Odd Lots - How A Professional Writer Turned Herself Into A World Class Poker Player

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Switching careers is always difficult. But former New Yorker staff writer Maria Konnikova did it in dramatic fashion. Konnikova decided that the best way to learn about the role of skill and luck in life is through poker, and so she decided to become a great poker player. And she made it happen, winning just over $300,000 in tournament play in a couple of years. On this episode, we speak with her about how she did it, and her new book, "The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned To Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. And welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Allo. Tracy, so you guys are going into hard lockdown again in Hong Kong, huh? Yeah, we are. We're experiencing our third wave of coronavirus,

and unfortunately, it's worse than the first and second wave. So, yeah, we're going back into social distancing measures. People are being told to work from home. bars are closed and restaurants are implementing new restrictions. So, yep, back to lockdown. So obviously, this is all getting pretty tiresome. I think people are ready for real life to resume. But there's actually one at, well, there's a few aspects of lockdown life that I kind of prefer, but there's one thing in particular that I find to be better. You know what it is? Yeah, I think I do. I think I've actually done it with you a couple months.

Oh, yeah. Yes. I find playing poker online with friends to be much better than playing poker in real life with friends. I'm not sure poker is a better game online, period, but at least on like a sort of social version, I much prefer like playing in a room with a Zoom chat going on than actually like gathering around a table with friends and playing poker. Wait, you're going to have to explain that, Because I thought poker, you know, when people play on a casual level like that, it's supposed to be a social activity. You're not supposed to like doing it via Zoom chat. Well, I get that. And so I think that's maybe it's because of a little bit antisocial or something like that.

But normally when I've played poker among friends or casually, people start talking about sports and that slows down the dealing. I don't really care about those conversations. Oh, not sports. Or like someone is like, oh, let's order pizza. and they bring a pizza onto the table or chips. And I'm like, come on, like, let's just deal. Or like, someone gets distracted. They start telling a story while they're dealing.

That gets really annoying. With the Zoom chat in the online poker room, you can have all that stuff. You can still have people having inane conversations or getting up for a snack, but it doesn't slow down the game at all. So if all you want to do is focus on the cards, I actually think it's a better experience.

I have a question. How much does doing poker via Zoom help when it comes to actual strategy and, for instance, hiding your tells? Is that the reason you like it? Because maybe when you're playing in person, everyone knows what you're thinking. And when you're on Zoom, it's much easier to hide your motivations. Well, what time I was playing with a friend who was wearing glasses and I thought I could almost make out his whole cards in the reflection of his glasses? But I couldn't. And that, you know, that'd be unethical.

But, no, I do think that's the thing And I've noticed myself on the videos Like when I'm like, oh, shoot, I'm really like leaning back at my chair here Or I'm really staring. I wonder if people can, you know, I'm giving it away. I haven't played enough to like figure out patterns.

But if I were to play enough with Zoom calls, you know, you would probably start to notice. I gotta say. So I don't think it's a secret to Oblots listeners that I am not a big poker fan or player. But when I do play, I find it much, much, more enjoyable when it's with actual people. And I think it's much more interesting to try to

look at the psychological aspect of it all versus just the cards and doing the maths, which feels like what Zoom is mostly about. Yeah. No, I hear that. And actually, I think without the Zoom, it can get a little boring. And I think poker in general, even though I really enjoy it as a game or as a sport or whatever you ought to call it, it can be boring and you just have long stretches of doing nothing and the attempt to create action, to create excitement can often be very costly. So I certainly am sympathetic to the view that it's more enjoyable in real life with actual people. Yeah, people definitely seem to do stupid things when they're playing the online games just to sort of, well, just because they can. But anyway, so I take it we are doing a poker episode.

Yeah. It's been a long time since we've done a poker episode. but I'm really excited about the one today because we're going to be talking to an author of a new book and unlike some of our previous guests who are professional online poker, longtime professional poker players, our new guest is sort of relatively new to the upper echelons of the game.

Oh, that sounds great. I'm always, well, as someone who came to it relatively recently, I am always interested to hear what other people think of the game and how they're strategizing around it and actually playing. Yeah, I'm looking forward to learning some lessons. Our guest today is Maria Konnikova. She used to be a writer at the New Yorker, and now she is a professional poker player,

and she is the author of The Biggest Bluff, How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. And she decided one day to be a poker success, and she became one, which is extremely impressive. So Maria, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. So you just decided one day you're like,

I am going to be a great poker player and you just willed yourself and trained yourself and you became one. You actually just manufactured it and made it happen. Is that accurate? Not entirely. Not entirely. I was someone like you, Tracy, who had zero interest in poker whatsoever. I'm not a games player.

