The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win - Hardcover

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Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind and The Confidence Game. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Boston Globe,  Scientific American, Wired, and Smithsonian, among many other publications. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings. Maria also hosts the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media and is currently a visiting fellow at NYU’s School of Journalism. Her podcasting work earned her a National Magazine Award nomination in 2019. Maria graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University.

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A Prelude

Las Vegas, July 2017

The room is a sea of people. Bent heads, pensive faces, many obscured by sunglasses, hats, hoodies, massive headphones. It's difficult to discern where the bodies end and the green of the card tables begins. Thousands of bodies sit in seeming disarray on chairs straight out of a seventies dining room catalogue-orange-and-mustard patterned upholstery, gold legs, vaguely square frame. Garish neon lights suspended on makeshift beams make the place look like the inside of a hospital that's trying a bit too hard to appear festive. Everything is a bit worn, a bit out-of-date, a bit frayed. The only hints of deeper purpose are the color-coded numbers hanging on strings from the ceiling. There's the orange group, the yellow group, the white group. Each placard has a number and, beneath it, a picture of a single poker chip. The smell of stale casino air fills the room-old carpet; powder; a sweet, faintly sickly perfume; cold fried food and flat beer; and the unmistakable metallic tang of several thousand exhausted bodies that have been sharing the same space since morning.

Amid the sensory assault, it's hard at first to pinpoint why something seems off. And then it comes to you: it is eerily quiet. If this was a real party, you would expect the din of countless voices, shifting chairs, echoing footsteps. But all there is is nervous energy. You can smell, hear, taste, the tension. And you can certainly feel it making a nest in your stomach. There's just one sound left in the room, reminiscent of a full-throated courting ritual of summer cicadas. It's the sound of poker chips.

It's the first day of the biggest poker tournament of the year, the Main Event of the World Series of Poker. This is the World Cup, the Masters, the Super Bowl-except you don't need to be a superhero athlete to compete. This championship is open to the everyman. For a neat ten grand, anyone in the world can enter and take their shot at poker glory: the title of world champion and a prize that has been known to top $9 million. If you happen to be British or Australian, you even get it tax-free. For professional poker players and amateurs alike, this is the career pinnacle. If you can win the Main Event, you have guaranteed yourself a place in poker history. Sit down with the best and have a chance at the most prestigious, richest prize in the poker world. Some people in the room have been saving for years to take their one shot.

It's near the end of the day. Of the several thousand people who've entered today's starting flight-so many want to play that starting days have to be staggered into flights to accommodate everyone; the dream is expensive, but it's awfully alluring-many are now out, having gone bust, in poker speak. The ones who remain are concentrated on making it through to the second day. You don't want to play the whole day only to find yourself walking out with minutes until the end and nothing to show for it. Everyone is gunning for the magic bag, a clear plastic glorified ziplock into which those lucky enough to have made the next day of a multiday tournament can place their chips. You write your name, country of origin, and chip count in excited capitals on the outside before tugging on the dubiously functioning adhesive strip to seal the damn thing up. You then take the requisite photograph for social media with the requisite chip count and add the #WSOP hashtag. And then you collapse, exhausted, into some anonymous hotel bed.

But we're not yet at the bagging and tagging stage of the day. There are still two more hours to go. Two whole hours. A lot can happen in two hours. Which is why one table stands out from the rest. Eight players are sitting as players should, receiving their cards and doing whatever it is poker players do with them. But one lone chair in the middle of the table, seat six, remains empty. That wouldn't be remarkable in the least under normal circumstances-empty chairs are what happens when a player busts out and no new player has yet arrived to take their place. Except in this case, there has been no bust-out. On the green felt in front of the empty chair sit several neat piles of chips, arranged from highest to lowest denomination, color-coded from left to right. And with each hand dealt, the dealer reaches over to take a precious ante-the forced amount that everyone at the table must pay each hand to see the cards-before depositing two cards that are then unceremoniously placed into the muck, or discard pile, seeing as there's no one there to play them. With each round, the neat piles of chips grow slightly smaller. And still the chair remains empty. What kind of an idiot pays $10,000 to enter the most prestigious poker event in the world and then fails to show up to play? What kind of a dunce do you have to be to let yourself blind down (the term for letting your chips dwindle by not playing any hands) in the middle of the Main Event?

The genius, I regret to say, was your author. While everyone at the table idly speculated about my likely fate, I was huddled in fetal position on the bathroom floor of the Rio Hotel and Casino and, for lack of a more refined term, barfing my brains out. Could it have been food poisoning from the guacamole I knew I shouldn't have eaten at the Mexican place just down the hallway during dinner break? A bad stress reaction? Delayed onset of stomach flu? Who knows. But my money was on migraine.

I had prepped endlessly. I had planned for all the contingencies-including, of course, migraine. I'm a lifelong sufferer, and I wasn't about to leave anything to chance. I'd taken preventive Advil. I'd done yoga in the morning for relaxation. I'd meditated. I'd slept a full nine hours. I'd even eaten over dinner break, even though my nerves were telling me to avoid all sustenance. And still here it was.

That's the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can't calculate for dumb bad luck. As they say, man plans, God laughs. I could definitely detect a slight cackle.

My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn't, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can't bluff chance. Poker didn't care about my reasons for being on the floor. There was no one to whom I could direct a complaint, a plaintive "But it's the Main Event!" The why didn't matter. Nerves or stress, migraine or food poisoning, the cards would keep getting dealt. The message was clear. I could plan all I wanted, but the X factor could still always get me. The outcome would be what it would be. All I could do was my best with what I could control-and the rest, well, the rest wasn't up to me.

As I contemplated the merits of dying right there versus first mustering the energy to bribe someone to bag up what measly chips I had left for me, before crawling off to die somewhere a bit less sticky and odiferous than this stall, I heard the telltale sound of my phone's text message alert. It was my coach, Erik Seidel. "How's it going?" the message read. Simple enough. He wanted to see how his student was faring in this, her biggest quest. The cackling from above was definitely growing stronger. I gathered my remaining willpower to text back.

"Fine. A little below average in chips." Which was true as far as I knew. "Hanging in there." Slightly less true, but hey, I'm ever the optimist.

"k, good luck" came the reply. Oh, Erik, you have no idea how much I need exactly that. A good infusion of old-fashioned luck.

Ante Up

New York, Late Summer 2016

"But for its costliness and dangers, no better education for life among men could be devised than the gambling table-especially the poker table."

Clemens France, The...