The Biggest Bluff – Book Notes

How I Learned To Pay Attention, Master Myself, And Win

by Maria Konnikova

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Main Takeaways

1. Pay attention. “Less certainty. More inquiry.” Be a dragonfly. Opportunities to be “lucky” are everywhere.
2. Read yourself before others. Focus on hand movement and initial card pick up rather than soul reading.
3. Life is but a series of gambles. Everything has risks. Our best bet is to learn how to make good bets.
4. There is and never will be one and only one “optimal” strategy. Consciously parting from the optimal strategy is part of the optimal strategy.
5. Don’t be superstitious. Don’t be even a little stitious. You’re simply increasing your surface area for tilt.
6. No bad beats. You know about life’s variance.Stop complaining when it doesn’t go your way. Stop thinking you’re a genius when luck is in your favor. Only focus on the prpcess. Did you make the right decision given the information you had? If yes, move on. If no, take note and move on.
7. Cashing too often is bad. It means you’re playing too conservatively and you’re not going for the win. The money is concentrated at the top so it’s not an economically viable strategy when you take into account your time and expenses.
8. “Your edge is your edge only if you’re playing your best game.” Don’t play if you don’t feel at your best.
9. Be proactive about tilt. Know when to quit. Tilt consists of positive emotions too. May be wise to fold after a big win?Headphones may come in clutch.
10. “Most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment. We don’t know what the next card will be—and we don’t even know when we see it if it’s good or bad.”

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Book Notes

Ante Up

• Erik Seidel advice: Pay Attention. He thinks psychology is still a big part of the game. Math and psychology can compliment eachother
• We learn best by experience. One off events skew our models. We need many hands to tune our models and separate skill from chance.
• No limit Texas hold’em simulates life the best.
  • Two cards is right ratio of known vs unknown.
  • Can always go all in in life.

The Birth of a Gambler

If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance, not one wherein you do not risk a loss for the chance of some gain.

Thomas Jefferson – Thoughts On Lotteries

• Games of chance are not immoral. Life is a game of chance we need to master.
• Are poker players gambling? Is it worse than being a stoke broker or an NFL player?
  • “Indeed, when the economist Ingo Fiedler analyzed hundreds of thousands of hands played on several online poker sites over a six-month period, he found that the actual best hand won, on average, only 12 percent of the time and that less than a third of hands went to showdown (meaning that players were skillful enough to persuade others to let go of their cards prior to the end of the hand). In mid-stakes games, with blinds of 1/2 and 5/10, there were some players who were consistent winners, and as stakes went to nosebleed—50/100 and up—the variability in skill went down significantly. That is, the higher the amount of money for which people played, the greater their actual skill edge.”
  • “When Chicago economists Steven Levitt and Thomas Miles looked at live play and compared the ROI, or return on investment, for two groups of players at the 2010 WSOP, they found that recreational players lost, on average, over 15 percent of their buy-ins (roughly $400), while professionals won over 30 percent (roughly $1,200). They write, “The observed differences in ROIs are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns.” Success in poker, in other words, implies far more skill than success in that far more respectable profession, investing.”
• Emmanuel Khant suggested to bet to question someones beliefs. Annie Duke suggested similarly.
  • “In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray.”
  • “Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no possibility of being mistaken? Would you bet your marriage? Your health? Even our deep convictions suddenly seem a lot less certain when put in that light.”
• Nate silver predicted a 71% chance of Hillary Clinton winning. People interpreted this as 100%.
  • Nate Silver is a poker player.

Would you bet your entire net worth on an opinion that you’ve just spent hours confidently offering on social media, broaching no possibility of being mistaken? Would you bet your marriage? Your health? Even our deep convictions suddenly seem a lot less certain when put in that light.