I have no interest in games, like any of them. In my free time, I like to read and do things like that. I've never grown up in a household. I don't even think we had a deck of cards and definitely no board games. They bore me. And I think the scariest thing that my niece and nephew can do is take out travelers of Catan. I just, I start having a panic attack right away thinking, oh no, are we actually going to have to play this? So that's not my world at all. I wanted to write a book about. luck about the role that chance plays in our lives. But to do so in a more systematic way, to try to figure out, okay, can we learn to tell the difference between the things that we can control and the things we can't control? Can we learn to figure out where skill ends and where chance

begins? And I needed a way into that topic. And I actually found one through one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, John Bonn-Noyman. I turned to him because he's the father of game theory, and I wanted to look at that framework for looking at chance. And it turns out that Man Neumann was a poker player and that game theory is actually based on poker. That Maunemann believed that poker was the game that best resembled strategic decision-making in real life. Because real life, unlike a lot of games like chess, like go,

which are games of complete information, where you can actually see the entire board, you can see all the pieces, you can figure out the right move, and you can compute what the right decision is, that's not real life. Real life is a game with a lot of unknowns, with a lot of uncertainty, with a lot of ambiguity, and that's what poker is. And so Von Neumann believed that if you could actually solve poker, then you'd have the key to some of the most complex strategic decisions in reality.

And at the time, the guy was working on the hydrogen bomb. So he really knew what he was talking about. He was at the highest echelons of governmental advising on stress. strategy. And this really, really intrigued me. And I thought, oh, what is this poker thing? You know, I really don't know what it is. But if this man thinks that poker is such a crucial element to understanding the exact questions I'm interested in, maybe I should read a little bit about it, started reading about it. And I thought, this is my book. Why don't I learn this game? Why don't I get someone really, really good to teach me? And why don't I use that kind of as a life metaphor to explore all of these questions of skill and chance that I'm interested in. And I didn't actually say I'm going to become a great poker player. I had no expectations. I didn't know if I was going to be good, if I was going to be bad. It didn't really matter. What mattered to me was the journey, the learning process. Tracy, I just want to point out that Maria has won $311,000 playing poker tournaments according to the Hendon Mob database,

including her best cash of an $84,000, $84,600 page. day. So something to keep in mind when someone just says, oh, I want to learn how to do it. I'm extremely impressed. Anyway, keep going. I just want to just sort of set the stage of how successful that decision was. Yeah, fair enough. So you didn't set out to become a great poker player, but it looks like you got there anyway. But I have to say that mix of skill and luck that you were describing, this is one of my own personal frustrations with poker, because I feel like even if I personally play a really, really good game, if I just get a bunch of terrible cards, there's not that much I can do about it. So I'm very intrigued by your thesis. I'm curious, as you set out

to learn more about poker, where did you begin? You mentioned reading a lot, but where did you go from there? And who did you talk to? So I enlisted Eric Seidel, who's one of the best players in the world, some consider him to be the greatest player of all time to serve as my coach and mentor throughout this journey. I got incredibly lucky. My luck started from day one when he agreed to take on this project, even though he's never taken a student before me, and said, okay, this is interesting, this is intriguing, let's see if someone with your mindset with a background in psychology, who's a blank slate for poker, basically, if we can teach you to play well. And he set my agenda, he was able to introduce me to a lot of the best minds in the game. So don't get me wrong. I did

work incredibly hard. When I decided to do this, you know, I left the New Yorker. I said, I'm going to do this full time. Seven days a week, seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day. I was living and breathing poker, either playing or analyzing hands or studying or doing something. But, but that aside, I also had access to the best minds in the game. So Eric introduced me to Dan Harrington, who literally wrote the textbooks on introduction to poker. I started working a lot with Phil Galfond, who is the founder of Run It Once, which is both a training site, which is some of the best poker training content, and a poker site, which you can't play on in the United States, unfortunately, but you can play on it in the rest of the world. And he's one of the greatest

players of all time. And then all of these other great names just came along and helped me, and were there to answer any question that I could possibly have. And that's rare. When you have an opportunity to just pick the brains of the best practitioners in that world. I don't take that for granted. I could have been someone who worked really, really hard and never achieved success because I didn't have access to that. And Tracy, you know, to answer your frustration with the game, that's also the beautiful thing about it because it teaches you how to deal with that in life. it's one of these things where one of the lessons that all of my teachers, but mostly Eric, would stress over and over and over, is that you have to divorce yourself completely from the

outcome. What poker teaches you is to focus only on the things you can control, which is the process, which is making the best decisions you possibly can, and putting yourself in a position to win, because then over the long term, if you master the process, you're going to be a winning player, no matter what. In the short term variance can go against you. And yeah, you can get Bad cards, someone else can be hit in the face with the deck. You might win it. You might lose a hand. You might lose a game. You might lose a tournament. But if you play over and over and over and you've always just completely disregarded the outcome and focused on making your process as good as possible, eventually you're going to win a lot of money. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed.

