The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
(Penguin, $28)
A person can acquire invaluable thinking skills by playing poker, said Liv Boeree in Nature. The game is “a delicious mix of science and art,” and Maria Konnikova, a New Yorker writer with a Ph.D. in psychology, partially understood that even before she decided to spend a year studying under a master and playing for high stakes. She became, very quickly, one of the top five female poker players in the world. But The Biggest Bluff is the best book ever written about poker, a game I played professionally for a decade, because it unlocks a way of thinking that can help anyone thrive.
Her story won’t tutor you in every in-game strategy, but “it will show you how to play the game of life more effectively.”
Konnikova took up the game after weathering personal misfortune, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times (U.K.). A death in the family and a mystifying autoimmune disease started her thinking about life’s bad hands. She got lucky, though, when poker legend Erik Seidel agreed to serve as her guru. On the page, “his sense of curiosity is as appealing as his sense of calm,” and he wisely advised Konnikova to start with small-stakes online games, stressing that learning to handle oneself is more important than winning—a principle backed up by a study that found the best hands in online