Hello, everyone. Welcome to this
collaboration between
GSAS Conversations and Columbia at Home.
I am Erin Hussein. I'm Columbia College
Class of 1992 and Columbia Law School
Class of 1995,
and I am currently the Associate
Director for Alumni Relations for the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Tonight we are very pleased to welcome
GSAS
graduate Maria Konnikova to speak about
the human decision-making process,
writing about sports, the world of
professional poker,
and her new book, "The Biggest Bluff." Near
the end of the program, we'll have an
audience Q&A.
You can use the Q&A feature in
in the bottom of your screen if you'd
like to submit a question.
We also have a couple that were
submitted during the registration
process ,and we will get to as many as we
can during the time that we have.
Maria Konnikova earned
the PhD in Psychology from Columbia in
2013,
and she is a psychologist, journalist,
writer,
and international poker champion. She's
the author of
"The Confidence Game," "Mastermind: How to
Think Like Sherlock Holmes,"
and "The Biggest Bluff," and has won a
number of journalism awards for her
writing
as well as for her podcast "The Grift."
She'll be joined in discussion
by Jeremy Feinberg who is a graduate of
Columbia College and Columbia Law School.
He's a lawyer working for the New York
State court system,
a devoted fan of Columbia Athletics, and
one of my oldest friends.
He first learned how to play poker while
he was a student at Columbia,
and many years later competed in several
World
Series of Poker events, and just on a
very personal note,
I first met Jeremy in September 1988
on 14 Jay while he was playing poker with a
group of fellow first-year students.
I'm very pleased to welcome Jeremy
Feinberg and Maria Konnikova.
Thank you so much, Erin, for that lovely
introduction and for making this event
possible. We've got a great show for you
tonight, folks, and we really hope you
enjoy it.
Maria, it's so nice to finally get a
chance to meet you. I feel like having
read your book
and some of your writings, I've gotten to
know you quite a bit, but here we are
for the real thing. And I have to start
with "welcome home
back to Columbia," even if the best we
could do was virtual tonight.
Thank you so much, Jeremy. It's an
absolute pleasure and
I'm thrilled to be back, or as
back as
as one can be. I'm actually in
Brooklyn right now, and the Columbia
campus has not magically moved,
but I am really happy to be here.
I had a wonderful experience as a
graduate student
with Walter Mischel. Unfortunately, he
can't be here tonight because he passed
away
after I graduated a few years ago,
before the book could come out, but the
book was dedicated to him,
so we have his memory living on in its
pages.
And I hope tonight we can honor him a
little bit . Well, I thought that was as
good a place to begin as any. I'd love to
hear about your experience studying with
Walter Mischel while you were
going for your doctorate, something that
is not an easy thing to do by any means.
And I know he's watching from up high
tonight and will
approve of whatever you choose to share
with us about your time on campus.
Walter Mischel was an incredibly
special human being. I was fortunate
enough...
My book is about luck. I mean it's about
poker, but really it's about luck and the
role of chance and
what role it plays in our lives and how
we can learn
to tell the difference between what we
can control and what we can't.
And talk about luck: I was so lucky
that Walter Mischel agreed to take me
on as a graduate student.
At the time, when I went to interview
with him,
he said he wasn't taking any more
students. He was done his last student
had been
Ethan Kross, and Ethan had graduated a
few years earlier. 
And he said that he
was in his late seventies, he was done with it,
and he was probably going to retire from
teaching soon.
And I convinced him not to do that.
I said I really want to work with you.
I've wanted to work with you ever since
I first read
about your work, which for people who
didn't study psychology,
Walter Mischel is the marshmallow guy,
the guy who's known for that famous
marshmallow test:
How long can a child wait to eat her
marshmallow?
And the amount of time that someone can
wait at age three or four
then goes on to correlate with all sorts
of life outcomes, from
SAT scores to health outcomes to
whether or not someone's likely to use
drugs to where they end up forty years
later.
These kids are actually still being
monitored today. They're no longer
children.
They're now well into middle-age
adulthood.
And so that that's the work that he
was famous for,
and I told him that I wanted to work
with him but that
I did not want to go into academia. I
said, "Look, I want to be a writer, I love the human mind, and I'm
fascinated by how we think and what
makes us who we are, and I want to learn
from you.
I want to learn from your wisdom, but
I don't need academic publications.
That's not my chosen path,
and I'm very self-motivated. I'm very
self-directed. Just let me do what I want
to do,
and I will work with you, I will learn
from you."
And he just looked at me and he said, "You
know what, I wouldn't go into academia
now either."
