learn to focus on non-verbal cues, to focus on changes, to start noticing subtle emotional changes that are happening in people because it helps you figure out what's going on in their mind, and that's information that's really important.

But if you then take that out of the poker context, it makes you, I think, a much better friend, a much better partner—someone who's actually much better in relationships because you're more in tune with others. You're more in tune with their bodies; you're more in tune with both what they're saying and what they're not saying, what they're feeling.

And we bluff all the time! And bluffing—people say, "Oh, bluffing, lying, it's bad!" No! I mean, people bluff about how they're feeling. They bluff about how confident they're feeling or, you know, how sad they are or how happy they are. We're bluffing ourselves. We're bluffing others. We have images of ourselves that we want to project to the world, but that image isn't always in line with reality.

Understanding that, being able to read the subtle cues, being able to say, "Hey, wow, I think this person doesn't really want to be talking about this right now," and they're nodding and saying, "Yeah, yeah, of course. No, no, let's keep talking." You can tell that they're not really comfortable, and you can say, "You know what? Let me steer the conversation in another direction. Let me actually be in tune with what they're not saying and with their little bluffs and their little deceptions, which are being communicated but in a way that I might not have noticed before."

So in that sense, yes, I am constantly reading people, and I think it's made me better for it and stronger.

I have to just comment that I find that answer both beautiful and surprising because somehow, in the "how do we take these lessons to win at life," it seems to suggest to me a kind of zero-sum game. And what you've just brought back to me and to the audience is how everyone can be elevated by greater attention in a situation and how it can be something that both helps the person that you're reading and yourself to have a clearer and more honest and perhaps more nuanced communication.

I think that's so important. So many people think that poker makes you this just stone-hearted killer, and there's so much more. It teaches you—that's why I think it's such a powerful tool for teaching people about all sorts of things, including emotional maturity, humility, and emotional resonance and empathy because all of these things are things that, yeah, they can make you win at a game, but guys, it's a game. You have to realize that.

So I'm not actually taking; I'm not stealing money from someone. It's not like I'm using this in a con artist way. We're playing a game where everyone understands that these are the rules, and then you take a lot of these things from the game, and you're able to make the world a more actually positive place where people are much more rational and much better to each other in a way.

It's funny that a game that people think of as, you know, these killers out for money, that I think it can actually make the world a better place in a big sense.

That's wonderful. That's a hopeful answer. Um, one of the audience writes, "As a woman who plays poker, I have bigger challenges playing against other women. I'd love to hear your insights on that."

I think that that's often the case, true. And I think that it's funny because there aren't many women in poker. For people who haven't read my book and who don't know a lot about the poker world, um, about 97% of the poker world is male, so 3% female. That's not a lot at all. Um, and so I often will go to a series and play for over a week and not play with another woman.

And so a lot of the things that I've developed is how to play against men because that's who I normally play against. They often underestimate me; they see me as female. Now, you get to a ladies' event—for instance, an event which is just women—and there's a bracelet event every single year which is the World Series of Poker Ladies' event. There are events like that where you do all of a sudden—all of that 3% comes together, and then people who don't normally play come out to play in these events.

I actually think that women have the potential to be just incredibly strong poker players, so I hope that there will eventually be more of them. But yeah, those events are often tougher for me because women don't underestimate me. They have much more nuanced versions of me. For them, I'm not just a woman. I'm—they're paying attention, and they're taking notes, and they're figuring out who I am because they see me as human, surprise, surprise. They see me as a fellow player; they understand that, you know, what I'm capable of because they're capable of it too.

Um, and so they bring a level of empathy and awareness to the situation that men often don't. And so it’s very funny. Yeah, I do often find playing against all women to be a more challenging environment also because it's all—it's something I'm not used to doing.

Wow! Um, Eric Sidell, your coach, taught you not to focus on the bad beats. Talk about what bad beats are and what this means in terms of real-world resilience in this time of COVID.

Oh, I think that's such a great question because I think that this is one of those lessons that's so incredibly applicable to the real world. So bad beats happen everywhere. The definition is that you get your money in as a favorite. So at the poker table, it means that when the money went in the middle, when you actually made this decision and committed to this hand, you were the favorite statistically speaking.

