Maria Konnikova

World Series online. Um, you have to be physically located in New Jersey or about it to do that. So I spent two weeks in a lovely studio on the Jersey shore playing poker. And how did you do in the World Series? Um? I'm I was down by but just by a few thousand dollars, which to me is winning because when you are buying in for tens of thousands of dollars, being just a few feels like a win. Okay, so how much? Um, it's multiple events. There's an event

every single day. So the way that they did it normally, this doesn't happen right now. The World Series was supposed to be happening in Las Vegas. Everyone was going to be there. It was all going to be live. My book UM, which came out on June, was originally coming out the week before the main event, so it was

all planned out perfectly. And obviously you can plan all you want, and then COVID happens and all of a sudden, there's no World Series of Poker, there's no live poker period, no no poker tournaments, and so they scrambled and they decided to do a semblance of it online, and the way they did it was to do thirty one events, one every single day of July UM and the buying's range from four hundred dollars for the lowest UM to around four thousand dollars for for the highest and you

can re buy into most of the events. Then they moved. As of August first, it's still going on, but now it's on an international platform g G Poker. So I was planning to go to Canada, but the border is closed because I wouldn't let us in either. UM. So unfortunately, I'm not playing, but a lot of people who are outside of the United States are, and they're the buyans can actually be higher and they're doing a mini main event for five thousand dollars, but I will not be

taking part because I'm not in Canada. Well, is it higher just because it's Canadian dollars? No? No, no, no, this is all in US dollars. Okay, let's just go a little slower for the uninitiated. How does the World Series of Poker work? How do they come up with the ultimate Champion? So the World Series of Poker is actually it's a series, so there are lots of events. So normally for about a month and a half, poker players from all over the world come to Las Vegas

and play a number of tournaments. And when people talk about the World Series of Poker, they're usually just thinking about the main event, which is the single most important one. It's a ten dollar buying and it determines the World champion. It determines who the World Champion of Poker is for that year. And so normally people just think, who don't play poker, just think the World Series that one tournament, but that's just the pinnacle. That's the last tournament of

the series. And people can play what's called side events, but you can also win bracelets. Bracelets a bracelet is what you win when you win a World Series of Poker title. But if you win a bracelet in anything other than the main event, you're just a bracelet winner. You're not the world champion. Okay, to play in the main event, you have to qualify in one of these other events. They're completely independent. As long as you've got ten grand you can play. And have you played in

the main event? I have. I've played in it multiple times and done. Um the first year, this is the opening scene of my book. I came down with a migraine on the first day and spent the better part of the second half of the day throwing up on the bathroom floor of the Lovely Rio Hotel and Casino. I did not do well. I made Day two and

then probably busted. The next year, I cashed. I actually came in the top I don't remember, but it was maybe top five hundred, top six hundred players, but out of tens of thousands, So I felt pretty good about myself. And do you like playing poker? I do? I mean I used to not. I didn't know anything about poker um as of you know, if you and I were having this conversation five years ago, Um, I wouldn't have

known what poker is. Really. The only exposure I had had to poker was Rounders, UM, which I thought was a great movie, and I thought Matt Damon did a wonderful job, and I really loved Teddy KGB. And that was, seriously the only poker I had ever seen. I didn't know how many cars were in a deck. I had zero interest in the game whatsoever. I'm not a games player.

I grew up in a household that reads books. We didn't even have a TV when I was growing up, so I just grew up with lots and lots of bookshelves, and for entertainment in the evenings, we read or my parents read to us. And there wasn't even a deck of cards around, no board games, no chest, nothing like that. And so, like I said, five years ago, if you and I were talking, I would have laughed if you said, did you know that one day you're going to play

poker professionally? Um. I got into it as a book project because I became fascinated by the notion of luck and the role that luck plays in our lives. So I came to it from from the side, from a very different angle but I did fall in love with the game and found that it taught me much more about life than I thought possible, and I'm still learning. I think it's such a beautiful game that really challenges

you on a constant level. Um. And to me, the best things in life are the ones that force you to grow, force you to become a better version of yourself, constantly force you to think better. Are the things that don't let you plateau and don't let you just kind of past through. And to me, one of those things is poker. Okay, forgetting the number of what you learned psychologically, etcetera. How long did it take you to master the game? To understand what the game was? I'm talking about on

the most raw level. If you're sitting there with someone who literally knows nothing but doesn't know their fifty two cards in a deck, how long would it take them to understand the game? Well, it depends on what you mean. If you mean learn the rules, not long at all. Within a week, we can have you playing and knowing exactly what it's going on in terms of the rules. Um.

If you're talking about really understanding the game. Um. My coach Eric Seidel is one of the best players in the world and has been playing since the eighties and winning since the eighties. And if you ask him, he'd say that he still doesn't understand it and he still hasn't mastered it. So you've got those two extremes. Okay, let's go back to the beginning, as you say, five years ago, when you didn't even know how to play at hand. What was the motivation for writing the book.

I went through a period in my life where nothing seemed to go right. I became sick, and no one knew what was wrong. It was an autoimmune condition, but ideopathic was the was the final diagnosis, which means we really have no idea of unknown origin for being specific. And I just became allergic to everything. My skin became allergic to everything. I couldn't go outside oftentimes because I was just erupt in hives whenever anything touched my body.

I mean by a in hives, I mean face, neck, body, everything. It was painful to put on clothes, and so I had lots of time to think about things because I was at home, not not able to do anything. On massive doses of steroids. As people tried to figure out what was wrong and get this under control. And at the same time as this is happening and I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with me, my grandmother dies. And she wasn't sick or anything like that, totally independent, healthy,

living by herself. She just slipped in the middle of the night. I think she was going up to go to the bathroom and she hit her head and didn't wake up. And it was one of these things where you realize, you know, it's just an accident. You could happen to anyone and you can't plan for it, and we didn't without her being sick, no one said goodbye, you know, we just had no idea. And my husband

lest his job, my mom lost her job. Just all of these things kept happening, one right after the other, and it made me stop and just really realize how important luck is. That when things are going well, we we like to take credit. So often we say, oh, you know, I I've worked really hard. You know, I've been working towards this, um I've earned this. And the truth is, sure, you need to work hard, but you also need to get lucky, and things have to go your way, and luck has to come together in a

lot of different ways. And there's so many things that are just beyond us, and someone else might have worked just as hard but not gotten lucky and not be where we are. And I wanted to write about that and explore it and figure out a way to learn to tell the difference between skill and chance, between the

things we control and the things we don't. And when I started reading about all of these different elements, I came across game theory, which is an interesting framework for looking at chance, and learned when I started reading the foundational text of game theory, the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, that John von Neuman, who's the father of game theory and also one of the geniuses of the twentieth century, um one of the fathers of the computer.

So you and I would be sitting here talking right now if it weren't for him. That he was a poker player, and that poker was the origin of game theory, that he actually believed that solving poker would give you a rubric for looking at life's most complicated decisions, and he the way he described it really intrigued me. It seemed that poker might be a way to tease the part all of these different themes I was thinking about. So I started reading about poker a little bit, a

little bit slower. So all these all these bad things are happening. What makes you pick up the game theory book? I started reading whenever I knew that I wanted to write my next book about luck and about skill versus chance. That is not a book. That's just a question, philosophical enquiry. It ain't a nonfiction narrative. Um. You need a story for any book. You need a way in Um what I do at the beginning of any project. It doesn't

matter how long or short I might be writing. Uh often I might be writing a New Yorker piece or a book. I read a lot. I think that writers need to first and foremost be readers. And for everything I write, I've read thousands and thousands of words more that I've written. And I just started reading everything I could find that had to do with luck and had to do with chance. And if you're reading about chance, game theory comes up. Because game theory is one of

the foremost ways of looking at chance. It's one of the foremost economic theories of the twentieth century, and it teaches you about thinking probabilistically. It teaches you how to make decisions in uncertain environments. And I knew this. I have a PhD in psychology, so I knew that game theory is where I went. For those who are not

up to speed, what exactly is game theory? Game theory is just a way of looking at the world where you try to figure out, how do I act in a way that no one else can exploit or take advantage of my decision? That's it. Okay, give us a couple of exact, non poker examples where game theory would come into play. Nuclear war, that's actually that was mon Nouman's example. He thought that solving poker would help you

avoid nucle your war. If you're trying to figure out whether your opponent Cuban missile crisis that actually happened, that's game theory. What is Kruschev going to do? What is Jeff k gonna do? How far can we push them? How far is he going to do? Go? Is he actually going to press the proverbial red button and fire missiles? Is he bluffing? So this is a perfect quintessential game

theoretical example. How can you gather information to try to figure out what the payoff matrix and game theories speak looks like, how can you gather information to figure out how we can get to a point in the matrix where neither one of us has any incentive to deviate? How can I figure out if he's bluffing or not? How can I figure out how far he's willing to go? And in order to do that, you need to input a lot of things into that mental model. This is

