Review of reviews: Books

poker win only 12 percent of the time. Guided by Seidel, and aided by sessions with, among others, an expert in nonverbal communication, this “hellishly bright” novice learns to disguise her tells and conquer mental traps like default passivity and the sunk-cost fallacy while working her way up to casino games in Las Vegas, Monaco, and Macau. At her account’s best moments, “you get to feel like quite the insider.”

Men rule the world she had entered, said Michael Paterniti in The New York Times. Ninety-seven percent of professional players are male, and Konnikova endured plenty of harassment and condescension on her way to a 2018 championship in which she beat 290 competitors for an $84,600 prize. You can thus read The Biggest Bluff as a feminist underdog story. But the happiest surprise isn’t the underdog’s triumph at the table. It’s that she “bet the house on the power of her mind to synthesize big philosophical ideas and psychological insights”— and she won. She has found an answer to how we should regard our futures, how to “see through the ups and downs to the underlying grid of chance and self-determination that guides all of life.”