Um, so say—but statistically speaking, it's a probabilistic game. This is where we began this conversation with some—that there's no such thing as certainty, right? So getting your money in as a favorite doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win; it just means that you made the statistically correct decision, and over time, if you keep making this decision over and over, you're going to win more often than you lose.

But in this particular case, you might not, and so when you flip over your cards and you're like, "And you think, 'Oh, I'm so far ahead! You know, I'm a 75% favorite!' and that 25% happens, and someone hits the miracle card that they needed." I've had it happen where I've gotten my money in as a 98% favorite, and the 2% has happened. They've hit the one card remaining that can beat me, and it does.

Um, it comes, and so that's a bad beat. And bad beats are actually good in the sense that they mean you're making the right decisions. If you never experienced bad beats, that means that you're being way too risk-averse, that you're not putting enough money in the middle when you're ahead, that you're too scared of the bad beats.

Um, so it's actually a sign that you're playing well, um, and that you're not running well in terms of variance, but that doesn't matter. You shouldn't be focused about that. But for a lot of people, they are—they are basically excuses to moan and to say, "Ah! I can't believe this happened to me! Unlucky me! I can't believe this guy was in with this hand, and he sucked out!" Even that term, "sucking out," you know, it shows a frame of being just really mad that something happened.

A lot of people love to complain, and at the beginning, I decided that I wanted to complain too. And so I experienced a bad beat and I ran to Eric and started telling him this hand about how I was knocked out of the tournament. It was really—and he just shut me up! And Eric is just the nicest guy ever, and he's so patient, and he's a really great listener and I just—my jaw dropped! I just thought, "What in the world?"

He said, "I don't want to hear it!" And he told me—he taught me something really, really important in that moment. Even though I was really mad at him, I was like, "You're my coach! You're supposed to listen to me!" He said, "No! Do you have a question about how you played the hand? Do you have a question about the process?"

And I said, "Well, no! I mean, I had, you know, a set, for people who don’t play poker, it's a very good hand." And he said, "Okay, well that's it! You're done! I don't care how the hand ended." When you tell other people bad beats, you're just taking your garbage and dumping it on their lawn.

And he was so right! And it's not just garbage that you're dumping on other people. It's toxic to you because you're focusing on the wrong things. You're focusing on the outcome—something that you can't control at all, something that's beyond you— instead of the process: Did I make the right decision? And you're wasting your emotional energy on this rather than on the process, rather than on the things that you actually have power to change, to work on, to improve that.

And eliminating bad beats from your vocabulary is such a powerful and freeing way of being. It helped me both at poker because all of a sudden they weren't weighing down on me and I actually don’t remember these days how I busted from tournaments. I don't remember my bad beats. They go out of your mind if you don’t focus there. Instead, I remember the interesting hands where I had interesting decisions to make.

Sure, sometimes I'll remember a bad beat because the hand itself was interesting—not because of the outcome. And if you start taking that to everyday life, it becomes such a liberating thing because rather than ruminate on all the things going wrong—oh, unlucky me!—I can't believe this is happening. You switch your mindset to say, "Okay, what can I do? Let me be an agent. Let me have my locus of control in Pye be internal rather than external."

Okay, yeah, this happened; let's move on! How do I actually learn from it? What can I take away? How can I improve my process? How can I put myself in a position to win next time? Because that's what you're doing when— with a bad beat, when it happens, you've put yourself in a position to win, and you got unlucky.

All right, let me keep putting myself in a position to win rather than wallowing! Because if you keep wallowing, those positions to win aren't going to keep coming up because your decision process is going to actually suffer. Because you'll be feeling bad for yourself, it will affect how you're evaluating things, your emotions; you’ll go on tilt! Your emotions are going to feed back in, and you’re going to rather than avoid future bad beats by just avoiding those situations to begin with because you figured out, "Oh, you know what? I should be paying attention to this. I should be focusing on that."