why game theory isn't just about math. It is about math, but it's also about psychology. It's about trying to put numbers in probably abilities, on human emotions, on human actions, on human decisions. And that's why von Neuman turned to poker, and that's why game theory can give you an approximation. But it's just an approximation. Everything in life is an approximation. He realized that you can't solve anything, So let me

just you ask let me answer your question. So, if you think about something like a Nash equilibrium, which is when you actually find that square where no one deviates, it exists in theory, but in practice it's almost impossible to reach that square because people are people, and you can think that you understand them, but Ultimately, there's always the chance that you don't UM, and so it's a

probabilistic answer. It's not a definitive answer. Well, in game theory, is there a specific paradigm or is it as simple as you say, we're gathering information talking about the nouns and the unknowns. What do you mean by that? Specifically? You talked about the matrix? What did you know you talk about game theory. It's like, I'm about the matrix the movie. So you actually you actually draw a matrix. So you have Bob on one side and you have Maria on the other, and in the simplest one, you

have four squares. Let's say yes, no, yes, no. And if we're trying to figure out what will Bob and Maria, you know, what will their payoffs look like in the four little squares of that matrix? So if both of them say yes, then agree to whatever proposition. UM, let's say you know that. Let's say we're choosing ice cream and we're trying to and if you and I agree on an ice cream flavor, we both get sent gallons of this ice cream flavor. We can't talk to each

other beforehand. Obviously, in real life, you can but in your so ideally you coordinate, but if you can't coordinate, So if you and I both come up with the same flavor, we get into the yes yes box, right, and our payoff there. Let's say it's of four is four and four. We're both really really happy, right if But let's say you and I or actually it might not be four and for because what if our two

flavors are different. What if I know that your favorite flavors chocolate, My favorite flavor is vanilla, but I want some ice cream rather than not having any ice cream. And so if I know your chocolate, and I don't think that you know that I like vanilla, I might say chocolate. So we both get into that box. But it's a four for you and it's actually one for me. Right, So now now it changes, so you just get different ice cream flavors. So let's say now we're in the

yes no, you stay chocolate, but I say vanilla. Well, all of a sudden, we're in a different box, and we're in a box where your payoff is lower in mine is higher, and we need to try to figure out how do we get to the box where we both kind of maximize it. Maybe both of us kind of like vanilla, it's in the middle. Maybe vanilla would be a three for both of us. That would be great, not vanilla, sorry strawberry, but we need a new flavor. So maybe strawberries actually second best for both of us.

So strawberries are three for you and a three for me, Well, then maybe we should try to coordinate on strawberry, right, because that's actually going to give us the most the best optimal mutual payoff because the total of that box is six, whereas your chocolate my vanilla boxes just five. Right, So we can start playing like that, and then you have to try to figure out Okay, well, how are

you thinking? How am I thinking? I use the type of person who's gonna want to coordinate on strawberry if I can't see you or talk to you, um, and should I risk it? Or are you the kind of person who's just gonna go chocolate all the way you're going to You're going to betray me, so to speak. So we can't coordinate because you want that chocolate and you don't care if I don't get any ice cream. So that's a very silly example, but you can that's kind of how you. That's how you that's how you

look at the matrix. You assign different ways well articulated. So you're reading the book and he mentions poker. Does a lightbulb go off in your head? Or is it an evolutionary process to decide to write a book? Um, it's both. At the beginning, it wasn't a light bulb. When I read von Neuman, I became intrigued by poker,

and I thought, huh, this is interesting. And then when I started reading about poker, all I did that I had zero poker books in the house, so I just googled poker and started reading a little bit about it online. That's when a light bulb went off, when I just thought, Hey, this game seems really interesting and it actually seems to get out a lot of these things that I'm curious about. It has an element of skill, it has an element

of chance. Von Neumann thinks that it actually has the perfect balance of skill and chance to make it a good analogy for life. I don't know much about it, but if I even thinks so, it's good enough for me. I mean, the guy's brilliant. So that's when a lightbulb moment actually went off, and I thought this could be it. And right away I actually just emailed my agent and said, hey, what do you think does this seem like a good idea?

And at this point we've been going back and forth for six months and she'd been saying no to every single thing I've proposed, and this one she said that the sounds promising. See what you can find. So so that was the start of the book. So what what was the process of actually selling the book? So first,

and this was true of all of my books. Um, I feel very very strongly that you need to work very hard on your proposal, no matter how many books you've written, and no matter what your reputation is, because you're doing it not just for selling it. You're doing it for you because it helps you think through the whole thing. It helps you figure out whether this is actually going to work as a book, whether it's going to be a good story. So it's a really good exercise.

And a lot of the proposal is actually writing scenes and writing parts of chapters to try to figure this out. And so I actually, before I sold the book, I spent putiple months playing. So I approached Eric Sidell, one of the greatest poker players in the world who agreed to become my coach. And I actually started on my journey before selling the book because I needed material for the proposal. I needed to see if it was going

to work. I needed to see whether the game was actually going to fulfill its promise of teaching me what I wanted to learn. I wanted to see if I liked it. I mean, I didn't want to sell a book and then go play poker and realize that it made me sick and that I absolutely hated it and that it bore me to tears. It's going to be multiple years of my life. Any book is multiple years of your life, so you better you better think hard

and pick something that's right for you. Um. And so the process looked like me starting to learn to play with Eric. I went to Vegas. I even made my first a little bit slower, a little bit slower told the book. Yet this stuff be doing because you've already met Eric Seidell. Okay, how did you meet Eric and how did you approach him? I'm a journalist. I cold called him. I had no connection to him whatsoever. I

followed him on Twitter and sent him a message. And the reason that I chose him was a very sophisticated reason. I did a Google search of best poker buyers of all time, and his name came up in multiple lists, and I did some research because his name wasn't the only one who came in, and he seemed to check the most of my boxes. I wanted someone who was older, who had been around a while, and who had a

more broad approach to the game. I didn't want someone who was young and just starting out and just had of the mathematical stuff that's the hot ticket today. I wanted someone who could really speak to my psychology background, so that was number one. So I needed someone from from from the past, so to speak. But I wanted someone who was still relevant. And Eric was actually the only person who checks both of those boxes, who was winning in the eighties and who was a winning today.

I mean, that just doesn't happen. Most poker players careers are much shorter, and they don't they can't keep performing at the same high level. Then I looked at videos. He seemed like a nice guy. He's very quiet, seemed very self effacing, very humble, and a lot of the other poker players were out there like in your face, screaming, swearing, yelling, throwing temper tantrums, you know, throwing cards and trips in

the air. And Eric was just kind of sitting there quietly, and I thought, I'm going to spend a year with someone as my mentor. I want someone nice and I want someone I can get along with. And then I realized that he was the guy from Rounders, so that was just a bonus that he was the guy in the in the red visor in the Rounders videos. And I thought, wow, it's a Rounders guy. It's they gotta gotta email him. So I found him on Twitter and I just contacted him and I said, hey, you know,

I'm a journalist. I was still at The New Yorker full time then, um and said I'm working on a new project. I'd love to talk to you about it. I think it's something that might interest you. Um And he wrote up and he he was just immediately open. There were no like tell me more about you. I'm not sure how much time this is going to take. That he loves my writing. The guy reads the New Yorker, he loves the New Yorker. He knew exactly who I was, so that helped and I didn't realize how lucky I got.

Most poker players do not know what the New Yorker is. Okay, so you meet Eric. What's the next process in this run up to selling the book and deciding to do the book? Well, first I had to pitch Eric and have him agreed to take me on. So I convinced

him that it was a good idea. Um. The way I did that was, you know, I told him that my background was psychology and as a journalist observing people, and he thought that and I'd studied decision making specifically, That's what I did for my pH d. And so I actually had studied a lot of the things that are important for playing poker, So that was part of it. And I think for him that was a challenge to see, you know, can he take someone from zero and can

my background? Can a psychological approach still work? Because right now, most new players, if not all, entering the game are mathematical, and I had taken my last math class in high school, so that was never my strong suit and so he was curious to see if that approach could still work. And I think the other reason he took me on was that he loves the game, and he saw in me an opportunity to spread the love of the game to other people, to the non poker world, because I can't.

I wasn't part of the poker community, and the people who read my books weren't poker players, and so I think he saw it as a long term investment, so he agreed to give it a try and to see if it would work. And we ended up getting along. So if we learned pretty early on that it was going to work in terms of us being able to work together, then I needed material before I could put together a proposal to sell the book. So he started teaching me. We started working together. UM, I started learning

to play. So before I sold the book, UM, I spent a few a few months going daily to New Jersey back and forth to play online because online poker is legal in New Jersey and not legal in New York, which is bizarre, but it's but it's the case. So I did that, and then I went to Vegas for my first live real life let's go just a little bit slower. You you go to New Jersey, you created account, what are those initial experiences playing online? Like? I hate

playing online, I still do. I'm not I'm not a fan you it's not what I love about poker, but why Eric wanted me to learn to play online, and I think he was absolutely right with the experience. Online is much faster. You can play thousands of hands these days. Online players get experience in a month that it used to take live pros people who didn't do this professional

years to acquire. That's the difference in speed. And so if you're learning, it's really helpful to see a whole array of situations and to see an array of behaviors and to start learning by experience. That's how the human mind learns best. And so playing online, I got to see hand after hand after hand, and it was just at first, it was very, very overwhelming, um and everything stressed me out. I didn't know how to use the interface. I don't like timers, and you have timers, how long

you can take to make a decision. All of this stuff was very stressful, but it started teaching me how to play. It started teaching me all of these different situations. And the really good thing about it is I could actually record all of my sessions because you can just screen record. So i'd play a tournament, I'd record the whole thing, and then I'd be able to take it to Eric and we could go through it and he could help me, so we could go through decision by decision.

