How A Professional Writer Turned Herself Into A World Class Poker Player

obviously this is all getting pretty tiresome. I think people are ready for real life to resume. But there's actually one well there's a few aspects of lockdown life that I kind of prefer, but there's one thing in particular that I and to be better. You know what it is? Yeah, I think I do. I think I've actually done it with you a couple of months ago. Oh yeah, yes, I find playing poker online with friends to be much better than playing poker, uh in real life with friends.

I'm not sure poker is a better game online period, but at least unlike 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 anti social or something like that. But normally, when I've played poker among friends or casually, people start talking about sports and they that flows down the dealing, and a really care about those conversas sports, or like someone or someone is like, oh, let's order pizza and they bring up to 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 you know, the online poker room, you can have all that stuff. You can still people having a name conversations or getting up for a snack, but it doesn't slow down the game at also have all you want to do is focus on the cards. Actually think it's a better experience. Well, 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, let's 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. I couldn't, and that you know that would be unethical, But you know, 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, 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 uh calls, you know, you would probably start to notice. I gotta say so.

I don't think it's a secret to all lots 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 could 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 want 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 whoa, just because they can. But anyway, um, 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 gonna 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, um 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 Kannakova. She used to be a writer at The New Yorker and uh 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 will yourself and trained yourself and you became one. You actually just manufactured it and made it happen. Is that is that accurate? Um? Not entirely, Not entirely. UM. I was someone like like you, Tracy, who had zero interest

in poker whatsoever. I'm not a games player. I have no interesting games like any of them for my 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. Um they bore me. And I think the scariest thing that my niece and nephew can do is take out travelers of Katan. I just I start having a panic attack right away, thinking, Oh, no, are we actually going to have to play this? So

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 twentieth century, John von Neuman. 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 von Neuman was a poker player and that game theory is actually based on poker.

That man Neuman 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 um, 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 Neuman believed that if you could actually solve poker, then you'd have the key to some of the most complex strategic decisions in reality. Um. And at the time, the guy was working on the hydrogen bomb, so so he really knew what he was talking about. He was at the highest echelons of governmental advising on strategy. This really really intrigued man. I thought, Oh, what is this poker thing? You know,

I am 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? Um? And why don't I use that kind of as a life metaphor to 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 it mattered to me was the journey, the learning process, Tracy.

I just want to point out that Maria has won three hundred eleven thousand dollars playing poker tournaments according to the Hendon mob database, including her best cash of an eighty four thousand dollar eighty four thousand six D pay day. So something to keep in mind when someone just says, oh, I want to learn how to do it, I'm I'm extremely impressed. Anyway, keep going. I just want to just sort of set the stage of how 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. Um, I'm curious as you set out to learn more about poker, where did you begin? You mentioned reading a lot, but but where did you go from there? And who did you talk to? So I enlisted Eric Sidell, who is one of the best players in the world, some considered him to be the greatest player of all time, to serve as my coach and mentor throughout this journey. Um, I

got incredibly lucky. You know. My Luks 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 mind set, 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 and he was able to introduce me to a lot of the best minds in the game. So don't get me wrong,

I I did work incredibly hard. Um I 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 in 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 at Once, which is both a training site which is some of the best or training content and a poker site, um which you can't play on in the United States unfortunately, but you can play on 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 we're 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, you know, I'm 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 to answer your 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 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 thing 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. Um, 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 funeym.