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world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Can you talk a little bit more about what you get out of professional guidance? And obviously, everyone knows there's a million poker books that have been written. I've read a handful of them. What is it that when you talk to someone like Eric Seidel or Dan Harrington, what is it that they can do for you? Is it hand analysis? Is it helping you identify patterns of play among the people with whom you're at a table?

talk to us about like what is it how that coaching works and what specifically they can offer to help someone's a game go to the next level well i think that personalization is key eric got to know me incredibly well i mean at this point you know i count him as a good friend because of just the sheer amount of time that i spent with his family they basically adopted me the sidels are are amazing um and you know i just i tagged along and spent more time with with them than i did with my own family for for over a year. And he really knew how I thought and who I was. And so that enabled him to see my weaknesses and to be able to really teach me how to think properly in a way that he couldn't have done had I just been some random person. And so I do think that that level of immersion was absolutely essential.

And yes, hand analysis is very important to that because a book can only teach you so much, but actually being able to discuss things with people. Actually, and this is true of anything, of learning absolutely anything, having someone with whom to talk through ideas, talk through your thought process, really helps you grow and learn because you're forced to explain your thought process. You're forced to pay attention to it. You're forced to analyze it in a way that allows you to spot loopholes that you otherwise wouldn't. In fact, one of the best teaching tools is to try to explain something to someone.

If you're unable to explain a concept, that means you don't understand it. And that is one of the first ways that a teacher can see whether someone has actually understood something. Very easy to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. But then say, okay, now teach someone who doesn't get it. And most people will flounder and not be able to do that. And so that back and forth made it impossible for me to hide. I actually had to learn these ideas.

I actually had to think through them for myself. And most of what Eric did, we never sat down and he said, okay, this is how you play this hand in that position. We didn't have a single conversation like that. It was all, okay, well, let's think through this. It's a very Socratic method, which could be incredibly frustrating. And sometimes I just wanted to shake him and say, just tell me how to play this hand.

I don't know what I'm doing. But what he was doing was giving me the building blocks of thought, the building blocks of analysis so that I could survive on my own rather than have to constantly turn to him and try to memorize things. memorization is not the way to go, by the way. That's a really bad way of learning poker. And that's what a lot of people do. They're like, oh, this is my hand range. I know that I'm opening these hands. I know I'm doing this. I know I'm doing that. It's all based on memory. And while it's good to memorize certain things, like the odds of hitting a flush, you know, very, just very basic things. It's like a handful. It's like 10 things. And then otherwise, in terms of how you play, it's all about the process, not about, oh, this is what I do with this hand. No, let me look at the situation. Let me. Let me look at the situation. Let me. You look at all the factors because no two hands are the same. No two situations are the same. And if you learn to contextualize every decision that way, you're going to be a much better decision maker, not just in poker, but in all decisions that you make. Well, just on that note, so once you

had the building blocks of how to actually play poker, can you describe what worked for you and what your playing style eventually looked like? That's a really excellent question. One of the things that I had trouble with from the very beginning was aggression and bluffing. That's really not my personality. That's not something I was ever good at. And that's something that people took advantage of. I found myself being bullied a lot and actually bowing down to the pressure. And it was a really unpleasant realization. I had always thought of myself as, you know, pretty successful, strong-willed female. And it ends up that I'd actually internalized so many gender stereotypes. I, I would be much more passive because I wanted people to like me.

And that was more important to me than winning a lot of money. I would fold hands because I didn't want people to say, oh, there's that horrible girl again who always raises me. I didn't want to, I wanted them to have a pleasant experience. This was really not a good way to play poker and not a good way to go through life. And I was really upset with myself when I realized that I was doing it. And so I really had to work hard at that. And eventually came to a style that was much more my own.

and that actually took advantage of the things that I was innately good at. This is something that I learned from Phil Galvan. Phil is a very mild-mannered person. And he told me, you know, when I was trying to be aggressive all the time, he said, look, you don't have to be. You have to find your own style. And Phil himself isn't a terribly aggressive player, even though he's one of the most successful players in the world.

He said, there's no one-size-fits-all. Find this style that's best for you. And so, yes, be aggressive, but be aggressive in a way that works for you. you. Not everyone can be hyper-aggressive. It's something that has to fit with your personality. It didn't fit with mine. And so eventually, I developed a very, I don't want to say the word reactive because it sounds kind of negative, but it's an adjustable playing style. Let's call it that. But it is reactive because I was reacting to people's perceptions of me and how they see women because I realized that everyone's telling me as a female first and as a poker player second.

And if I could figure out how they thought women play, because by the way, poker is 97% male, the professional world and 3% female. So most of the time, people will be like, oh, my girlfriend plays. This is how she plays. So I think you're going to play like that. They take these very strange notions of how women are supposed to play or not play, and they apply them to me, at least at the beginning. And if I can figure out what that is, then I can play into it.

actually take advantage of it because it's an incredibly strong it's a it's a wonderful thing to be underestimated it's something that you can really really use and once i realized that then i turned it on its head and instead of letting myself be bullied i was like okay if you underestimate me and think that i will fold to everything then i know how to i know how to counteract that how should someone go about the process of self-evaluating so i like i said i like to play i don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. I just, I enjoy it. Sometimes I do all right. What are the first questions or what are the first, you know, you mentioned the Socratic approach to learning, but what is, what are the first things one should look for in themselves to just, A, identify how they play

currently? And then B, how might one go about evaluating a style of aggression or reaction that they're comfortable with themselves. Well, I think that self-analysis starts far away from the poker table. I think everyone needs to take some time to just sit down and kind of do a little self-assessment. Think, okay, what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What are the things that annoy me? What are the things that make me happy?

