A fascinating, inspiring journey and narrative
Real-life journalist, author and psychologist Maria Konnikova has just hopped a chopper from Nice to Monte Carlo for a high-stakes poker game, and in her fantasy, she is as glamorous as the setting. But the real-life version reasserts itself — jetlagged, dishevelled, insecure and terrified. Konnikova is here for the European Poker Tour, but just eight months before, she was basically poker illiterate.
This scene comes halfway through Konnikova’s quest to conquer the World Series of Poker, in Las Vegas, still months away. What would motivate her to take on such a pursuit? The Biggest Bluff is Konnikova’s attempt to answer that question and to describe her journey.
What starts as a whim becomes a provocative and moving spiritual journey.
As a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, she studied decision-making, and specifically the interplay of skill and luck in making important life choices under pressure. She was also inspired by the work of mathematician John von Neumann, the father of game theory. Real life, von Neumann believed, is all about bluffing, “little tactics of deception” that keep others from knowing one’s true intentions. Poker is about the interplay of chance and control, skill and luck, and in that sense it mirrors real life.
Real life is front and centre in Konnikova’s story, and indeed she was nudged in part by her family’s streak of bad luck in 2015. This run of misfortune seemed unfair, and improbable, and reinforced her interest in chance and control. She set a goal to compete in the World Series of Poker one year later.
She persuades Erik Seidel, a legend on the tour, to take her on as a project. She learns how to truly pay attention, under high pressure and surrounded by distractions, and to keep her emotions out of her judgments and card-playing choices.
In the end, readers share in her big win, though it’s not what we — or she — originally had in mind. The biggest bluff, she comes to understand, is the belief that skill can ever be enough when luck is stacked against us. Yet this hope keeps us going, in the casino and in life.