What I was doing to start teaching me how to think through things and how to think about poker. So in that sense it was invaluable. But in the sense of am I having fun yet? No, I wasn't having fun and I didn't love going to New Jersey. To be perfectly honest, you want to be able if you're already playing online. You want to play from the comfort of your home. You don't want to be sitting in a Starbucks with strangers looking over your shoulder and asking, hey,

what are you doing, which is exactly what happened to me. Okay, So what is the difference between the people who play online and what did you learn about people and luck in those initial sessions? Very little? I mean, this is just me learning the ropes. This, This is why this journey ended up taking three years instead of one. Um. So this at this point I'm not I'm not learning much. I'm just still trying to figure out whether it's straight

piazza flush or flush pizza straight. You have to remember that I'm a total notice. I have to I don't even know the rules of the game. So look, starting online is me trying to figure out what I'm doing. And we're not even at the scale versus chance yet. Right now, we're still at the very rudimentary stage of how do you play? Okay, So, in your online career in New Jersey, before you get to Vegas, how much did it cost you to learn how to play? Oh?

I ended up winning two thousand dollars, a little over two thousand dollars, okay, But before you were up in the black? How far deep in the red were you? If at all fifty dollars was minnitial deposit. I never re deposited. That's pretty good. So how long do you play online before you decide to hit the big world in Vegas? A few months? And how frequently? Um? Three or four days a week? And so how do you or does Eric decide you're ready to go to Vegas? Um?

Part of it was bankroll. So when I saved up enough money because Eric wanted me to take it seriously as a profession, and so he said that I had to earn my way up, and so we waited until I made enough money where I could finance my trip to Vegas all through what I already what I want from poker? Is that the same same two thousand dollars? Okay, so good a thing I want. I withdrew it all and we we went to Vegas. I mean, Eric was in Vegas most of the time, most of that time anyway. Okay,

So you go to Vegas. Where do you stay? Um? I stayed at different places I made. I spent multiple months in Vegas, so I stayed in airbnbs, I stayed at the Aria. So it just depended, okay. And the longer you stayed does the hotel cut you a rate? Really? Really? Okay? So you go to Vegas. Go to Vegas, and what's the first step, Um, start playing baby tournaments, the dailies that cost you know, thirty five dollars and the nightlies. So I'm not allowed to play any of the more

expensive tournaments. I have to start from the bottom. And until I start winning those, says Eric, I cannot make my way up to any further stakes. Well, well, you're a high achiever. How did it feel to be in the little league? Oh, I don't care. I'm I'm not I think there's not a there's it's a very it's a it's a very different thing to be a high achiever and to be embarrassed to be in the little leagues. I'm never embarrassed to be in the little leagues. I

think that's how you learn. I mean, I've spent my whole life saying I don't know how to do this. Please tell me, and please teach me. I don't understand. That's what I do. I write about people who are much smarter than I am and who know much more than I do, and I interview them and I write articles about them and about their work. So I love not knowing. Um, for me, it's fine. I got to

start at the bottom. You have to learn everything. You talk about these baby tournaments, and that's where you start to learn. You wonder what effect being a woman is in the game. Certain people try to intimidate. Could you amplify that a little bit? Sure? Of course, are we still talking about selling my book because at this point I've told my book. Okay, so literally literally, where in

this process did you sell your book? After? After I had been in Vegas for a little bit, then I went back to New York sold the book and then came back to Vegas. Okay, how much to make it worth? I'm not going to get how in terms of the number that the company gives you. Are you saying, well, I need enough to live for X per year and that's that's the criterion. Nope, that's not how it works. I mean my books sold that auctions. My third book, my first two were best sellers. It was a It

was a pretty straightforward process. I have a good agent. Okay, so that now that you're deep into the process, you're not worrying about cash. You have enough to live on. No, I mean you always have to worry about cash, especially because I left the New Yorker, so my income went to zero completely, and you have to even at the New Yorker, there's all writers are freelancers. So no that if it's no health insurance, this is all stuff I have to pay for. And I have suddenly stopped writing.

I've realized that I need to be playing poker full time, and so all of my income streams went to zero. When you get a book advance, it's not what you think it is because you have no idea how long the book is going to take, So you need to make sure that it will last you. You don't get it all, you just get a quarter of it goes to your agents. So so there's that you pay your own taxes. So there's that I leave in New York City, so the tax right is very very high. So there's that,

and you need to I have a mortgage. You need to kind of know that you're paying for planning for all of these things. So no, I have zero dollars to spend on poker. Okay, so you you played online, you went to Vegas, you sold the book. The next step is starting starting to uh grind my way up until I can start winning these little baby tournaments so that I can make money, so that I can actually see if I can move up to the next level

in the poker tournament. Because my advance is going towards paying my mortgage and my health insurance and all these other things, it's not going towards paying my poker tournaments. I did put a little bit aside because I knew that for the book, I wanted to play the main event that you and I started off talking about, So I knew that ten thousand dollars was going to be budgeted for that no matter what, UM, and so that was put aside. Otherwise I needed to earn my way

up or not as the case. Maybe Okay, going back to those initial experiences in the baby tournaments, what did you learn? I learned this is where I really started learning a lot um. At the beginning, I wasn't doing well for a number of reasons. I mean, first, I was intimidated. Playing live is not like playing online. UM. I didn't know how anything worked. I didn't know the mechanics. I felt like a literal fish out of water. I say literal because in poker or the term for bad

players who don't know what they're doing is fish. And I was definitely a fish, um. And so I and I felt it. I knew that I didn't know anything. And it would have been one thing if it had been just this really warm and friendly and welcoming environment and people said, oh, it's okay, like you're you're okay, we'll help you out, um. And that's what it was. At the highest levels, they are excitels of the world. They opened their arms wide and they were all incredibly

generous and helpful. All of the big high stakes players gave me their phone numbers, said they'd help me, and we're really excited about my whole journey. When you enter a random casino off scrip and are playing in a thirty five dollar tournament, those aren't the same players. These are people who are here to have fun. They're drinking.

They are mostly men. The poker world is male um, and they don't really care for a female at the table, And if you're already there, they're not gonna mind their manners because they're here to have fun and they shouldn't have to act differently because a woman is at the table. So I initially I wasn't playing well because it was really intimidating, and I would let them bully me, and

I didn't want conflict. I wanted people to like me, so i'd fold, and even when I had good cards, I wouldn't necessarily bet as much as I should because I didn't want them to think, Oh, that's the bitch who was always so aggressive. You know. I wanted them to think I was a nice person. That's not the way to play poker. That was not that's not the game theoretical answer, And I was I was just letting

them walk all over me. And then it took a while for me to realize what was happening, And it took a while for me to realize that this was actually an advantage. That they were all underestimating me and what I was capable of, and correctly, at the beginning, they weren't underestimating me because I did exactly what they wanted me to. You know, they'd bully me and I'd fold. They do this, and I'd go away. You know, That's

that's what they wanted, and they got it. But once I realized that I was able to take that dynamic and put it up and turn it around and really figure out, Okay, fine, if you think I'm just a girl. There was a guy who kept calling me little girl over and over and he really got to me. Um. Good for him, you know, he he got me to make bad decisions. That's what you're supposed to do. Um,

but he he really got to me. And but then I realized, if, okay, if you think of me as a little girl, then I can get away with things that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to get away with. If you think I'm incapable of bluffing, I'm going to bluff more. I'm going to run big bluffs because you're going to fold. Because if you think that I couldn't possibly be doing that, then you think I must have

a strong hand. If you're someone who would rather die than fold to a girl or be bluff by a girl, well I'm not going to bluff you because that would just be throwing money on fire, because you're going to call me no matter what. But when I have good hands, or even marginally good hands, I'm gonna bet a lot because you're gonna call me, and you're gonna call me

with hands that are worse than mine. If you're someone who doesn't want to take my money because you want to be a gentleman, there are guys who are very condescending and patronizing and telling me all the things I was doing wrong, um, and wanted to help me out by calling me honey and showing me their cards. You know you made a good fold, honey, here you go, here's my hand, um, And I'd say, okay, fine, this

is great, thank you for showing me your cards. Information is very important, so I love seeing what what cards you hold. But also I now know that when you bet a lot, I should fold, even if I have a pretty good hand because you don't want to take my money because you're a gentleman, or you'd like to see yourself as a gentleman. Once I could figure out how people saw me and how they wanted to see themselves, you know, do they want to see themselves as a

big macho ga or asked the gentleman? Or is this? Or is that? Once I could figure out those more human elements, that I started being able to really take advantage of them. And that's when I started winning and making real money. And when you made this money, did the men get angry? Yeah, of course, that's a simple answer.