Because at the poker table, all of these things are going to come out. All of the psychological baggage that you carry with you is going to come out and it's going to affect your game. Also, very important to poker and to a lot of other strategic decisions are how do I react to risk and to stress? So in what kinds of situations am I risk seeking and what kinds of situations am I risk averse? So in poker, you'll see that one of the best scenarios to pay attention to for other players, if you want to take advantage of them, is how do they react when they lose a huge pot? And relatedly, how do they react when they work? And relatedly, how do they react when they win a huge pot. Most players are actually going to react in some way, but that way is not going

to be the same. So some people, for instance, when they lose a lot of money, all of a sudden they'll get hyper-aggressive because they want to win those chips back. They'll become much more risk-seeking. Other people, when they lose a lot, they'll suddenly become very cautious and very risk-averse because they want to protect the little they have left. By the way, now put in investing or whatever it is for poker, and I think this is very true. Other people, when they win a lot of money, again become very risk-seeking. I'll say, oh, yeah, I'm on a role. I have the hot hand. Got to take more risk. Got to keep the role going. Others, when they win a lot, they'll say, okay, I'm done. Now I'm going to be really conservative. I want to protect what I already have. I don't want to lose this

because I could get unlucky. You need to figure out how people are responding to those situations, and then you can take advantage of that. But by the same token, you need to figure out how you respond to that. Most people are not honest with themselves. They say, oh, I don't let that affect me. I'm a very rational person. No, nobody is at the beginning. And you actually have to honestly do that self-assessment and figure out, okay, if I'm in that situation, how am I going to react? Because it's not going to be rational. And how do I counteract that? So you start from that. You start to be honest with yourself. Put yourself in those most common situations, the ones that are most likely to get you off of a rational decision-making path and onto an emotional decision-making path.

and figure out ahead of time what your emotional reactions are so that you can figure out a game plan for how to counteract that and how to actually identify ahead of time so that you become someone who in the moment is more able to control your thought process, more able to control your emotions. And then you take it from there. So I feel like whenever we have a conversation about how best to play poker, and Joe and I have had quite a few of those on the podcast over the past few years, but there's always this emphasis on being rational for obvious reasons, right? It's a game of logic. It's a game of numbers and probabilities. But is there any room for for emotions or gut feeling? Is there a way to use that

to your advantage? I feel like that aspect of it rarely gets discussed. Okay. You've hit on one of my big past. which is to get the term gut feeling out of people's action vocabulary ever. So we love to react with our gut. And a lot of people will say, oh, you know, I'm a feel player. I'm a gut player. So I, as a psychologist, I studied this a lot. And what we find in study after study is that people have very, very strong gut feelings.

And they're equally strong when they're correct and when they're wrong. And if you ask people to tell the difference, they're unable to. It's coin flips. So we have zero ability to tell which of our gut feelings or our intuitions is accurate and which is completely wrong-minded. And our memories are very false when it comes to this. They're very biased. So we'll remember the times that we followed our gut and were right or didn't follow it and our gut was right. And we'll forget all of those other times where our gut was full of crap, which is what our gut is normally filled with. And so what I urge people to do is to realize that there's only one type of gut feeling that you should be able to pay attention to. And that's when it's not really a gut feeling. That's when it's thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of hard earned expertise of something that you are truly good at and that you've spent a lot of time studying that your mind might not have conscious access to. And so you actually experience it as gut when it's really expertise. So for someone like Eric Seidel, if he has a gut feeling that this person is bluffing at the poker table, he should go with that gut because it's not gut.

It's pattern recognition. It's the fact that he's seen this situation play out over the last 30-some-odd years countless times. He just hasn't actually sat down every time and done an analysis and said, oh, when this happens, this person is bluffing. But his brain was doing that analysis, even though he might not have. have consciously been writing it down. Because he doesn't have conscious access to it, he says, oh, gut feeling. But it's not gut feeling. It's over 30 years of winning at this game and

seeing this play out over and over and over. If I have that same gut feeling, this person is bluffing, I should ignore that and try to look at all of the other things that I can be using to make my decision because I do not have the expertise. I've not been playing at poker nearly long enough. I cannot call myself an expert. I'm not allowed to call myself an expert for another 10 years at least. And so that's, you have to be really, really careful. And that's not something that people really like to hear. We really love our guts. But, you know, our guts, that's, you don't want to be deciding with your stomach. You want to be deciding with your head. So talk to us a little bit more about your actual experience. And, you know,

you mentioned, okay, you decided you wanted to do this. You sought out instruction. But then actual put it into gameplay. And what was the learning curve like? And how long did it take you from going to someone who was like, okay, just sort of understanding the rules to feeling like you had a good chance at making money when you sat down at the poker table? What was that process like? I still don't think I have a good chance of making money when I sit down at the poker table. I think that imposter complex has never entirely gone away. but it was a very it was it took a long time so the way that I started learning at first I played online

even though I always knew that my goal was to play live my edge is live I'm a psychologist I'm not a mathematician the last time I took a math class was in high school my edge is people and online sure some of that matters but most of it is mathematics so I'm not someone who was ever going to train there, but online you can get a lot more experience than you can get live because the hands are much faster. So in a week of playing online, you can get six months' worth of a live playing experience. So that's very important. So I started there. And until I started consistently making money online, Eric did not let me play live. He was very big about building your bankroll organically and making sure that you were very savvy financially with your decisions. What stage