Maria Konnikova – The Biggest Bluff

The Art of Losing

• Eric Seidel is a huge walker. So am I. Read Erling Kagge’s Walking book if you need convicing.
  • “These haven’t been your traditional lessons. We don’t sit and review. There are no lesson plans. There are no specific topics to cover or goals to hit. Instead, we walk. Erik is a big walker. Ever since he got a Fitbit, some years ago, he has been religious in hitting his daily step count, and as I will learn, walking is a big part of his routine, come rain or shine, in New York or Vegas or anywhere else in the world, whether he’s in between playing or in the middle of a tournament. It’s not just for exercise. It’s his way of thinking, his way of reflecting, his way of relating, his way of learning.”
• “Erik has explained that the earlier you open, the stronger your hand needs to be, because more players are still to act. That makes sense. In any decision, information is power. The earlier you act, the less information you have.”
  • Look up: “Poker starting hand matrix.”
• “And so despite knowing fundamentally sound strategy, you have to be willing to part with it.”
  • “Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.”
• Quantifying risk of going broke with the M-ratio.
  • “How many orbits around the table can I sit and not play a hand? Your M is, basically, your cushion for putting in the minimum each orbit. The lower your M, the more in danger you are of busting the tournament sooner. And the letter M itself? It comes from the last name of a player named Paul Magriel.”
• “If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance.””
  • “So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession-one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I’ve never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I’m very lucky that I started off losing.” – Richard Feynman – Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• ““The beauty of poker is generally, delusion is punished,” Erik tells me. You may get away with an illusion of control in the short term, but if you persist, no one will know your name in a few years’ time. In real life, we can remain deluded indefinitely. If we choose delusion over objectivity in poker, we are eventually doomed.”
• Less certainty, more inquiry. There’s not ONE way to play a hand. The object of poker is making good decisions.

Less certainty. More inquiry.

Erik Seidel – The Biggest Bluff

The Mind of a Strategist

• Be a dragonfly.
  • “The true deadly killer is one that hardly anyone would think of: the dragonfly. According to a 2012 study from researchers at Harvard University, the dragonfly manages to capture an astounding 95 percent of its targeted prey. It may not look as glamorous or be the subject of fan adulation—it’s unlikely anyone sees the tiny flying alien look-alike as a kindred spirit—but it’s a far more effective predator. Its eyes have developed to spot the tiniest deviations in motion. Its wings allow it to swerve and swoop in unimaginably quick configurations. And its brain has evolved to not only see possible targets but predict their future movements with startling accuracy. The dragonfly is so good not only because it sees what its prey is doing, but because it can also predict what it will do and plan its response accordingly.”

A Man’s World

• The cost of passivity.
  • “Who knows how many proverbial chips a default passivity has cost me throughout my life. How many times I’ve walked away from situations because of someone else’s show of strength, when I really shouldn’t have. How many times I’ve passively stayed in a situation, eventually letting it get the better of me, instead of actively taking control and turning things around.”
  • “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war”
• “Perceived aggression in women is not only not valued; it’s seen in a negative light. In men, on the other hand, it’s viewed as evidence of great potential.”

No Bad Beats

You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck. . . . One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.

Winston Churchill – My Early Life

• Poker Economics – Bankroll Management & Risk Mitigation
  • “I get a quick crash course in poker economics. Some players have backing. The specifics vary deal to deal, but broadly, it means that someone fronts you the cash for all your poker playing and you split the winnings. If you keep losing, though, you go into something called makeup, where you need to make up your losses before you pocket any wins. Then there’s staking. People can buy a percentage of your action for the same percentage of your winnings—say, 10 percent for 10 percent. If you’ve had good results, you can sell at markup: someone pays a bit more for the chance to have a sweat, or piece, of the event. Or there’s swapping. If you respect another player’s game, you can ask to swap a certain percent. So you get, say, 5 percent of anything they win, and vice versa. All of these are ways to manage risk. The best professionals know when to lower the gamble, not just when to ratchet it up.”
  • “Yes, in the long run, the Eriks of the world will be ascendant, their skill triumphant. But you will never see the long run if, in the short term, you don’t buffer yourself against the vicissitudes of chance. It’s not an ego thing. It’s practical survival. True skill is knowing your own limits—and the power of variance in the immediate future. Because who knows how long “immediate future” might last? After all, probability distributions don’t care about the past.”
• How to deal with Bad Beats:
  • ““Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player. It’s like dumping your garbage on someone else’s lawn. It just stinks.” Well, that certainly gets the point across. But aren’t I allowed to vent just a bit? As it turns out, no, no I’m not. “Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it.”
  • “How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.”
  • “There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves. How we phrase sentences—are we the one doing the acting or being acted upon?—can determine whether we have an internal or external locus of control, whether we’re masters of our fates or peons of forces beyond us. Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.”