Not all of them, Um, I mean Eric was ecstatic when I won my first tournament, as was my husband, as where all of the players who Eric had introduced me to, I mean everyone who Everyone was always very very supportive and excited. The guys I was playing against, no, they weren't. In the first tournament I won, Um, it was a baby tournament. I don't remember how much. The entry fee was around fifty dollars at Planet Hollywood. And when we got to the final table, um, I was

the chip leader. I had most of the chips in play, and they all started pressuring me to chop, which means stopped playing and just divide up the money. Um, and I didn't really know what that was. Eric and I had never talked about it because I'd never been in that situation. And I was going to agree because okay, you know, I want to be nice, I want to be amenable. Then one of them just turned to me and said, yeah, you know you don't you know you're

gonna just lose all those trips. You're in a position of power now, but you're just gonna lose them. And I was like, okay, well screw you. No, I'm not gonna chop. So they were not happy. They and then they just kept and then another one of them busted, and another one and they just kept pressuring me to chop. But at that point nothing was going to compel me to chop. So I ended up winning and I was and they were not happy because they just wanted me to give up my money and give it to them.

But you know, we talked about the arc from being intimidated to winning. Uh, you know, it takes a psychological makeup to be at the top and endure others people's hate or anger or that you how did you learn how to cope with that. How did you gain a thick skin? Well, I mean part of it was my training.

So my graduate advisor, who I worked with for many years and who then became a close mentor and friend of mine, was Walter Michelle and two people who aren't familiar with the name, they're probably still familiar with the

work because it's become part of the popular culture. The Marshmallow test the famous psychological experiment that had little kids set at a table with a marshmallow or another treat whatever they liked the most in front of them, and there was a bell next to the treat, and they were told, you can you can ring the bell at

any point and you're allowed to eat your treat. But if you don't ring the bell, if you just wait for us to come back to the room, we'll give you many more treats and you'll be able to eat as many. You'll be able to eat more of them. And what they wanted to learn was how long would this child weight? A three year old or four year old and there's this delicious things setting right in front of you, it's really hard to wait, and one minute feels like an hour. I mean to a kid that young,

it's actually really hard to delay gratification. And what Walter found was that the kids who were able to wait the longest had much better life outcomes. So they followed these kids. They're still following them. Walter unfortunately died a

few years ago, but the kids are still being followed. Um. And so now it's you know, over forty years later, um, and they were the kids who waited longer, did better in school, better SAT scores, went to better colleges, have better health outcomes, are just much more successful in life. And so this was kind of the foundational study of self control and of how important the ability to regulate your emotions and regularly cool hot stimuli. So the marshmallow

in this case is the hot stimulus. You want it, it's right in front of you, yourity to wait, your ability to cool it off. There were kids. I love the interviews with the kids. So home said, you know, oh, well, I put a frame around it in my head because you can't eat a picture. Others that said, you know, oh I pictured it. I pretended that it was a cloud, and you can't eat a cloud. Others just turned the chair around so they weren't looking at it. Now, these

are kids coming up with these strategies spontaneously. But Walter found you could teach them. You could actually teach these strategies, and kids who learned those strategies were just as successful

as the ones who had them intuitively. And so I've been doing this work for a long time, and so I think I had a lot of the arsenal and the vocabulary for realizing what was going on and having some techniques in play so that I could remove myself from the situation that said, I mean, I wasn't successful

from the beginning. I had to work hard, and I ended up actually working with a mental game coach, someone who could help me, someone who could see me objectively, because even if you're me, I mean, I was very I think I was a little overcompetent at the beginning of my ability to regulate my emotions because I thought, oh, you know, I have a psychology PhD. This is what

I studied. I'm a natural. Well, when you're at a poker table in a new environment and there's lots of pressure and the stakes are rising, you're gonna you're gonna mess up. And I realized that I did need help, and so I a lot of the things that I learned, I only learned because I was I had someone on the outside who I could talk to and who would be able to in a sense, mirror me back to me. But to to say, oh, so, it seems like, you know, you get really upset when these guys are trying to

bully you. It seems like when you're in those situations, you default to this more passive thing. And I'd say, oh, I guess you're right, because he was right. He just I would just explain what happened and tell him the day, but he could synthathize it in a way that it's very difficult to do when it's you who's going through it. Which is which is all to say that, sure, I had a lot of the skills and a lot of the knowledge, and I think that helped me, and that

helped me ramp up more quickly. But I still need it outside help. I still needed someone who could help talk me through it. Um. And I think that that's something very important to realize. Whether you paid or not, what is someone like that normally charge for their help? Um. It depends on the person. Uh, there's there's a huge scale and mental game coaches. I mean it starts at a few hundred dollars an hour, and I know some I never worked with them who charged over a thousand

dollars an hour. Okay, Just so there's a point in your book that a lot of people are interested in that does not directly relate to poker. You have a line there we say you don't believe in the ten rule? Could you go a little deeper there? Sure m. I spent a lot out of time arguing back and forth with Andre's Eriksson, who is the father of of the research into into deliberate practice, who recently passed away. He did, yes, he died a few weeks ago. Unfortunately. I liked him

a lot. He was a great guy. We disagreed on everything, and we never got into a fight because he didn't. He would just listen to you and he just never raised his voice, and he just would not and say, yeah, no, I don't agree, and he would and he would go on, and it was it's so rare, you know. And I was attacking his work because I wanted to challenge him on a lot of the things that he was saying, and he just he was okay with that, and that's I really admired that. I think that's such a rare

characteristic for a researcher. So what is what is your actual belief relative? So I think that I think that practice is absolutely important. No one is saying that it's not. You need to work hard, and you need to need to practice, and you need to practice deliberately. I think Honders was brilliant in so many ways in figuring out that these components matter. However, he insisted that that's all that matters, And what I say is that's absolutely not true.

Genetics matter, Talent matters. Who you are when you start matters. The same amount of hours done in the exact same way as not going to translate for person A to person BE, and PERSONNE might need a hundred hours to get amazing. Person B might never get to that level even with a hundred thousand hours. So there are lots

of individual differences. There's a lot of variability, and yeah, you have to work hard, but that's not enough, and you have to also figure out where your skills are and you have to figure out what you're able to do. Had I decided that I wanted to write a book about playing golf, there'd be no book. My hand eye coordination is zero. I cannot hit a golf ball, for the love of my life, and I can't, especially for a baseball book. If a ball is flying at my face,

I mean, I duck, I can't. I can't do that. I'm not someone who's good at any of that. And believe me, even if I practice for ten thousand hours, even something like golf, which is a very which is something that's very amenable to learning, never going to be able to hit balls with tiger woods or or go on any sort of a decent level. I know that, and I and I'm willing to bet a lot of money on it. And that's the difference between me and uders.

Unders would say that's absolutely not true. You can be tiger Woods, and I'd say, no, only tiger woods can be tiger Woods. And he said, no, Well, you didn't practice well or you didn't practice deliberately enough. Okay, Uh. There's a lot in the psychology in the book. One thing we didn't cover is the game you're playing is Texas Hold Him. You make a big point in the book where you're analogizing that to life, and you believe it's the best analogy in in games. It's not me,

it's von Neuman. So let's just let's just get that straight because I didn't make it up. I just stole his uh with with full attribution, but it's his idea. So which we're looking for is what is the balance of known information to unknown information? What is the balance between the things that we have in common and the things that we have in private. Because poker is a game of incomplete information, like life. So there are things

that you know, there are things that I know. There are things we both know, and we need to make the best decision possible knowing that we don't know everything right, we can only guess at some of this hidden information. Other games like chess are really bad analogies for life. Von Neuman dismissed it completely because chess is a perfect information game. There's always a right move. You can solve it. And he said, if you give me enough computing power,