Can you talk a little bit more about what what you get out of professional guidance? And obviously everyone knows there's a million poker books that's been that have been written. I read a handful of them. What is it that when you talk to someone like Eric Sidell 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 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, um, 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 this 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 fat. 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 not understand it, and that is one of the first ways that a teacher can see whether someone has

actually understood something. It's very easy to say, oh, yeah, I get that, but then say Okay, now teach someone who doesn't get it um, and most people of flounder and not be able to do that, and so that 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, it's not like we never sat down and he said, okay, this is how you played 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 very socratic method um, which could have been which could be incredibly frustrating. And sometimes I just wanted to shake him and say, just tell me how to play this. You know, I don't know what I'm doing. Um. 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 UM, I have to constantly turn to him

and try to memorize things. Memorization is not the way to go by the way. That's 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 handfeld like ten 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 look at all the factors, because no two hands are the same, No two situations are the same. And if you learn to conct 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. M 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 you're playing style eventually looked like. That's a really excellent question. Um. One of the things that I had trouble with from the very beginning was aggression and bluff. Thing that's really not my personality. UM, that's not something I was ever good at, and that's something that people

took advantage of. UM. 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, a pretty successful, strong willed female, and it ends up that I'd actually internalized so many gender stereotypes. 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 Galfund. 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 this, you don't have to be You have to find your own style and Peel 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 the style that's best for you, and so yes, be aggressive, but be

aggressive in a way that works for 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 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 let's call it that, um.

But it is reactive because I was reacting to people's perceptions of me and how they see women, because I realized that everyone saw me as a female first and as a poker player second, and if I could figure out how they thought women played, because by the way, poker's ninety seven percent male the professional world and three percent 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 their you know, 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 and 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 people and 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 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, um, how they play currently and then be 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 am I in what kinds of situations? Am I risk seeking? And what kinds of situations? And my 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 huge pot? 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, they'll again become very risk seeking. You say, oh, yeah, I'm on a roll. I have the hot hand, gotta take more risks, gotta gotta keep the role going. Others, when they win a lot, they'll say, Okay, I'm done. You know, now I'm gonna 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 honest with themselves. They say, oh, I don't let that affect me. You know, 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 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 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, for gut feeling.

Is there a way to use that to your advantage? I feel like that aspect of it rarely gets to um, Okay, you've you've hit on one of my one of my big passions which is to get the term gut feeling out of people's um action vocabulary. Ever, so we what we love to react with our gut and a lot of people will say, oh, you know, I'm a gut I'm a field player, I'm a gut player. So I

as a psychologist, I studied this a lot. And what we find and 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 on able to coin flips. So we have zero ability to tell which of our gut feelings are 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, you know, followed our gut and we're 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 experienced it as gut when it's really expertise. So for someone like Eric Seidel, if he has a got feeling that this person is bluffing at the poker table, you 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 thirties some odd years countless times. He just hasn't actually sat down every time and then an analysis and said, oh, when this happens, this person is bluff thing. But his brain was doing that analysis even though he might not 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 thirty 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 poker nearly long enough. I cannot calm myself an expert. I'm not allowed to calm myself an expert for another ten years

at least. Um, 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 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 uh, 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's 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, Um, I still don't think I have a good chance of making funny when it sent out at the poker table. I think that impostor complex has has never entirely gone away. UM, but it was a very it was it took a

long time. So the way that I started learning UM at first, I played online UM, even though I always knew that my goal was to play live my edges live. UM. I'm a psychologist. I'm not a mathematician. The last time I took a math class was in high school. My edges people UM 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, and you can get

live because the hands are much faster. So in a week of playing online you can get six months worth of live playing experience. So so that's very important. So I started there UM and until I started consistently making money online, Eric did not let me play live. He was very big about building your bank roll organically and making sure that you were very savvy financially with your decisions. What stakes when you the first tables that you said, So,

I always played tournaments. I did not play cash games, so these were like five dollar buying tournaments. I made the decision at the beginning because it's a very if, it's a very different style of play, and um, we had to decide what was I going to do? And as if you're talking about life analogy, tournaments are definitely the way 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, five dollar tournaments online. Once I started winning some of those, and I want to think a little over two thousand dollars, and I took that money and went to Vegas and started playing in the dailies and nightlies. Um, you know, the thirty five dollar buying tournaments, because that's as low as you can go for live poker. And I really wanted to play in

these hundred dollar tournaments, and Erica wouldn't let me. He said, that's way too high for you. 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 i'm studying, I'm working really hard, um,