When you, the first tables that you said it, what was the, what was the? So I always played tournaments. I did not play cash games. So these were like $5 buy in tournaments. I made the decision at the beginning because it's a very, if it's a very different style of play. And we had to decide what was I going to do. And as if you're talking about life analogy, tournaments are definitely the way to go. Because they have a dynamic.

There's a beginning. There's a middle. There's an end. It's much more of a progressive story as opposed to a cash game. which is much more static. So we decided I was going to focus exclusively on tournaments. So I was playing, you know, $5 tournaments online. Once I started winning some of those and I won, I think a little over $2,000, then I took that money and went to Vegas and started playing in the dailies and nightlies, the $35, $45 buy in tournaments, because that's as low as he can go for live poker. And I really wanted to play in these $100 tournaments and Eric wouldn't let me. He said that's way too high for you. You can't do it until you start winning. at the lower ones. And I spent multiple months in Vegas playing every single day, multiple tournaments a day. And I was losing money for for a while and I became very frustrated because I thought, you know, I'm studying. I'm working really hard and nothing's working. And then it started working. Everything just kind of came together. And I won my first tournament at Planet Hollywood. It was, you know, $45 or something dollar buy in. And I won over $900. And I was just over the moon. It was amazing. And then I started being able to play the $100 tournaments. And I started to final tabling those and coming in second place and doing well there. And then I was able to move

up gradually to higher and higher stakes. And I think that that original win at Planet Hollywood made me realize, okay, I can do this. I really needed that burst of confidence because after two months of playing almost every day and not making any money, it can be very frustrating and eventually it can be enough to say, you know, maybe I'm just really, really bad at this. But what it shows you is that, sure, at the beginning, I was very, very bad, but it also takes a while for everything to come together. Being bad doesn't mean you're not learning. It doesn't mean you're not improving. And you can't judge based on outcome. You have to just keep on plugging away at the process. And then I know, after that first one, I didn't look back because I was able to kind of

finance my way through. And then my big breakthrough at PCA, the Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure, when I made in, you know, in one week I made over $100,000. That happened almost a year to the day from the first time I played a live poker tournament. So I have two questions based on that. But the first one is Joe and I started this podcast by discussing the sort of pros and cons of doing online poker versus live games. What was your experience of that and how was the process different? And then secondly, when you were doing the live games, what did you tell people about who you are? Did anyone ask you what you were doing there? And you sort of appeared out of nowhere and started to do very well. So I'm just wondering if people were curious about you.

Yeah. So the first part, online and live is very different. I vastly prefer a lot of live poker, both because I'm better at it, but also I find it more interesting. There's more going on. This isn't true of all people. A lot of people prefer playing online. And they're different, both in terms of speed and in terms of the player pools. Although right now, things have gone a little bit murky because a lot of live players have moved online because with COVID, you can't play live. So now the player pools have become a little bit mixed. But before, there were very different player tendencies, and you learn to play a little bit differently on online than live. And online was actually tougher. The good online games were much harder than the

live games because people were more mathematically minded. The best players use software to analyze everything. They have overlays. You're just seeing a table. They're seeing your statistics. They're seeing exactly what percentage of hands. You open pre-flop. How often you three-bet? How often you fold to a three-bed? How often you get a four-bet? All of those numbers are there because they have that software crunching in the background. If you want to play seriously online, you have to have it, even though some sites no longer allow it, but all of the sites that do, you're at a huge disadvantage if you don't use that. None of that exists live. You have to just learn to do that on your own. You have to learn to pay attention to it. So in that sense, live is harder, but I like it a lot better because

I actually think that those muscles are very important to train. And I think because I play live, I actually have a bit of an advantage on the sites that don't allow the HUDs, those software overlays, because I'm used to paying attention to players and I'm used to kind of counting for myself, okay, how often does this person raise, how often do they free bet, how often do they fold to a four bit? You know, I'm used to tracking that in my mind, whereas players who have software that does it for them are not necessarily used to it. So that's, but that's a big difference. So online, much more mathematical, live, much more psychological, a lot more software number crunching online, a lot more people crunching live. In terms of whether people asked me questions, at the beginning, I think they just, when I was playing in most stakes tournaments, no one really gave me a second look.