I'll tell you exactly what you're supposed to do. And of course chess has been solved, and so he said, that's not life. Life is not a chess game. You can't see all the pieces, you can't see the board. You know, you might think you're looking at a queen and then while the disguise comes off and it's actually a bishop or or whatnot. So life is full of deception. Life is full of things you don't know and things that are concealed, and so you need an imperfect information

game to be like life. But within poker, there are lots of different variants. And the reason that no limit hold them is the one that I chose, and the one that seems to be the best is the exact balance of knowns to unknowns seems just about right. There are other variants of poker where there's too much unknown,

and so it becomes too much of a gamble. So if there are five cards that every single person has that you can't see, all of a sudden, they're just too many X factors and it becomes too much about a guessing game and too little about skill. If there's only one card. There's some variants where there's only one whole card. Then it becomes too mathematical, too much like chess. There's too little that's unknown, and and hold him in Texas,

hold him. He thought that this was actually the variant with the best balance, and the reason that you choose no limit as opposed to limit. So the differences in limit your bets are limited. There's always a cap to what you can you can bet, and no limit there isn't he said, Well, life is no limit. You can always go all in, you can always bet everything. Nothing's keeping you from it. So if you want an analogy for life, it better be no limit. Okay. A couple

of things you brought up. You mentioned a couple of times math and the people with mathematical skills. To what degree do they have an advantage and where are they in the poker hierarchy and sphere. Well, it depends. Um, I think that you need both. I think that you need both math and psychology. And I think that the best players have both. And the best players know which one is their skill and that's where they've focus, that's where their edges. But they also learned to master the

other thing to the best of their ability. So for someone like Eric Seidel, he's a psych guy and he's not a math guy, and yet he has the most advanced mathematical software that he uses to try to figure out what the math guys are thinking. Someone like Stephen Chidwick, who is currently considered one of the best tournament players in the world. He's much younger. Um, he's a math guy, He's the one who knows exactly how to set up

all of these simulations. Or someone who I worked with, Um, who's just a great guy and a great player at someone like I Caxton. They know the math, that's their strong suit, that's where they've run all the simulations. Their numbers leave me and Eric far behind, but their psychology might not be quite as strong because they are much more in their heads about the math and might not be picking up on some of the physical cues, might

not be picking up on some of the psychological dynamics. However, at the top, I mean, I actually think that Stevie and I probably are picking up on all the psychology because there I've just named two of the best players in the world, But almost everyone else is not them.

And there are people who rely way too much on the math and they miss a lot, and I can actually sometimes they're the easiest to play against at the table because you know what they're thinking, you know what they're going to do, and you know that they're missing a lot of information because they've already figured out mathematically exactly what they need to do here, and there are

people who don't care about the math at all. They're also easy to play against because you can exploit them because they're going to make bad mistakes because they don't care about the math. They don't care about the odds. They're just playing the man. And you need to understand the math. And you need to understand that part as well. You mentioned at the beginning you hadn't taken a math course since high school. To what degree have you? Uh, you know, spit up and become accustomed to and learn

the math. I mean I count on my fingers and Eric still do. And Eric told me at the very beginning that there's no hard math the math. He said, it's so easy that a sixth grader can do it. If you can add, subtract, multiplind, divide. So I have not picked up any advanced math skills, but I have become better at because I've had more practice. Is mental math um and I I'm someone who was always fine at math. I mean I took advanced calculus. I just took it in high school and I haven't taken it

since I always could understand the math. I just didn't like it. It wasn't interesting to me. So I have those muscles somewhere back there, UM, and I was able to wake some of them up, so I can calculate POD odds pretty quickly. At the beginning, it took me a while and I'd have to be sitting there counting. Now I still use my fingers, but I do it very very quickly. Okay. Another element you talked about in

the book is aggressiveness. So, uh, is that something that people just tend to play aggressively and they don't modulate their behavior And are the aggressive players a certain type that you can then adjust to? Well, it depends once again, it depends on the player. So at the beginning, I feel like players start off in one of two modes. Some are way too aggressive now I'm talking about amateurs who are just starting out, and some are like me, way too passive. UM. So I was too scary, UM

and not nearly aggressive enough. And there are a lot of players, UM, and I think actually most players are on the other end. They play too many hands, they're

too aggressive, they like bluffing and they enjoy that. And as you learn more about the game, UM, there are players who keep being super aggressive always and back in the day um as Area told me it was before my time, but he said that that used to work because all the thinking players would think, go, well, if you're being that aggressive, you know you must have a really good hand. Um And so there was once upon a time when the whole general level of the game

was lower. Super aggression got people very very far are Once people started catching on, they, as you said, adjusted, they started realizing, wait, this guy is just running everyone over because no one's standing up to them. Now, if you start standing up to them, all of a sudden, the aggression is not paying off anymore. Because you are people are pushing back, and you have junk you have you don't have a strong hand at all. You're bluffing way too much, and all of a sudden you start

losing money. And as Eric said, the guys who failed to adjust, who stayed super aggressive, wint bust. They went broke, they lost all of their money. And so the best players are players who This is actually a similar answer to the one I gave about math and psychology. The best players are players who figure out what their natural level of aggression is and who figure out what works for them, what feels comfortable to them, and then who are able to do that and to adjust to other players.

So someone like Eric is not someone who's an aggressive person in real life and not someone who's like a maniac at the table. The at certain tables, he's capable of very maniacal plays because he's very good at adjusting. He's good at reading what people are doing and what people think of him, and so you need to learn

to use people's perceptions of you against them. So if people are sitting there thinking underestimating Eric, thinking that oh, he's someone who's you know, he's never going to go maniac on me, well then it's time for him to go maniac on them. Um Or there are other tables when you're at a table with maniacs, and in those tables, you become very quiet and you wait for a very strong hand, and that's when you fight back. You don't fight maniacs with maniac tendencies. That's a mistake that people

often make. Okay, how about tells. Tells are something that is not nearly as important as people think, and very different from what people think. So originally, you know, everyone always thinks poker face, right, you you have to stare at people's faces and the eyes are the window to the soul. My last book was about con artists, and let me tell you, if someone's a good liar, you're

not gonna find out. Um. I spent multiple years with people who deceived on a daily basis, very very intelligent people, and when I met them, I knew who they were, and I was still taken by them because that's how good they are. And the psychology tells us that people are really really bad at spotting liars. We spot liars on average, no better than chance. Where we suck at

learning to tell whether someone's being deceitful or not. And the face is actually the worst place to look because the face leads you astray because the face has fake cues, even if people don't mean to have them there, Their face tells you something because subconsciously we look at faces, and there are certain traits that communicate certain things like trustworthiness. Certain cuts of the jaw and certain eyebrows say trustworthy,

others say aggression. It's not something we're consciously aware of. It just something that we experience and react to within just micro seconds, within fractions of a second of staying a face. And so when people are trying to stare someone down saying, oh, is your left eyebrow twitching? Is your nostril doing this? That's wrong. It's probably not going to tell you anything. It's probably gonna screw you up,

and you're gonna make mistakes. That said, the human body does convey a lot of information, but most of it's not coming from the face. And it turns out, um, I met this really cool researcher um who actually studies secrets and was looking at tells in poker, because poker is natural secret keeping, right, You're you're trying to keep other people from guessing how strong your hand is. And so he looked at videos of people playing the main

event of the World Series of Poker. He had people analyze them and ask how strong someone's cards were, how strong was their hand, And he had them look at unaltered videos. He had them look at just the face, and then he had them look at just the arms and hands. And what he found was when people just looked at the video, the unaltered one, they were no better than chance as predicted. When they just looked at the face, they were worse than chance. So the face

screwed them up. They actually thought that they knew much more than they did, and they made they made bad mistakes when they looked at the hands, though they actually improved and they were predicting at much better accuracy. And so he found that the hands are giving off a lot more information than any other part of the body. And he's done a lot more work on that since then.

And it turns out that it's not just in poker, that when we look at hands and a lot of different contexts, we can predict a lot about the behavior of the person. So do you employ that information when you play? Do you look at the hands and what might you see that might affect your play. It's all about how people handle their cards and their chips, how they under their bets, how they know how smooth their motion is. And this is really important. You have to

observe someone over time. One time doesn't mean anything. You have to see how their actions and how the way that they move changes from normal. Right, So how do they how do they normally bet? Is this same or is it or is it smoother? Or is it you know or is it less smooth? So a lot of it is about deviations from baseline and in order to be able to see if someone is deviating from baseline. You need to establish a baseline. How do you do that.