You’re going to get into a very bad spiral of seeming bad beat after bad beat, but it's something that you're doing to yourself because of the way you're thinking and the way you're ruminating and your negative thought patterns that are actually going to spill out onto people close to you. They're not going to be very pleasant because you're not pleasant, you know? It has a spiral effect, and I think that since the second part of the question really was explicit about COVID, I think that it's a very powerful lesson for right now. Let's focus on the things that we can do. Let's focus on our choices!

Let's focus on the things that are within our control because a lot of this is within our control at this point. There are data that shows that the choices that individual people make—you know, the choices to wear a mask, the choices to socially distance, to not go indoors and to only be outdoors when you have to be around people—those three choices can stop the spread of COVID. And those are such easy things that you can do!

And wash your hands, obviously, but that's not the most important thing. The other things are actually more important, and if people take that—the facts—and rather than hope that it goes away and say, "Oh! I'm tired! I'm bored! I'm this! I'm that! I can't believe this is happening to me!" Instead of saying, "I can't believe this is happening," be like, "Yeah, it's happening!" And whether or not you believe it, it doesn't care; it's out there!

That's the thing about variance and probability: it doesn't care about you; it's just going to happen no matter what. So your opinions about it don't matter at all. It's out there, and the virus doesn't care about you! It doesn't care if you think it's time for it to go away, so why don't you focus on yourself, on your own emotions, your own reactions, your own actions—the things that you can control?

Talking of taking power back, here's a question from the audience.

That was a very powerful answer, and thank you. A question from the audience: how do professional poker players come out of losing streaks?

I think that this actually is a very good follow-up to the bad beat question because professional poker players who are good, and who actually survive—so the caveat: some don't—and a lot of professional poker players go broke because they overestimate their ability, they become overconfident, they start playing above their bankroll, and they go bust. No one remembers their name!

Or they are good at poker but horrible in other areas and, you know, spend all their money on drugs or spend all their money at the craps table or whatever, and go bust. So professional poker players who are actually good and who have lasting power understand variance. They understand that there will be times when they go through periods of losing, and they don't take it personally, and they don't think, "Okay, um, this means that, you know, everything sucks. Life sucks."

They don't let it actually affect their decision process, and in order to do that, though, you have to be prepared for it. And in order to be prepared for it, you have to be humble and to realize that you're not invincible and that these streaks are going to happen to anyone, regardless of how good you are.

It's so easy, especially young poker players, if they come in hot and they're winning a lot, they think they're never going to lose. They think that they're just the best, and that sure, other people before them have started losing, but they're different. There's this hubris that comes with it, this feeling of invincibility that causes you to take risks you shouldn't be taking and to play higher than you should.

And then you have someone like Eric, and a lot of people say, "Oh, you know, they dismiss him because he's quieter and he's much more self-facing." One of the things he does is, and one of the things he taught me early on is that you should never play above your bankroll. You always have to mitigate risk because you will start losing at some point.

And so just because I started playing, you know, sometimes in a $10,000 tournament doesn’t mean that now all the tournaments I play are at that level. I'm not comfortable always playing at that level; I understand that even if I have a great cash grade and have won a lot of money at that level, that doesn't mean that that's my new normal.

Because that's not my bankroll! I can't afford that! Because if suddenly things start going against me, I won’t be able to come out on the other side. So you have to prepare for that possibility, and you mitigate risk in other ways. So people sell pieces of themselves; they hedge. They realize that bad things are going to happen, and the only way to get through it is to actually be able to get to the other side of variance.

Variance evens out over the long run; that's SEC volume, secure to variance. So if you're running bad, if you're losing, you have to get the volume to actually start to have that probability go in your way and the variance change, but it only evens out over the long run, and you don't know how long the long run is so you might be losing! It doesn't care that you can only afford to lose for a month. You might be losing for a year; you might be losing for two years.

And as long as you keep a level head and keep playing well, thinking well, and doing your analysis—and this comes from humility as well—you have to try to figure out, "Am I losing because of variance, or am I losing because of me? Because I'm making bad decisions?" And that's an important question. Someone like Eric has made tens of millions of dollars over the years but has also had losing years; he's had years where he's lost millions.