Texting Your Way out of Millions

• “Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, once ran a study where he asked people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs. The self-described unlucky took about two minutes, whereas the self-described lucky took a few seconds. The task was identical, but the self-identified lucky people were much more likely to notice something the others missed: on page two, in huge letters, were the words “Stop counting—There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Prepared mind or not, in the absence of observation it matters little.”
• “You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.”
• “If we want to be successful, “we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.” We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.”

A Storytelling Business

The Gambler and the Nerd

• Lodden Thinks Game:
  • “Lodden Thinks was created one day in the mid-2000s, when two poker pros found themselves bored at a televised poker table. The Magician and the Unabomber—Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak, the former nicknamed for his past profession, the latter for his affinity for hoodies pulled low over his face and sunglasses shielding his eyes—soon came up with a way to pass the time. At the table was Johnny Lodden, a Norwegian pro and mutual friend. They would take turns asking him a question—and then bet on what he thought the answer was. Lodden would then supply his own response, and the person who’d been closest to Lodden’s answer would win the round.”
• Cashing too often is bad.
  • “You need to be playing for the win, not for the min cash. If you’re cashing this much and then busting soon after, you are doing something wrong. You’re getting to the bubble short-stacked.”
  • “Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players. You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. It’s just not possible.”
  • “Be willing to bust more often, take the higher variance lines that might mean I lose all my chips—but if I win, will propel me into a far more commanding position to go deeper, last longer, get closer to that final table. Be willing to be more aggressive even if that means losing more. There’s a saying in poker that if you’re never caught in a bluff, you’re not bluffing enough.”

The Art of the Tell

• Intuition & Thin-slice Judgements
  • “Indeed, we now know that we don’t even need a few words or a real glance: in as little as thirty-four milliseconds—less than the time it takes to blink—we have already formed judgments on things like trustworthiness and aggression. We grow more confident in these judgments the longer we look at someone, says Alexander Todorov, the man largely responsible for refining our knowledge of perception into ever-tinier and tinier fragments of time, but we don’t often change that initial reading. The process occurs at the level of perception rather than thinking: it’s subconscious, processed by our visual system rather than the part of our brain responsible for logical assessment. And it’s remarkably powerful.”
  • “Here’s the thing about thin-slice judgments: they are intuitive, and they are based on large samples. As with all things statistical, they break down in accuracy at the level of the individual.”
• Hands > Faces
  • “In both cases, something curious happened. When the students looked at unaltered clips—the way we normally see the world—they were no better than chance at guessing the quality of someone’s hand. When they looked at faces, their judgments actually dropped to below chance levels. That is, their opinion on the quality of someone’s hand was less predictive of the actual quality than a coin flip—suggesting that faces may actually give more false than useful information. (That seems right to me, I reflect, based on how I’ve been using faces up to this point. Maybe everyone should play in a ski mask to help me out.) But when they looked at the motion of hands alone, their performance shot up. Even people who had no prior knowledge of poker whatsoever seemed suddenly able to tell with some accuracy whether someone had a hand that was strong or weak.”
  • “Slepian found that in both cases, they were better than chance at picking out the players with the stronger cards. The players they picked as more confident and those they picked as executing movement in a more fluid manner were also the players who had the winning hands.”
  • “I vow that, for the next two months, I’ll do less looking into souls and more looking into hands.”