You do that by looking at people over and over and over and observing hands even when you're not playing with them, even when you're just when you don't have any cards and you're just looking at them when they're

playing against someone else. Okay, Now, one of the big stories in the book is before you make it to the big game, you're playing I believe it planning Hollywood, are one of these so called baby games, and you have an incredible hand, but you're beaten by a better hand, and you go to tell Eric the story and I'm beaten by a worse hand. That's hence the bad beat. So when my when the money gets in, I have the best hand, and I should be winning there most

of the time. I should be winning there over the time, and actually even more. I think at that point I was in almost favorite, and this person hits their miracle card and wins, and I'm knocked out of the tournament. That's what's called a bad beat. When you get your money in as a favorite, statistically speaking, and then the other part of the variance happens. Because there's no such thing as I've gotten my money in as favorite and I've lost. So two percent happens, and it happens a

lot more frequently than you think it will happen. So so this is one of these things where you're supposed to Vaughan and say I made the right decision, and then variancet and go my way. That's not what I said. I ran to Eric and I started telling him as they started crying to him, not literally crying, but complaining, saying, oh my god, I can't believe this happened. And he shut me up. He said, I don't want to hear it, and I just I couldn't believe that he didn't want

to hear what I had to say. I mean, he's my coach. He's supposed to listen to me. And he asked me, he said, do you have a question about how you played the hand? And my answer was well no, I mean, you know I had top set, which is about as strong as it guts. And he said, well that's it. Hand over, and he said, let's make a deal. I never want to know how a hand ends. All I care about is your decision process. All I care

about is what you were thinking. Are there questions, are there, nodes are They're parts of the decision that you weren't sure of. If so, let's talk about it. But the ending, the outcome, just forget it because that's not what you control. So this goes back to my original question, skill versus chance. Skill is the process, it's the decision. It's how you

made the decision. It's whether you were thinking clearly, whether you put your money in well as a favorite, whether you were using the information that you had to the best of your abilities. Outcome, that's luck. That has nothing to do with you. Now the money is already in your decision is done. Now the cards have to cooperate, and you don't control the cards. That's the chance. And so we don't care about the chance. We don't. We

don't focus on that. What we care about is the stuff that we actually can change, which is how we play, how we think about something. And so that was his rule. No bad beat stories. He said, that's someone else, that's never you. You are not allowed to tell a bad beat story. Okay, At some point he says, you have enough experience to play at the ARIA. I have a couple of questions here. When you're at the ARIA, not playing. Does everybody allow you to see your their car or

just Eric? What is the process there, and what is the process where you ultimately get in the game. And what if somebody who's at one of these baby games decides they want to play the aria, what happens? Then anyone can play any tournament. Anyone can play if you have enough money, just that buy in and there you are in terms of whether I can see people's cards. So I had quite a unique arrangement. Eric played in

a lot of high roller events at the area. So these are tournaments that are dollars dollars to enter, so not not anywhere near the level that I'm playing. And there are a limited number of people who play those games, and how many people are there and depends on the day. Um, but we're talking tense. That's thirty would be a good day. Usually it's fewer. And the way that it worked normally is tournaments aren't cash games. No one is allowed to sit behind players and look at their cards. It's not

allowed period. This was in a cash game, someone can sweat behind you, that's fine, No one cares. In a tournament this this is actually against the rules. However, this is the area can run its own tournaments, and I was learning, and Eric said that he wanted me to be able to see his cards, and the tournament director there said, if every single person is okay with that, then I'm okay with it. And so I asked every single person and all of them said sure, not a

problem at all. And so I was allowed to sit and sweat with Eric to see his cards while he was playing UM. And then other players as I got to know them, and as they became friendly with me and started helping me with different elements of my game, other players would say, hey, why don't you sweat with me today? So I UM. All in all, I played with, played with, sweaded with three different players during my time there.

I sweateated with Eric most frequently. UM. I also did a sweat a few times with Jason Coon and with I Caxton. Those are two amazing players, both of whom were really helpful to me. But everyone else I've never seen their cards. Okay, just talking irrelevant of you. All the high state game poker players know are at the area, well for that those tournaments, yes, so they're there are

cash games coming up playing happening all the time. This isn't a cash game, So the high state cash games are happening at Bobby's room at the Bellagio, at a different casino. That's a different player pool, because tournament players are not cash players, and vice versa. Just for the uninitiated, explain the difference. In a cash game, every single chip

is worth a certain amount of money. So you buy in for a hundred dollars and you get a hundred dollars worth of chips, and that's exactly how much you have. And if you lose them, you can read, you can add on whatever you want um and you can walk away at any point. Maybe you want a huge hand, and all of a sudden, your hundred trips became five hundred, and you say, you know what I want to go now. That's called a hit and run. Then you take your tips and you leave. In a tournament, trips have zero

cash value. You buy in for certain amounts, a hundred dollars and you get ten thousand ships, and so does every single person. And the chips are just a way of keeping score. So they're just like points, and your goal is to gather all of them, and your chips are only worth something relative to the chips of the other players, and you can never you can't get up and walk away when you suddenly find yourself with a hundred thousand ships. Nope, gotta gotta keep playing because they're

worth zero um. And if you if it's a freeze out tournament, which means you can't re enter. If you lose them, you're done. You're out of the tournament. And of players give or take anywhere from depending on the exact turn, meant are going to go home with zero dollars because they will bust before the money and everyone else is going to make money. And in a cash game that just doesn't happen. That's not the same. Okay, a couple of things. So let's say I'm at the

area in the tournament begins. Is there a time limit, Yeah, at the high rollers, Yes, you have thirty seconds to make every decision. No, I mean for the whole tournament itself. Oh no, it ends when it ends. Okay. And let's say I'm playing in a cash game and I walk away. The other players are cool with that, Yeah, they keep playing. I mean, if you're someone who always hit and runs, so you're someone who always comes and as soon as you win, you leave, they're probably not gonna want you

to play with them anymore. Um. But if it's an open game, they can't do anything about it. If it's a private game, they can. Then you're saying, these are different players who play cash games and play tournament games. It's a different it's a different strategy. It's a different game because in a cash game, you are are always

playing with the same number of blinds. So if you are playing at a low stakes game, say one dollar two dollars, it's not suddenly going to become a two dollar five dollar game or five dollar ten dollar game. Just doesn't happen. In a tournament, the blinds keep going up, and so it's a very different strategy because your chips, relatively speaking, suddenly start being worth less and less and less.

It's something that has a beginning. The beginning is like a cash game because you're deep stack, you have lots of big blinds, and then it becomes much less like a cash game because all of a sudden, the blinds are you know, was one, two, and all of a sudden, it's a thousand, two thousand, and if you still have your ten thousand and chips, all of a sudden instead of you know, blinds, you all of a sudden have

five and you're gonna bust. Um. And so the pressure is very different, The dynamics are different, the decision making process is different. A lot of players play both. Now I play cash as well, but most people specialize in one. So ultimately, uh, when you're at the area, do you what's the biggest buy in tournament that you ever played at the area. I've only ever played their daily tournaments, so two forty dollar? Okay? Low? Uh. So ultimately you go to Monaco and then you go to the Carabean

where you ultimately win. UM. Tell us the process there, I mean, it was just it's more of the same. I just I kept working and studying and studying with more and more people, UM, and just improving slowly, UM and slowly working my way up. UM. Once I would do well at a certain level, so I'd constantly challenge myself UM. And no one could have predicted that I'd win a tournament, a major tournament at that UM. And that's one of these things where you have to work hard,

but you also have to get lucky. And I most of those things had to come together and as a result of winning, uh, you get on the Poker Stars team. Tell us about that. So Poker Stars, which is one of the biggest poker companies in the world, has something that's called Team Pro. So it's a team of players which are their professional players that are sponsored by the brand. So whenever you play, you wear a little patches. Let's

say you know, Poker Stars Team Pro. So you're like, you become like a NASCAR or Formula one where you're suttenly put putting all these decals on you. Um, but it's really prescigious and it's something where they kind of they endorse you and you represent them, but you all of a sudden also have more of a budget to play. So I never received a salary from them. That's not how it worked because I didn't want any sort of

conflict of interest. But for their tournaments, I had a budget, so they'd say, you know, you can spend this amount on Buyen's for instance. So it enabled me to play without being quite as afraid of of going broke because I had I had this cushion and I wasn't paying for all of my own tournaments. At the Poker Stars. I'm not aligned with Poker Stars anymore. No, no, Um, I left the team last year. And what was the

decision process there? It was a it was a mutual decision. Um. I didn't want to be involved with any poker company when my book came out, I wanted it to you know, I wanted to just promote the book and not anyone else. I didn't want anyone once again to think there was a conflict of interest. And they were moving on. They've actually cut most of their live pros. Um. Their strategy is now much more online. Um. And I'm not an

online player. Okay. So let's say you get a hankering to play, doesn't matter who's playing in terms of names, where the location is. Maybe you go to Atlantic City, you play, or you say, you know, I don't like the players there. Um, I don't like Atlantic City, I hardly ever. I mean I so I for me, because I'm a tournament player. It's not a hankering. I go where the tour goes. So I look at the schedule. They're announced well in advance, and I plan out the

stops I want to play at. So I I plan out where I want to be so at any given point, I mean right now, there's zero going on. Let's just be clear. In the middle of a pandemic, there's no live poker. But let's reverse, you know, two years ago when when this was still a thing. At any given point in time, there are lots of major poker tours. The World Series of Poker just happens once a year, but there's a World Poker Tour which has major events

once a month. There's the European Poker Tour, which is the one that's run by by poker Stars, and that's happening in Europe. There's an Asia Pacific Poker Tour which is happening in Asia. Um, there are a bunch in the US. You've got the World Poker Tour, You've got the World Series Circuit events. So there are lots of

things happening at any given point in time. Time and so what I would do would be sit down and map out a schedule, map out what events that what stops I wanted to go to, because they're all series. So you go and it's a number of different events. So if you don't do well in one tournament, you just enter another one and you have many opportunities to do well. Um. And so that's how I would choose when to play, and then when I went home, I really wanted to relax. I mean, in which was the