Because other than saying, oh, there's a girl in the game. Well, that's weird. But over time, yeah, absolutely. and people started figuring out what I was doing. I never volunteered it, but I never lied about it if someone asked. And I think that it stood out because when I was traveling, I would be sitting in these smaller tournaments and then all of these high roller players, not just Derek, but all of his friends would come over and say hi to me and give me a hug because those were the people I knew.

Those were my friends in the game. And so people started realizing, wait, who is this girl, who knows all of these people? And then the poker media picked it up on it and did a few stories about me. And then I lost a little bit of my anonymity. This is Tom Keane inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day. I'm Paul Sweeney. We bring you complete coverage of the U.S. market open.

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That's the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast with Tom Keene, Paul Sweeney, and me, Alexis Christophorus. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Surveillance, Essential Listening, each and every business day. I want to ask another question about the only reason we talk sometimes about poker on this podcast, which is nominally about markets and economics, is there are a lot of people in the investing world who play poker and are interested in it, and there's obviously a lot of theoretical crossover. Right now, in investing, we've seen,

just in the last several months, but for a while, this absolute explosion of online trading. And retail money coming into trading like we've never seen before. And if I wanted to do some sort of like, you know, forced torture analogy, maybe it's sort of like the Chris Moneymaker phenomenon where after everyone saw him win the World Series of Poker, was that a bunch of people got into playing online poker. But for whatever reason, lots of people are entering the investing world trading like crazy. online. And I'm curious, you know, how that's changed the game, even in person, you know, when you're at a live table against people who have, like, had their experience playing mostly

online, have seen more hands online because they're multi-tabling it, perhaps than someone like, even like Eric Seidel has seen in the 30-year career, just because they can play so many hands so so much. How has that fundamentally changed the game from your perspective, that so many, people have seen so much in a way that historically never been the case before? Well, it's actually changed it live much less than you would think because a lot of the online players when they actually make the transition to live are horrible. They don't understand live poker. They give off way too much information. And when you're multi-tabling, you're not, you're good at the mathematical tiny edges. You're not good at the very big spots because you don't

have to be. That's not how you play. You play for volume and for making a tiny bit of money. Multitabling is not the way to get good at live poker. But it's a wonderful, they would kick my ass online. Don't get me wrong. But a lot of times I love playing with them live because they don't know what they're doing. And they give off way too much information. However, a lot of the really best players these days who've come up both online and live have made the game more challenging. or so I've been told. So a lot of people say, whoa, you know, you came in at such a horrible time when, you know, poker is dying because it's getting so complex. I have no idea.

It's all I've ever seen. It's all I know. I don't know what it was like before. I've been told it's tougher now. But I think that they bring a much more mathematical mindset. They're using solvers programs that actually run, you know, thousands of Monte Carlo simulations and try to figure out what's the approximate way to, play this hand. And so they're thinking about it in a much more precise way. That said, I actually think that it can give a false sense of confidence because it's really important to remember that

poker has not been solved. These solvers are only approximations and they're only as good as with any algorithms as the inputs that you put in. And a lot of people misuse solvers. They don't know how to put it in ranges correctly. They don't know how to build the game trees correctly. And garbage in, garbage out as with every single algorithm. And even the players who do use them correctly, who know exactly what they're doing and who are the best in the world at them, a lot of times they won't think creatively. They won't actually see some of the nuances that are happening live

because they're so locked into their solutions and they know exactly what they're supposed to do. And you can really exploit that. So sometimes the mathematical guys are the easiest players to play against. usually they're going to really excel, but there are moments where you can just completely take advantage of them. And I have. I've actually won against some of the absolute best players in the world by knowing exactly how they were thinking about things, because I also use solvers. You have to if you're playing at a high level. But I use them as a way to enhance my thinking,

not as a way of gaining certainty. There's a really, there's, I think, a big risk, not just in poker, but in finance and everything, in thinking that algorithms and big data and all of this stuff, that it's going to give you certainty that you don't actually have. And I think that there's a big risk of overconfidence there and of failing to pay attention to other things because you think you've got it all figured out. I'm going to make an assumption in this next question and do tell me if it's incorrect. But when we started the discussion and you were describing your project, you sort of said, or you suggested that poker was, you know, your interest in it was, it came from intellectual curiosity

and you saw it as this mix of skill and luck that best reflected life. It sounds like as you embarked on this project that you came to really enjoy your poker experience. I'm just wondering when, you know, if that happened, what made it happen? Like, what was that moment when you, when you thought, actually, I really like this and I'm having fun? It definitely happened. There wasn't one moment. I think it was a realization over time. And I think that the reason that I love poker is because of what it's teaching me about non-poker is because of how complex the game is. It's because the more I learn about it, the more difficult it becomes. And I feel like it's teaching me to stretch my mind, to think in new ways to challenge myself on both an intellectual and an emotional human level. And until COVID, you know, I was playing live regularly. I was still traveling all over the world. In fact, you know, I had to cancel plans for my, what was going to be my next big tournament.

