The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova

 I started playing poker in graduate school with a group of friends, and quickly fell in love with the game. We played pretty regularly (like every other week) for years, and I missed it terribly when I left. I'd come to think of myself as being a decent player, and when I was in Vegas for a friend's bachelorette weekend, I even spent a few hours at a cash game, and came out of it $100 richer. Then, last January, I signed up for free poker lessons from Poker Powher, this super awesome organization that teaches women to play poker (for free!!!), and reconnected to my love for the game. I also discovered I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was, heh heh, but after three months of weekly lessons, and lots of (free) practice games, I got a whole lot better. And now I just want to play all the time.*

I had posted something about all this on facebook, and a friend recommended Konnikova's book. I'll confess, I was a little skeptical, but I got the audiobook from the library (read by the author, which is always nice), and 10 minutes later, I was hooked. This is a really great book. It's not so much an account of how Konnikova learned to play poker (and play it well) as it is an investigation into the nature of poker as a game, and more broadly, into the way people conceptualize luck and risk. What does it mean to gamble? Why do we think of poker as gambling, but not, say, attending a PhD program in the humanities (surely the riskier endeavor, with more on the line). I've been super fascinated by these questions for awhile — not just because I am the graduate of such a PhD program, and have dealt with the roulette-like job market more than once, but all the more so during the onset of the pandemic, which was a particularly vivid illustration of the totally illogical way people understand risk — and Konnikova brilliantly shows how examining poker is actually the ideal way to study them.

On the way, you get some fun stories about the eccentric characters she meets, and a few brief scenes of the heart-pounding, nerve-wracking experience of playing Hold 'Em (especially as a woman, an aspect of the book I particularly appreciated). If you're an aspiring poker player, what you get in this book is not really a set of lessons for how to play, but a philosophy of play that helps you wrap your head around its particular combination of luck and skill. A lot of poker lore is focused on the idea of bluffing and tells, and yes, that stuff matters, but it's not quite as all-encompassing as some movies make it out to be (though I do think the mental aspect of the game is one of its biggest challenges, and one I'm still very much learning). The Biggest Bluff is really useful in the way that it carefully sorts through all those aspects. But the particular pleasure of this book, I think, is that Konnikova also subtly, gradually, draws out the beauty of poker — the things about it that make it, really, the perfect game.

It's a really fun read, and a much more intellectual one than I'd expected. Highly recommended!

* Free games are great, but they're really not the same as playing for money. Hence I am currently seeking a generous patron, interested in sponsoring me...