Reading Myself

• Tells 101
  • ““The majority of movement at the poker table is just complete noise,” Blake tells me. “It can add to the information process, sure, but you’re juggling so many things at the poker table that often it’s more distracting than anything else.”
  • “Confident people move from point A to point B quickly. There’s not a lot of hesitation,”
  • “The most telling moment is often at the very beginning of a hand, when players first check their hole cards: how they check and what they do immediately after tend to be the most honest actions a player will execute in the entire hand.”
  • “A lot of people think that acting robotic at the table is the best way to conceal tells. It’s actually the worst way,” Blake explains. “The more of a cognitive process you have towards concealment, the more of a likelihood that that’s eventually going to be a break and we’re going to see more stuff.”
  • ““Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,” Blake suggests. As long as I always do that, I ensure that I’m thinking through every hand at every part of my range, aces and suited connectors and trash alike. Because I’ve thought before I acted, I act with confidence every time—and I act with a delay every time. There’s no longer the problem of immediate action with straightforward decisions and delays with more complex ones. And the whole process becomes more streamlined and fluid naturally.”
• Personality & Profiling 101
  • “the first person you have to profile—psychologically, not physically—is yourself.”
  • “For decades, Walter had argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed. Instead of embracing the nuance of humanity, it stripped traits from context and gave people global scores on things that made no sense.”
  • “People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations.”
    • “I am. I know it. But I just cannot let go. To this day, I’ve never swung upside down off a monkey bar. I’ve done headstands and handstands, dives and balances, but the playground remains unconquered. I’m a scaredy-cat. Risk-taking scale score, from zero (never takes risk) to ten (always seeks risk): negative two, give or take. And yet. When I was in college, I decided that for my senior thesis, I would travel to Georgia—the country, not the state. And I would do so during a civil war. You see, I wanted to observe decision-making psychology in action, to experience how real people and real leaders reacted during real crises, not just ones that had been created in a college lab. And so, notebook in hand, I flew halfway across the world, hired a bodyguard, and made my way into the literal line of fire. What risk-taking score do I get on that one? How about for putting my career at the New Yorker on hold to play poker? Or for being too afraid to ever ride on a motorcycle or fly in a helicopter unless under duress? Or for moving in with my now husband less than two months after we met? Or for never having tried a single recreational drug, not even pot, because I’m too afraid to…”
  • “Who you are comes out at the poker table.”
• Donkey Space
  • ““The hard part of poker at this level is actually not this incredibly hard thing of knowing what perfect play is, which is as hard as it is in a game like chess,” Lantz says. “The hard part is this: How good are you at identifying where your opponent is in strategy space, based on their actions?””

Full Tilt

• Know when to step back.
  • ““See how you feel in the morning” is a refrain I’ve grown used to hearing from him. His point is a simple one: your edge is your edge only if you’re playing your best game. To play your best game, you need to be your best you. Rested, sharp, focused. If you’re off, a game that would have been a winning endeavor can suddenly become a losing one. An almost sure thing can become a gamble. I thought that it was just his way of letting me off easy, in case I got jittery about playing a big event—but, no, he does it himself. I’ve seen him skip a major $500,000 tournament—one with quite a prestigious title—because he wasn’t feeling his best.”
  • “sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title. We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a result.”
• ““Ignore the average,” Erik implores. “Just focus on how many blinds you have. The average doesn’t matter for your strategy. What matters is how deep you are.” We’ve studied what I do when I have lots of chips (deep-stacked), a middling number, or a small number (short-stacked). All I need to know is how many chips I have relative to the blinds, and I can play. I shouldn’t worry about how many others have—at least, not the others who aren’t at my table. Sure, I should be paying attention to the chips at my table. But the tournament average has no bearing on that whatsoever.”
• Tilt 101
  • “And while tilt often is a negative feeling—anger, frustration, and the like—it can also be a positive emotion—being very happy at winning a hand, liking someone at the table, and so on. All it means is that you’re experiencing an emotion that is not, strictly speaking, related to your decision.”
  • “The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,” Jared tells me. “Everything else is earned every single day.”
  • “You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.”
    • “If I see a situation that may turn sour—and let’s face it, many of them potentially could—I should put on my headphones as a way of controlling my surroundings. I don’t actually have to listen to music.”