He was able to kind of withstand that and keep going because he was always in a position to do so. So make sure that you're always in that position, and if you're not, you're playing at the wrong level, and you're not taking enough hedges, and you're not positioning yourself to actually be able to last over the long term.

That’s good advice! Um, talking of bankroll, one of the audience members has asked, Phil Gordon in his green book for poker recommended playing with a percentage of your savings. Did you have money in the bank before playing or start from zero?

Um, I started from zero when it comes to poker. I am a writer; this was not my—this is not the first career that I've had. So yeah, I had money—um, just in general, from what I do. Not a lot of it because I'm a writer; I'm not someone who actually, you know, makes millions of dollars. I've never made millions of dollars, and I don't think I ever will.

But I had—going into this—I had, you know, steady income. I was always a freelancer, so I've never actually had a paycheck. Well, I haven't had a paycheck since 2008. That was the last paycheck I've ever gotten; that was the last time I had any sort of a full-time job!

So I'm always someone who has to have savings because I never know whether I'm going to earn zero in a month or however many thousands of dollars. I have no idea; my earning stream isn't like this; it's like this, and I have lots of months of zero income and so on. On the one hand, yeah, of course, I had money in savings because I'm an adult. I have an apartment, you know? I have—I have a life. I have obligations.

Um, but in terms of poker, I needed to start from zero because Eric made it very clear that if I was going to take this seriously, and if he was going to teach me, I had to treat it as a profession, and I had to approach it the way that he would have any professional approach it. So my initial investment was something like $50 in an online deposit. That was my own money.

So I didn’t start from zero; I started with that initial deposit, and he had me start playing tiny tournaments—ones that cost, you know, a dollar or $2, dollar or $5 to enter. And he said, "Until you start winning these and making money this way, you can't play live." You can’t—the cheapest tournament live is like $35 or whatever.

So I was playing online for several months and made a few thousand dollars playing online, and that's when he said, "Okay, now you can come to Vegas, and now we can use that money to have you start playing live tournaments." He wouldn't let me play $100 tournaments; he said, "That's way too expensive!"

So I was playing the dailies for $35, $45. He said, "Until you start winning these, you can't move up." And so I played day after day after day those tournaments I didn't want to be playing, um, and then I started winning. I actually—I won my first tournament. I don't remember what the buy-in is, but around $50 at Planet Hollywood, um, and I made almost $4,000, which is a huge return!

And all of a sudden, he said, "Okay, now that you've shown that you can beat this, now take that money, and we're going to see if you can do how you can do in a $100 tournament." So I played that, and you know, very soon actually after that, the learning trajectory was pretty steep.

So I started final-tabling those $100 tournaments, and all of a sudden, I would come in second and win $3,000 or $4,000. So the numbers kept going up, and so then he said, "Okay, now you can start playing slightly higher." And I was selling pieces of my own action. So I wouldn't even get all of that money; he'd say, "Well, we have to still hedge because you—$500 is still a lot of money." So I would sell different percentages.

So people, you know, let's say I sold 50% of myself. So if I win $10,000, I get $5,000, and the people who backed me get $5,000 as well. But if I lose, then they don't get anything, and they just helped me with the entry fee. So this is just a way, once again, to mitigate risk, and so my entire poker bankroll was built organically that way.

When I started—and when I would go through periods of losing, he'd make me drop down in stakes so that I could always organically support myself and actually be able to do this without dipping into the money that I had for other things—for life.

And that sounds like good advice for playing for the long term, which is what Eric Sidell himself has been able to do.

Yes! Um, one of my favorite quotes from your book is: "In turning my mind to tells and reads at this stage in my learning, I may have missed a crucial step—that the first person you have to profile psychologically, not physically, is yourself." What's the most surprising thing you've learned about yourself through poker?

Well, I think we've talked about one of the most surprising, which is the extent to which I internalized a lot of gender stereotypes that I didn't think that I had internalized. But something—I mean, something that surprised me was that—that really surprised me was that I actually fell in love with the game and that it was something that I became a passionate advocate for.