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, forty five or something dollar buy and and I won over over nine hundred dollars and I was just over the over the moon. It was amazing. And then I started being able to play the hundred dollar tournaments and I started final tabling those and coming in second place and doing doing well there. And then I was able to move up gradually too,

higher and higher stakes. And I think that that original win up Planet Hollywood made me realize, okay, um, I can do this. UM. I really needed that burst of confidence, because after two months of playing almost every day and not making any money, UM, 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 Sue or at the beginning, I was very very bad. But it also takes a

while for everything to come together. Being bad. It 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, keep on plugging away at the process. And then I know, after after that first when I didn't look back because I was able to kind of finance my way through UM and then my big breakthrough at pc A, The Poker Stars carribean adventure UM when I made UM in you know, in one week, I

made over a hundred thousand dollars UM. 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? You know,

did anyone ask you what you were doing there? And you sort of appeared out of nowhere and and started to do very well. So I'm just wondering if people were curious about about you. Yeah, So, so the first part online and live is very different. I vastly prefer live poker, um, both because I'm better at it, but also I find it more interesting, there's more going on. Um. This isn't true of all people. A lot of people prefer playing online um, 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 UM, so so now the player pools have become a little bit mixed. But before there were very different player tendencies, and you learned to play a little bit differently 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. Um. The best players use software to analyze everything they have overlays, You're you're just seeing a table, They're seeing your sticks. They're seeing exactly what percentage Japan's you open pre flop, how often you three bet, how often you fold to a three bed, how often you forebet. 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 UM, even though some sites no longer allow it, but all of the sites that do UM, you're at this 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 UM. But I like it a lot better because I actually think that those muscles are very important too 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 that 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 three bet?

How often do they fold to afford 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 UM, a lot more

people crunching live UM. In terms of whether people asked me questions at the beginning, I think they just when I was playing in most days tournaments, no one really gave me a second look, um, because otherwise other than saying, oh, there's a girl in the game, well that's weird. Um. 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, UM. And I think that it stood out because when I was traveling, I would be sitting, you know, in these smaller tournaments, and then all of these high roller players, not just Derek but all 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 both um.

And then the poker media picked up on it, um and did a few stories about me, and then I lost a little bit of my anonymity. M I wanted to ask another question about the only reason we talked 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 then and there's obviously a lot of theoretical cross

over 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 a sort of like the Chris Moneymaker phenomenon where after everyone saw him when the World Series of Poker without

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, um, 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, um playing mostly online, have seen more hands online because they're multi tabling it perhaps than someone like even like Eric Sidell has seen in the thirty year career, just because they could 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, uh, in a way that historically never been the case before. Well, it's actually changed it live much less than you would think, because, um, a lot of the online players when they actually make the transitions to live, are horrible. Uh. They you don't understand live poker. They

give off way too much information. And when you're multi tabling, you don't 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. Um, multi tabling is not the way to get good at live poker. But it's a wonderful They would kick my ass on 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. Um, and they give off way too much information. Um. However, a lot of the really best players these days who have 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, um, But I think that they bring a much more mathemat radical 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, um, And so they're

thinking about it in a much more precise way. Um. 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, that 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 missed use solvers. They don't know how to put it in ranges correctly, they don't know how to put in the build the game trees correctly, and

garbage and 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 see, they won't think creatively, they won't actually see um, some of the nuances that are happening live because they're so locked into their solutions and they know exactly what they're

post to do, and you can really exploit that. So some of sometimes the mathematical guys are the easiest players to play against. Usually they're gonna they're gonna really excel um, 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. Um, But I use them as a way to enhance my thinking, not as a way of saying of gaining certainty. There's really there's I think a big risk, not just in poker, but in financing 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 over confidence there and of failing to pay attention to other things because you think you've got it.