Glory Days

• Poker Physiology 101
  • “Poker players, it turns out, command one of the best-stocked pharmacies you’re likely to find for most any occasion. Need a boost of energy? Caffeine pills of all doses are on offer. An even bigger boost? Nicotine tablets to the rescue. Trouble focusing during your deep run? Adderall, Ritalin, you name it, it’s there. That’s not to mention marijuana in all its forms and copious amounts of psychedelics. (“I swear by microdosing,” one player who shall remain nameless tells me.”
  • “One recent study showed that elite chess players can burn up to six thousand calories a day during tournaments, exhibiting metabolic patterns reminiscent of elite athletes.”
  • “Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later. In effect, we become more impulsive. Indeed, even work that has shown some benefits of fasting on certain tasks also admitted that the thought process involved was reliant on “gut feelings”—an appropriate choice of words for decisions governed by the stomach.”
• Design your downtime
  • “We take a twenty-minute break. Jared has created a routine for me, and I now follow it by the minute. First five minutes of break: off-load and brain dump. I write down some of the key hands so that they don’t occupy any of my headspace going forward. I’ll analyze them later with Erik. For now, the important thing is to get them out of my system so that my mind is ready for new information. Then a few minutes of contemplating my decision making. Asking myself: How was my thinking? Were there any emotionally compromised decisions? Again, I’m not analyzing now, just noting for the future. Next ten minutes: nothing. No poker talk. No thinking. Just walking and relaxing. And then, right before the end of break, a few minutes of warm-up for the next level. Get myself mentally ready, psyched, in gear.”

The Heart of the Gambling Beast

Can one even touch a gaming table without becoming immediately infected with superstition?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Gambler

• Don’t be voluntarily superstitious
  • “Isn’t attaching himself and any part of his mental well-being to random objects potentially dangerous? Sure, you might feel in control, but really, aren’t you just adding one more factor that you might not ultimately be able to control?”
  • ““Any form of delusion should be punished in poker,” he continues. “It’s really tilting to see it rewarded.” He’s talking less about the lucky objects that Ike espouses and more about the feelings and the I knew the card was coming bits that get bandied about. But the lucky objects, too, at least a bit. He has zero patience for any of it. “It’s just cultivating the wrong mindset,” he tells me. “Eventually, that’s going to get you in trouble. That’s not poker.””
  • “Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium.”
  • “Jane Risen, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, calls this kind of thinking from people like Ike—“smart, educated, emotionally stable adults”—a form of acquiescence. We can recognize that something is wrong and irrational, but then consciously and purposefully choose to let the false belief stand rather than correct it. “People can recognize that one course of action is rationally superior yet choose to follow a different one,” Risen writes.”
  • “Phil Hellmuth often talks about his “white magic”—an ability to see into his opponents’ souls and hole cards to make huge plays. Daniel Negreanu has often claimed to be able to know what card is coming next—something he has said repeatedly on many a poker stream.”
• Patrick Mode
  • “The bubble is my favorite time,” he tells me. “You should go crazy. Play any two cards.” I look at him like he’s slightly insane. This is the Main Event, after all. “I’m serious,” he says. “No one wants to bust on the bubble. Now is the time to gamble.”

The Ludic Fallacy

And the biggest bluff of all? That skill can ever be enough. That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up. We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.

Maria Konnikova – The Biggest Bluff

• “Author and statistician Nassim Taleb distrusts the premise of my entire project: he believes we cannot use games as models of real life because in life, the rules derived from games can break down in unforeseen ways. It’s called the ludic fallacy. Games are too simplified. Life has all sorts of things it can throw at you to make your careful calculations useless.“
• “We have won the impossible, improbable lottery of birth. And we don’t know what will happen. We never can. There’s no skill in birth and death. At the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment. We don’t know what the next card will be—and we don’t even know when we see it if it’s good or bad.”
• “There’s a Buddhist proverb. A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs. Soon, the farmer’s son falls off one of the feral horses as he’s training it. He breaks a leg. The neighbor expresses his condolences. The farmer just shrugs. Who knows. The country declares war and the army comes to the village, to conscript all able-bodied young men. The farmer’s son is passed over because of his leg. How wonderful, the neighbor says. And again the farmer shrugs. Perhaps.”
• ““Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” If we cannot do it ourselves, we cannot control it. We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itself—that, we don’t control.”
• “Most people think of poker as a way to get wealthy. And it is. Only not the way you think. I didn’t make millions. But the wealth of skill I acquired, the depth of decision-making ability, the emotional strength and self-knowledge—these will serve me long after my winnings have run dry.”

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Affiliate Links

• The Biggest Bluff – Maria Konnikova
• Thinking in Bets – Annie Duke
• Walking – Erling Kagge
• Silence – Erling Kagge
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! – Richard Feynman
• The Gambler – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• Harrington on Hold ’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments, Volume I: Strategic Play
• Harrington on Hold ’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments, Volume II: The Endgame