As I told you when we began this conversation, I don't like games. I'm not a games player. I don't enjoy them at all. And yet somehow, this particular game opened up my mind and taught me things about myself, about decision making, um, about emotions and emotional regulation that I never learned while doing psychology research and getting a PhD in these very things and these very questions.

And it just—it shocks me that I can be passionate about a game and that I've actually become someone who advocates for it, who thinks that children should be taught how to play, who thinks that this thing can actually help make the world a better place! If you had told me, you know, three years ago that we'd be having this conversation, and I'd be saying poker is the most powerful tool to unlocking your mind, I would say, “Haha, you know, very, very funny!”

And yet, and yet here we are, and I do think that—and I say this as someone with a PhD, not just in psychology but in the psychology of decision making—that's what I studied. Um, and I’ve learned more about decision making at the poker table than I’ve learned in years of working with thousands of subjects and running study after study after study. Um, and that's really surprising to me that I could actually get here from there!

That's wonderful! I think we have maybe time for one more question from our audience, and so we'll wrap up. Given that you just said that poker is something that you recommend children starting with, so this audience member asks, What resources would you recommend for someone wanting to learn to become good enough at poker to compete in the high-stakes competitions?

Well, I think that first of all, you need to put in a lot of work. So before I moved up to high stakes—I mean, I was taking studying poker as a full-time job. So I was working on this seven days a week, um, know, seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day, either playing or studying or reviewing.

Of course, I was very lucky to have resources that other people don’t have—the minds of these great players—but a lot of what I did is fully accessible to anyone and free. There are so many free resources online, so I would recommend taking it seriously and actually studying. I think that if you're serious about it, some of you probably do want to invest in some stuff that's not free.

Uh, my favorite coaching site is Run It Once, and it has just these amazing videos from some of the best players in the world that teach you about a lot of the different concepts in poker. But there are other sites as well; you can find one that works well for you. But let me just give you one tiny kind of metric that will help you: for me, watching like a half-hour video takes at least two hours because that's what active watching is.

You have to stop; if you don't understand something, you have to go back and make sure you understood it. If there's a concept in it that you don't understand, you pause the video, you look up that concept, you figure it out, and you actually try to understand it. So that has to be active learning to a lot of people.

They think they're studying if they're just watching a poker game and being like, "Oh, man, that idiot! He should have done this! He should have done that!" That's not studying; watching a poker match can actually be studying. So I also—I have a subscription to PokerGO because it has so much content from the high-stakes players where you can watch their hands up coverage, which is just an invaluable tool.

Once again, one of those just takes me—if it's a three-hour-long video, that's going to take me multiple days because all of those hands need to be analyzed. You have to keep pausing and thinking, "Why are they doing this?" Always ask why!

So come to it, come to it with that kind of an active mindset, and it’s going to take time. I mean, it's—it's not magic! It doesn’t just suddenly happen. So these tools are out there, um, and a lot of them are free, and a lot of them aren't that expensive. But it's not just having them; it's using them and immersing yourself in them correctly.

And there's one tool that you didn't mention, which is a book that's just come out called The Biggest Bluff by Maria Kova. I highly recommend that you read that book!

With that, Maria, I'm going to thank you for such a wonderful conversation today. It's been a real joy talking to you. Uh, coming up on Friday, we have Bob Kolhan, and I'd like to ask you if you could please, uh, give us an introduction to your Big Think Live talk that's coming up with Malcolm Gladwell on Tuesday, August 4th.

Of course! First of all, thank you so much, Winston, for taking the time to do this. It's been an absolute pleasure. You were just a brilliant conversationalist, and I really enjoyed it. So, thank you for doing this, and thank you for reading the book.

And yes, um, I will be doing another Big Think Live next Tuesday, the 4th, where I will be interviewing—so I will be in Winston's shoes—and I will be interviewing Malcolm Gladwell. So if you're interested in psychology and in writing about psychology, come join us next week for some fascinating insights from one of the best storytellers in the business. That's not me, by the way; that's Malcolm!

Thanks, but the two together—that's alchemy! That's gonna be explosive! So tune in!

Thank you so much, Maria. We'll say goodbye to our audience. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Big Think Live! Thank you, everyone! Bye-bye!