I'll 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 you sort of said or you suggested that poker was you know, your interest in it was came from intellectual curiosity and you saw 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. Um, there wasn't one moment um. 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 learned 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 love ball And until COVID, you know, I was playing live regularly. I was still traveling all over the world. Um. In fact, you know I had to cancel plans for my what was going to be my UM next big tournament. Um it became one of the last live poker tournaments

to be held in this country. UM. 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. Um And But until that moment, I had no intention of quoting, end 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. And now 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 stopped me. It's not me much more than my PhD. Actually, I want to ask you about that. The the emotional valance part because you can learn about you know, get really good at uh, 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 what. 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 uh, you know, 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 in 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 to deal with the emotions and I hadn't thought through them,

you know. Part way 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, um at teaching me to to have some of these you know, 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 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 to 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 now I'm going to actually

physically write all of those things down. Jared made me make spreadsheets um 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 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, UM, 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. You know, sometimes the emotions are correct, um, and they're actually integral to the decision, But of the time, or even 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 and advance what your triggers are, if you know and advance how you're likely to react,

because then you can be proactive as opposed to emotionally reactive. UM. I want to go back to um, the point you were 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, UM, 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. Yeah, 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. UM. And there are people who have succeeded in all sorts of other areas of life. And you have someone like Vanessa Selps who went to Yale undergrad yea law school, brilliant lawyer. UM worked at some of the best touch funds in the world, professional poker player, Livebury astrophysicist, professional poker player. You know, you have you have these 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, um, 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 eight percent of time, and this is not a number that I'm just kind of pulling out of thin air, um, there was actually a study that economists did who analyzed hundreds of thousands of poker hands online and found that the best hand one twelve percent of the time, which means that pent 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, um and basically be the 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 realm 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 um, 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 not fit for a radio consumption. So I'm not 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 propositioned, literally, given a key card 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 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, 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. What just real quickly, Um, how have you been spending the the crisis, the quarantine and what are your plans for when it's over? Um, I've been focusing on my book launch. 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. Um. I barely have left Brooklyn, or I mean, I barely have left my apartment since the end of February, except for two weeks UM in July, where I actually got an airbnb in New Jersey to play the World Series of Poker online because in the US to have to be physically located in New Jersey or Nevada in order to be able to play. UM. And so I did that, and now I'm back in Brooklyn. UM. And do you not foresee any more travel in in my

immediate future? But yeah, my quarantine has been has been spent on trying to get the book out there, even though it's not See this this, 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. UM. That's the variance, and that's the things that you can't

predict for UM. 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 of an experience as I possibly can. Maria, that was great, really, uh really enjoyed you coming on and uh, best of luck and congrat something and looking forward to see you rising on the Hendon mob. I'll keep both you're re checking your profile and I see your your cash your cash winnings, continue to write. Thank you guys so much, thanks for it.

That was really interesting, crazy, 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. Um 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 it's pretty phenomenal that she managed to do so, like completely out of her own will. She just wilds 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 okay, um, well we could do we could do a part cast series where 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. Yeah, and we'll record everything. It would be great. Yeah, that's actually something to look forward to. Yeah, that's something to

look forward to and all that. But you know, I do think I do think her a 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 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 my process. I follow on a process that I may have lost money at this quarter, but my process, my process. But that is essentially what that means, which is like, you know, sometimes you're have an approach that's not gonna 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 the greatest ones investors are not just someone who randomly got lucky because they bought Netflix fifteen 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. See that's what you know. You have the self evaluation part, So that's good, that's

the first step. I don't know, I would probably say something pretty similar with 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 coronas fingers crossed, I'm looking forward. 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 wisn't Thal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stalwart and you should follow our guests on Twitter Maria kna Cova. Her handle is at m conda Cova. Also be sure to check out her new book, The Biggest Blow How I Learned to pay attention, master myself and Win, and be sure to follow our producer Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlton. Follow The Bloomberg had a podcast, Francesca Levi at Francesca Today and check out all of our podcasts under the handle

at podcast. Thanks for listening to