It became one of the last live poker tournaments to be held in this country. So I was on my way there and ended up going back because of what was happening. And I realized that this was not good and that the casino was not where I should be. But until that moment, I had no intention of quitting and of pulling back from playing seriously live because it was still giving me so much. And I was still learning so much about thinking, about decision making, about emotional regulation, about people, about all of these different elements. And that, to me, is beautiful.

There are so few things that will give you that kind of richness of experience. I have my PhD, not just in psychology, but I studied for years, decision-making, under risk and uncertainty and under hot emotional conditions. I made people play stock market games. I looked at all of their decisions. And I spent so long studying all of this stuff, and nothing has taught me more about it than poker. Basically, it's taught me much more than my PhD. Actually, I want to ask you about the emotional availance part, because you can learn about, you know, get really good at pattern recognition.

you can get really good at math. You can get to know yourself and your bluffing strategy and what you feel comfortable with. But at some point, you get to a position where you're in a tournament or maybe you're sort of on the bubble with a chance to make money. And you're in a huge pot and the stakes are really high. And people's heart start to beat faster. How do you do you have a process for sticking to your method of analysis and not letting the emotions of those moments dictate what you ultimately decide to do. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, part of it is experience. At the beginning, I would give off a lot

of information just because these situations were new to me and it was really difficult for me to deal with the emotions. And I hadn't thought through it them. You know, partway through my journey, I actually got a mental coach. So someone who helped me with the mental elements of the game, someone named Jared Tendler, who was very, very good at teaching me to have some of these mental cooling and emotional cooling strategies, because you do need someone to look at you from the outside, even though I'm someone who studied self-control and who really knows all of these strategies theoretically, practically, practically speaking, it's much more difficult to apply them to yourself because you, when you're on tilt, that's the poker term for letting

emotions into your decision process, it's really, really hard to identify and analyze it in yourself. It's much easier to see it in someone else. We're not objective about ourselves, especially when we get into emotional situations. And so a lot of the work happened away from the poker table. A lot of it involved going through games, going through hands, going through tournaments. I would take lots and lots of notes and try to figure out after the fact, okay, what situations got me off my game, what things tilted me, what types of things made me emotional.

Okay, now I'm going to actually physically write all of those things down. Jared made me make spreadsheets where I would then say, okay, what's the emotion I was experiencing? And what am I going to do? What are the things I'm going to say to myself in the moment to counteract that? How am I going to avoid this happening next time? You have to do that work ahead of time because once you're already on tilt, it's too late. So if you don't do that hard work in advance, it's not going to happen and you're going to end up letting emotions into your decision process, which is not good if they're incidental emotions. Sometimes the emotions are correct and they're actually integral to the decision, but 90% of the time or even 99% of the time, that's not the case.

So you need to learn to identify them and dismiss them. And you need to learn techniques of cooling your hot emotional states and figuring out how do I get back to a rational place. And the only way to do that is if you know in advance what your triggers are, if you know in advance how you're likely to react, because then you can be proactive as opposed to emotionally reactive. I want to go back to the point you are making about women, how women are treated in the game versus men. Because I feel like whenever Joe and I do a poker episode, it sort of sounds like a massive cliche

because Joe clearly enjoys the game and plays it a reasonable amount. And I don't really see what the big deal is. And although I play it when I'm forced to and talk about it when I'm forced to, Joe, I don't find it that compelling. Why do you think women aren't as attracted to poker as men? And what can be done to change that and maybe interest women a bit more in the game? I don't think there's anything inherent. I think that actually women are incredible poker players.

Some of the best poker players in the world and the most impressive people are female. And there are people who've succeeded in all sorts of other areas of life. You have someone like Vanessa Selps who went to Yale undergrad, Yale, Yale. school. Brilliant lawyer, worked at some of the best hedge funds in the world, professional poker player, Livbury, astrophysicist, professional poker player. You know, you have these very, very, very, very impressive females. And I think that historically, it's been a male game. And so the culture is not necessarily welcoming to women. And women don't realize, I think, a lot of the times, what poker is. They just see it as this gambling thing. And one of the things I've

tried to stress in my book, and I hope my book actually brings more women to the game, is that poker is not gambling. It's actually different from every single other game in a casino. It's a game of skill. It's a game where you can win with the worst hand and where you can lose with the best hand because 88% of time, and this is not a number that I'm just kind of pulling out of thin air. There was actually a study that economists did who analyzed hundreds of thousands of poker hands online and found that the best hand won 12% of the time. time, which means that 88% of the time it's the best player who forces someone with the better hand to fold. And that, to me, that's just the epitome of skill. It's all about becoming better and mastering

your process so that you can maximize your decisions and basically be the more skilled person in the game. And I think that that's not clear from the popular culture. I think a lot of women think of poker as, you know, oh, everyone's smoking, you know, these guys in the back, room with cigars. I don't want to do that. I don't want to gamble. And I think a lot of times when if you don't understand the game and if you haven't taken the time to actually study in and to figure out, oh, this is a game that can teach me a lot. You're like, you know what? This is boring. I don't want to do this. It's not a boring game at all if you actually start figuring out what it's about, but it's boring if you just are sitting there and no one wants to include you because you're not in

