The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How a novice became a poker pro – in a year
The psychologist Maria Konnikova set herself a challenge – and ended up hooked, says Clement Knox
THE BIGGEST BLUFF by Maria Konnikova 368pp, Fourth Estate, £20, ebook £9.99
Afew years ago, a rumour started doing the rounds of the book industry. An author had missed a deadline. This is nothing new. Authors miss deadlines all the time, normally from some mixture of idleness, existential despair, and inertia. But this author was different. The reason for the delay was not failure, but success. She had gone off to research a book about poker, chance and life, and had ended up making so much money playing professional poker that the book’s publication date had been pushed. That author was
Maria Konnikova, and the delayed book has now, at last, been published as The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.
Konnikova’s journey began in 2015 when a shock wave of illness and unemployment passed through her family, unsettling her sense of control over her life and opening her eyes to the role that randomness played in her day-today existence. Konnikova is a Harvard and Columbia-trained psychologist, who has written two books of popular psychology. Her response to misfortune seems to have been moulded by a scientist’s interest in experimentation and a writer’s nose for a good story.
After reading mathematician John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, she was inspired to confront the variance in her own life by attempting to master a game that had fascinated Von Neumann: no-limit Texas hold ’em. Why? Because poker, she writes, “unlike quite any other game, mirrors life… Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two. Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives – chance and control.”
The hitch is that Konnikova has never played a hand of poker in her life. She can’t tell a flush from a full house. To fulfil her dream, she will need help. The man she recruits to act as her teacher, mentor and Virgil as she descends into the underworld of pro gambling is Erik Seidel. To say that Seidel is a good choice of coach would be a major understatement.
Seidel is an unassuming man in his late 50s when they first meet in New York in the summer of 2016. But Seidel’s dad clothes, late-stage baldness and modest manner are camouflage. He is one of the great living masters of poker, revered for his longevity in a game, which tends to favour the young. The Hendon Mob (a website that tracks professional poker) ranks him 4th on its All Time Money List, with lifetime earnings of $37.8million. His opponents nickname him the “Silent Assassin”, the “Volcano”, and the “Seiborg”.
Konnikova prefers to think of him as a dragonfly, a predator with a 95 per cent success rate. On another occasion, a jazz metaphor comes to mind. Seeing him in action at a tournament, she realises he is like a bassist in a quartet, “the one holding everything together”. Watching him play, Konnikova writes that she “can almost hear the music of the cards”.
Together, Konnikova and Seidel
she is a brilliant observer of the weird world she has immersed herself into. Her pithy descriptions of casinos in Las Vegas, Macau, and elsewhere (she refers to Vegas perfectly as “an adult playground on a lifelike scale”) captures the seedy charm of these airless, dream-filled tombs.
She is also an excellent chronicler of the gender dynamics around a poker table. Pro poker is 97 per cent male. Men tend to view women as easy marks. (Konnikova cites a study showing that men bluff women 6 per cent more than they do other men) Then there is the mixture of condescension, bullying and lechery she encounters from her fellow players. Konnikova tries to flip these prejudices to her advantage, with limited success.
Not that chauvinism hinders her startling ascent through the poker ranks. From the outset, Konnikova is disarmingly modest about her successes. She mentions offhand that she made $2,000 on online poker while still a rookie. She wins her first tournament within six months of starting the project. Within 12 months she is flying to Europe to participate in tournaments. She clearly becomes very good at poker, very fast.
The most enthralling parts of the book are when she takes the reader inside the cockpit and talks through some of the high-stakes
The pro poker scene is filled with pinkhaired men called Chino and Jungleman