year that I really spent really playing full time. That's when I was a Poker Stars Team pro. I was on the road for over eight months of the year. That's exhausting, and I was I was just I was spent. Uh So every time I was home, I just wanted to recharge. I had zero desire to play poker. Okay, now we live in an arrow. Used to be pre Internet, you had to go out to have experiences. Now all the actions at home. But one thing I always say is when you walk out the front door, you ever

know what will happen. Let me give you an analogy to ultimately form the question there. I have a friend who got divorced, and to use the vernacular, he'll hit on anything that moves. So have you learned that it's two? Is engagement the key? Because of luck, you never know how the play plays out. Is it about the number of ups, shall we say? Or is it about strategizing

the ups? It's about all of these things. So engagement definitely, because engagement gives you an edge, and engagement allows you to take in more information and information with power. Information is key, but yes, it's also about strategizing the ups and minimizing the downs. So poker isn't about winning every hand. It's about winning the most with your good hands and

losing the least with your bad hands. And you can you can take that not just in the immediate hand to hand, but also in the long term in terms of tournaments. In terms of the long term. A lot of players go broke because they go on a hot streak and they're winning, and they don't realize that there's such a thing as regression to the mean that this isn't sustainable, that they're just getting lucky. Sure, they're probably playing well, but they're also getting lucky, and so you

need to plan ahead. You need to figure out, Okay, how do I plan for the down swain which is going to happen. A lot of people don't do that, and instead they say, Wow, I'm great, I'm not going to play one thousand dollar tournaments anymore. I'm going to play ten thousand dollar tournaments. I'm gonna play twenty dollar tournaments. Hell, I'm gonna play fifty dollar tournaments. And there goes their money.

Because they can't actually afford to do that. Now you talk in the book that you are on one side of psychological training and there's another side which might close you out of professorships. What's going on there? Oh, I was just so. So that was just me talking about different schools of social psychology. So the person who was my mentor, who was my advisor, Walter Michelle Um is someone who is very adamantly opposed to the person reality

trait research. UM. So there's a school of personality psychology which says that you know, we have the Big five, the big five traits, and we have certain levels of extra version and neuroticism and open this to experience all of these things. And Walter said, bulletshit, that is not true. That's not how the world works. You can't decontextualized personality. Personality only matters in context if you're going to predict behavior.

And he actually did this back in the sixties. He wrote a book that looked at the correlation between these all of these different measures and actual behavior and found that the correlation was point one or point two, so predicted ten to of what happened, which is nothing. It's very low. And yet people were saying, this is the holy Grail, and he said, here's your problem. People don't have a there's no such thing as someone who is,

you know, conscientious. Maybe you're conscientious that well, your teachers think you're the neatest person ever, and you never make your bed, and your parents are frustrated because everything is such a mess, your clothes are on the floor, and you're the opposite of conscientious at home. Context. Maybe you're someone who is a risk speaker in certain situations, like you love to skydive, you like to really do all you know, go go go full on out there, but

you're incredibly risk averse when it comes too many. And you're someone who you know who keeps all your money in a piggy bank because you're scared of the banks. So once again context, and he said that what matters is behavioral signatures. If then signatures, if we're in this situation, then this person behaves that way. That all of the other personality work was really pointless when it came to actually predicting how someone would behave, and pretty pointless as descriptors.

There's an entire school of psychology who hates that and does not like Walter. I'm attached to him. I was his last student. When I apply to academic jobs, I come with Walter's baggage because I represent his viewpoint. And so if and I never was in academia, I don't like academia for these very reasons. Um, I think it's it's very I think it's very incestuous, very much who you know and whose school you're on, and all of

these things. But imagine that I went on the job market and I applied to a school for someone who's really big in the Big five of personality is on the hiring committee. I might have done amazing work in what I do, but I'm not going to get an interview because that person is very opposed to my point of view and doesn't want me in their psyche department.

Or I might not even have one of them, but I might have the department who thinks that all social psychology is total bullshit and that it's all about neuroscience. And if I get that person who's making the decision or listening to my job talk or reviewing my paper, I'm done. I don't have a fair shop. They're not actually going to look to see if i'm saying anything interesting or if my research is interesting, because fundamentally they disagree with what I'm doing. That's one of the things

I loved about poker. Um, none of that matters. Doesn't matter what you look like, where you went to school, who you studied with, whether you even graduated, what your last name is, what religion you are. Another matters. If you play well, you get to play, and if you can afford it, you can buy into any tournament. No one can ever block you from buying into a tournament. Now, you immigrated from Russia at a young age. To what degree did that and having foreign parents affect your life

and career trajectory? I mean, my life would have been completely different had that not happened. I mean it was the Soviet Union. I did not leave Russia. I left the Soviet Union. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. No one knew when that was coming down. Um, and so how did I stay? And I mean, I'm Jewish, It's I'm actually saying the reverse. I'm saying, how did it change someone who grew up or started in Russia had foreign parents as opposed someone who grew up in America.

I can't answer that question. Because I didn't grow up in America, I know how my life was changed. I mean, I know that had I stayed in Russia, I wouldn't have had I wouldn't be a writer, I wouldn't have had any of these opportunities. What age did you come to America and did you feel different from kids? How long did it take to assimilate? Um? It took a while. I mean I didn't speak English, so of course, had

I grown up here would have been different. Um. So I think I was much more aware of the limits of our abilities very early on, because I couldn't communicate. I couldn't say a single word in English. But I was lucky that I was little, so I was able to learn quickly. I don't actually remember learning English. It just happened naturally, the way I remember learning some other languages that I speak now, But my my four year old brain picked it up eventually. And what did your

parents do for a living in America? Computer programmers? What they did in Russia, that's what they were trained. And how many kids in the family? Four? Four that I grew up with, actually five, okay, well the four that you grew up with the other three. What are where are you in the hierarchy, baby? And what are their lives look like? Um? My oldest sister is an m d PhD. She's an anatologist and runs a lab at

Yale University. My other sister is a veterinarian and lives in Vermont, and my brother, Um, lives in Sweden with his wife and kids and works for Spotify. Really, okay, so you go to Harvard, what's that experience like? That's really you're at the age when Zuckerberg is there in the Biggle they were so so that was Zuckerberg was a year below me. Eduardo was my year, and not only my year. You lived in the same freshman dorm as I did. I've known I know all of those

guys from the beginning. I was one of the first few hunt producers of Facebook. And what was your opinion of them? Um? I always I didn't know Mark well. I liked a Guardo he was always a really nice guy. And the the Winkle the Winkle Watses were always nice, but I didn't know them really either. Okay, so going to Harvard was a good experience. I loved it. So my my husband also went to Harvard and he hated it, so he and I had very, very different experiences, but

I absolutely loved it. Is that where you met No, now we met later um through a friend who was my my co worker and his former roommate. So at what point do you decide you want to study psychology.

I decided I wanted to study psychology when I was in high school and took an Advanced Placement psychology class, and the summer reading assignment was Oliver sax Is, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, And I remember reading that book and falling in love and thinking, oh my god, the human brain is the most fascinating thing in the world. I want to be all over sex when I grow up. Not the doctor part, but the person who can write that way and who can

describe the human mind that way. So after you get your PhD. The concept of becoming a writer was instilled back in high school. Oh, the concept of becoming a writer was instilled when I was six years old, five or sex. Apparently I had announced it to my family way back then that I was going to be a writer. I wrote my first book in first grade. I've always wanted to write. I study in Harvard, I studied fiction. I studied fiction writing. I had actually I actually graduated

with a writing portfolio. Okay, So if we look at the country at large, specifically Trump, the election, etcetera, what does your experience with game theory and psychology tell us about what is happening in America today. I'm very pessimistic. I mean and I'm very scared. I am not a Trump supporter at all. I've done everything I can. I've

written for every publication about I could think of. You know, I started off with a piece in The New Yorker right after the election, call it saying Donald Trump con artist question mark. Well that has since changed to exclamation point written about Trump and his lives for Politico. Um. You know, I just wrote a piece about Trump and as a poker player, as a maniac poker player for Politico just a few weeks back. Um. I've become more and more pessimistic, and I think that we run a

real risk of a second term, which scares me. Um. I think people cannot get complacent. Um. And this is just what a what a way to make the conversation going a really depressing direction. Trump. It's funny because people want to talk about every stuff and other stuff, but it's all really the people want to talk about. In terms of game theory, what might you advise the Democrats to beat Trump in the election? I mean, Trump is a maniac, and the way you beat mania accident to

be a maniac back it's too fine. Pick your spots and play more conservatively, and but really concentrate on those few hands that you are playing. Um. I think that people make a mistake when they go down to Trump's level, when they stooped to that level, when they actually try to be a maniac back and return. You can't beat him at that game. I think you need to be much smarter than that, and I think you need to be much more patient and try to try to beat

him by by playing stronger hands and playing them well. Okay, so in terms of engagement, everything is up in the year because of COVID. Would you tell Biden to debate him or not to debate Trump? Stay in the basement because you want to be you want to be as conservative as possible against a maniac. Don't give him any don't give him any occasions to uh to lash out. No, do not debate him. What's that going to do? Okay? And then let's go back to the nomination process. Obviously,