the boys club. I think that that turns a lot of women off. And I think a lot of times when they walk into a casino and sit down at a poker table, at those lower stakes, it's not a welcoming experience. A lot of men are drinking. There's a lot of sexism. I mean, I've been called everything under the moon. Some of the stuff is not fit for a radio consumption. So I'm not going to say what I've been called. But if you can think of it, I've been called it. I've been propositions, literally given a keycard and told what my rate was going to be. I've experienced things I never thought I'd experience. And that's a problem. And I think that that keeps a lot of women from the game. And honestly, had I not been a journalist going into this for a book and had I not

seen what was possible, had I not had a lot of the best players showing me that their excitement, their love of the game, the fact that it's a really beautiful game before I sensed it for myself. And I kind of took their word for it because I said, well, you guys are brilliant. and you could do anything in the world and you've chosen to play poker. So I guess there must be something to this. If I didn't have that, there's a very good chance that I would have gotten right up and walked out and never come back. Well, it's good that you didn't. I think that's a great place to leave it.

But just real quickly, how have you been spending the crisis, the quarantine? And what are your plans for when it's over? I've been focusing on my book lunch. So this was not the way I planned. to release my book, but my book came out in the middle of quarantine. So I'm in New York. I barely have left Brooklyn, or I mean, I barely have left my apartment since the end of February, except for two weeks in July where I actually got an Airbnb in New Jersey to play the World Series of Poker Online, because in the U.S. do you have to be physically located in New Jersey or Nevada in order to be able to play.

And so I did that, and now I'm back in Brooklyn. And do not foresee any more. more travel in my immediate future. But yeah, my quarantine has been spent on trying to get the book out there, even though it's not, see, this is the thing. This is what poker teaches you. Focus on the process and you can't control, you can't control the outcomes. You can't control what's going on around you. So everything that's happening right now, that's just, that's out of my hands. That's the variance. And that's the things that you can't predict for and that you can't control for. So what I can do is focus on myself and focus on trying to make this as good an experience as I possibly can. Maria, that was great. Really, really enjoyed you coming on.

And best of luck and congrats on the book. And looking forward to see you rising on the Hendon Mob. I'll keep up rechecking your profile and see your cash winnings continue to ride. Thank you guys so much. Thanks, Maria. That was really interesting. Tracy, I found that really inspiring. You know, like, I always say I like the game, but I admit that I'm not good at it. But maybe I should just decide to try to get good at it. And maybe we both should. Like, maybe we should both stop talking about it so much and just both become good at it.

That'd be fun, wouldn't it? I have a feeling that Maria makes it look a lot easier than it actually is. And that said, clearly I haven't read the book. But just talking to her, like, it's clear that she's a talented player. And it's pretty phenomenal that she managed. to do so, like, completely out of her own will. She just wields this professional poker career into being. That's amazing.

We kind of did that with, like, podcast, right? I think it's slightly different. But sure, okay. Well, we could do a podcast series where we all go to Vegas, and why don't we just see who makes the most money? I think that's what we should do. Let's just do that. Yeah, rather than putting too much pressure to actually become good,

when it's all over, let's just both go and just see, who wins more money. That'd be fun. And we'll record everything. It'll be great. Yeah. That's actually something to look forward to. Yeah. That's something to look forward to when all this is over. We'll do that. But, you know, I do think her description of poker as this mixture of luck and skill is a really important one. And it's sort of similar in financial markets as well. You can get lucky

on a single call, but over the long run, all your investment decisions sort of average out. And eventually, if you're making just tons and tons of stupid decisions, your luck is going to get overwhelmed by your stupidity and your long-term average is going to go down. Yeah, it's a cliche, but fund managers, you know, they love to talk about, oh, my process. I'm following a process, and I may have lost money this quarter, but my process, my process. But that is essentially what that means, which is like, you know, sometimes you're having an approach.

It's not going to work. You got bad cards, the company you invested in, whatever. But that is what they're talking about, is that discipline to have an approach. And, you know, the greatest ones investors are not just someone who randomly got lucky because they bought Netflix 15 years ago or whatever, but actually have some sort of process and discipline to evaluate investments. It's just extremely, extremely hard. If someone were to ask me what my poker process was,

I would say a mixture of panic and confusion. You have the self-evaluation part. So that's good. That's the first step. I would probably say something pretty similar. A couple of that with like some sort of like overconfidence or trying to do hard to be clever. But probably, but no better. All right.

Well, I am looking forward to testing all of this out in Vegas once the whole coronavirus stops. Fingers crossed. I'm looking for it. Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our guest on Twitter, Maria Konnikova. Her handle is at M. Connikova. Also, be sure to check out her new book, The Biggest Bluff, How I Learn to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. And be sure to follow our producer, Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today. out all of our podcasts under the handle at Podcasts.

Thanks for listening. San Francisco. On April 4th, 2020, around two in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee.

beginning April 16.