Biden is a centrist. Bernie and Warren were further to the left, believing the American needed systemic change. Certainly since that time, Black lives matters happens, there are protests, we have COVID nineteen, we have all these economic issues. Would you advise l was a good decision to play conservatively with Biden. Would a decision further oute there like Bernie have been a better decision. Obviously it's never gonna happen, But what's your opinion. My opinion was that Warren was

a much better nominee and that it should have been so. So. No, I don't think Biden was the best decision. Um, but I don't think that Sanders was the right decision either. I think I was in the Elizabeth Warren. But let's make it a little bit less about personality more about, you know, the vision. Both until she waffled a little bit, both Warren and c Anders were saying, Okay, you know, we have to break up the tech companies, we have

to be aware of corporations. You know, we need health care for all, which is certainly different from what Trump and the Republicans are selling. When you're someone in that position, can you win with being outside or do you play it safe? I think you can win. I think I think that playing it safe is not always as safe a strategy as people think. That was a fundamental mistake that I made early on in poker. I thought that I couldn't go wrong by playing it safe, and it

ends up that I could. That I was bleeding chips, I was bleeding supporters because I was just being very, very timid. So I think sometimes you need to go out there and realize that extreme more a little bit more extreme doesn't necessarily mean unsafe, that actually the safe choice might be the less safe one, because that's someone

who's incapable of winning. I don't think Biden's incapable of winning, by the way, I'm just saying that, Um, I think it it's false to think that the quote unquote safe choice is actually safe. Another thing Eric says is essentially played a win. You don't want to just be in

the money. Tell us a difference there, so, as I already um intimated, when you're playing tournament poker, it's very different from cash games because most people are going to walk away with zero, and so there's a point in a tournament called the bubble, and the bubble is the point where the next person out gets zero and then the person after that makes money. So let's say it's a hundred dollar tournament um and ten people are getting paid.

The person who is out in eleventh place gets zero dollars, and the person who's out in tenth place gets, say a hundred and twenty dollars. Okay, so they make twenty dollars because a hundred dollars is they're buying, and they make twenty dollars. But the way that tournament payouts work

is that they're concentrated at the top. So if you keep just min cashing, which means being out in tenth place right after the bubble, if you keep just squeaking your way into the money and you keep making twenty dollars, you're going to go broke, because what about all those tournaments that you didn't cash, What about the travel expenses,

what about all these different things you need. Actually, to a hundred dollar tournament, you need to be making a thousand dollars or you need to be making ten thousand dollars, not twenty. And the only way to do that is to make the final table where the real money is concentrated. Because maybe out in tenth places a hundred and twenty dollars and first place gets nine dollars. That that's a little that's a little extreme, but maybe, but it's it's

kind of like that. And so what Eric was saying, don't try to squeak into the money so that you can say you cashed, because you want to try to accumulate chirps, to put yourself in a position to win, to put yourself in a position to actually make the final table, to actually make a deep run, because that's how you actually make money in this game. And it's

a very diff strategy. A lot of people will just start playing very conservatively, unfolding every single hand because they just want to say they cast they want to make that men cash. But that's a very short sighted strategy. You need to be more aggressive. You need to actually be willing to risk more, because only by risking more earlier are you going to be able to put yourself in a position to win the most. Okay, let's talk about different things where the numbers are different. In Gulf,

they pay a long way down. Certainly the person who wins makes usually double what number two, But then from there people can make hundreds of thousands of dollars being in the top ten. Okay, and certainly there's costs to play golf now, a lot of those people play to win. I'm a fan of ski racing Bodie Miller, who's now retired. He would play to win, whereas it's a season long cup and people with lesser victories might win on a

cumulative basis. The question becomes, do you at this elite level, do you have to play to win in order to succeed or is there a role for the journey person in this game? Now you have to play to win um in order to really succeed UM. I think that the journey person needs to play cash games as well, UM if they want to. Tournament poker is very high variants, So tournament poker, UM, if you're not, if you don't have a few big scores every single year, you're gonna

lose money and you're going to go broke. A lot of tournament players they like playing tournaments, but they also supplement with cash games, which are much steadier, much lower invariants. So that's one way of doing it, so, so if you want to go hybrid that that's one way. Another way of doing it is to just sell a lot of your actions. So a lot of people who aren't making those huge scores but who want to keep playing, they'll sell nine of their tournaments, so they're just playing

for ten percent. They can only lose ten percent, but if they actually hit that big score, they're only gonna win time percent of it, and their investors are going to get ninety percent. So there are lots of ways of mitigating risks. So in that sense, sure, there's there's

definitely room for everyone. And if you're just there to have fun, I think there's also room for you because as long as you don't as long as you don't quit your day job, I think that it's something where you can learn a lot and where you can actually become a better decision maker. And I think it's better not to quit your day job. One of the reasons that I think I was able to improve quickly was

I knew I didn't have to write. I could always go back to being a writer full time, and I didn't have to play poker to make a living, and I think that liberated me to actually play better. So what did you learn about your initial question, your premise life of visa VI, luck and chance. I learned that in the short term you have to have luck on your side. So in poker, poker is a game of

skill and there's a chance element. But over the long term, the best players are going to win, and that I think is true in a in a macro sense as well. But in order to get to the long term, you need to get lucky in the short term. So any hand, any game, any tournament, a much worse player can win if they get lucky and if they actually look out. So I can play against Eric and win. That doesn't mean I've suddenly become better than Eric. That just means I got lucky. But if Rik and I play ten times,

he's gonna probably win more than I win. If we play a hundred of times, he's definitely going to win more than I win. If we play a thousand times, I'm not gonna have any money left. That's how much more skilled he is than I am. So over the long term, skill in the immediate term, look, but you need to plan ahead. You need to realize that good luck and bad luck one doesn't necessarily follow the other and you never know how long the long term is. So it's not like if I got on lucky today,

I have to get lucky tomorrow. Life doesn't work that way. Probability doesn't work that way. So all you can do is keep making good decisions and keep putting yourself in a position to win, and never risk so much that you can't recover. I think that's a very valuable life lesson because you don't know how long you're going to have to stick it out while the variance is not on your side, and you have to just be ready

and be there when luck turns your way again. Okay, so let's just assume if I snap my finger and COVID was over, which of course is not going to happen. Are you a writer? Are you a poker player? What do you anticipate doing after this lull both? I mean I had no plans of stopping to play poker, never had any plans to stop writing, and they go very well hand in hand. I can write anywhere in the world, I can play poker in most places in the world,

so why not do both? But I think I'm always first and foremost a writer that's always my my first identity. That's what I love. Um, that's where my heart is, and that's what makes me I am. But I love poker and I was still learning a lot and still really growing in the game when COVID hit um, and so I fully intend to keep playing, at least for the foreseeable future, while I'm still winning and while I'm still enjoying it. Why would I stop? And are you

pulling together a new book as we talk? Um? No, I'm not someone who's thinking about my next project before I'm done with my previous project, and it always takes me at least six months to figure out what I'm going to do next in terms of books, So I have no idea what's next. I'm working on some other things that aren't books, um, that I can't talk about

right now. But so I am. You will be seeing creative output for me from me in the coming months, but they're not It's not going to be in book form. But the next book is I'm not sure? But is it? The creative projects are writing yes, okay, into what do we did the success of the book? Uh? Meat or exceed your expectations? And what opportunities have come along as a result of the book. I mean, so far, it's

only been a month since it's been out. So Um, I've been very happy with the with the reception that people seem to be responding to it and enjoying it. I didn't know what to expect. It's very different from my prior books. It's much more personal. I mean, it's a memoir, it's it's a first person book. It's the first time I've written in my real voice, not just my journalistic voice, and I've actually shared what's in my head. Um, And so I think it's always makes you feel very

vulnerable putting yourself out there like that. So I didn't know if people would like it, and I've been very gratified that I've gotten a good response and that the poker community likes it. Um. That's also something that I didn't know, um, whether that was going to work out or not, because poker players can be a tough crowd, and so I I'm really glad that they think I've represented them well for the most part. Um, It's it's been hard. I mean I had to cancel my book

to our, I had to cancel all of my events. Um, it's not at all like the book release that I had planned. Um, but you you, the funny thing is that's what my book is about. Right. You can plan as much as you want, and then chance is going to be what it's going to be, and you have

to deal with it. Actually, the human narrative as opposed to the psychology, was the most interesting for me, and I almost wish there were two books, one without any of the psychological analysis and one with it, because just you know, a lot of times I would get really into it and you, you know, you would talk about all the theories, etcetera. But I said, you know, what is a person feeling? You know, what are they gonna do? What's happening? In any event, Maria, thanks so much for

doing this. Thanks for taking time out of your day tell your story. Certainly fascinating for all those of us who are interested both in poker in life. Thanks again, Thank you so much. Bob, It's been a pleasure. Until next time. This is Bob left Sex