Walter was also
he was a renaissance man. He was someone
who, when he
got his first job at Harvard, had one
publication to his name,
and he didn't like that academia had
become this publisher parish environment.
He loved the freedom to think
differently, to do other things. He was a
beautiful
artist. Up until his dying day, he was
creating these beautiful paintings on
X-rays. That was his
his new thing. And he was an art
collector. He loved
literature. He loved all sorts of things.
And he loved that I wanted
to write. He thought that the best
psychologists, the best
thinkers, were people who had multiple
interests,
not people who were pigeonholed into one
thing
and just spent every single
breath and every single moment of every
single day
doing that one thing. And so, miraculously,
the one sentence that you're never
supposed to utter at an
interview to a PhD program, which is "I
don't want to go
into academia," was what convinced Walter
to take me on as a graduate student,
and it ended up being the beginning of a
relationship that lasted over a decade
and that became a very close friendship,
collaboration. And he told me many years
later that I kept him teaching
about five years longer than he wanted
to
because he wanted to stay and he was
rededicated to academia. So I think
I'm glad that I was able to share him
with more students than would have
otherwise shared his wisdom, and he
also said that he wouldn't have written
his book. He wrote the book "The
Marshmallow Test,"
which everyone should read. If
you're gonna go and buy one book after
this don't, buy "The Biggest Bluff," buy "The
Marshmallow Test"
as a testament to the late, great Walter Mischel.
And he said he never would have
written it had it not been for me.
That's amazing. It sounds like it was a
wonderful mentor-mentee
relationship
and one that still pays dividends to you
today.
That's absolutely true um and, you know,
the seeds of the
book, the seeds of "The Biggest Bluff,"
were born in the lab with Walter and in
our discussions
and in the work that we did on
self-control and on something called the
illusion of control:
knowing when control ends and
chance begins. And it ends up that the
human brain
loves the illusion of control, so we love
claiming control even when we're not
actually the ones calling the shots.
So for those who are not trained in the
discipline, is the concept behind the
illusion of control
the idea that you're on a hot streak
and that you couldn't possibly lose,
because you just had three great things
happen in a row, or is it something else?
No, it's something else. So that's the hot
hand fallacy,
which is also a problem, when people
think that they can't lose.
The illusion of control is thinking that
you are responsible for outcomes even
in a stochastic, uncertain environment where there are multiple factors and you
can't possibly know
whether you actually were in control or
not.
And the classic studies actually were
done in the 1970s at Harvard
in the laboratory of Ellen Langer.
She did this really cool thing where she
had a
rigged study, so this is this is one that
you'd need
approval to do. So you had to
bet on the outcome of a coin flip. You
had to say whether it was heads or tails,
and you had to predict it in advance. And
the study was rigged in the sense that
everyone had a number of correct and
incorrect outcomes,
and the experimenter knew the order in
which they were going to give you that
feedback
because they could they could
basically say right or wrong however
they wanted.
And so, in all cases it was an equal
number of right and wrong answers,
as it should be, quote unquote, because
people think that,
you know a coin should be heads or tails
50-50,
right,  but the order of the correct
and the wrong answers was different
depending on the specific experimental
condition.
So in some of them, people
were right and wrong in a seemingly
random distribution. And I say
"seemingly" because it's what the human
mind thinks of as random. Randomness
does not look like what you think it
looks like. Poker cures you of that
delusion very, very quickly.
You realize that the cards have no
memory whatsoever.
Probability has zero memory. I write in
my book, probability has amnesia, and I
think that that's exactly how you need
to look at it.
It's not normally distributed, but the
human mind has this
conception that randomness should look
random, so in one of the conditions it
looked random.
In another, people were wrong a lot at
the beginning and then right a lot later
on,
and in a third, people were right a lot
at the beginning
and then started leveling off and being
wrong more often
as time went on. In the first two
conditions,
people, when they were asked questions
afterwards such as
"I'm good at predicting the outcomes of
coin tosses" would say no. I mean, they
realize that this is
complete BS. I mean these questions are
crazy, because a coin toss is random.
There's no skill in predicting whether a
coin is going to be heads or tails.
That's just complete luck. I think you
and i can agree on that, right, Jeremy?
Total luck, zero skill. But in the last
condition, when they were
right at the beginning a lot, all of a
sudden a really weird
thing happened. These people said, "Yeah, I
actually
am very good at predicting the outcomes
of coin tosses.
Yes, with practice I would get better. Yes,
with
less distractions, if I were in a quieter
environment,
I would be better. Yes, if I actually
studied harder, I
would be better." They were giving these
nonsensical answers that made it seem
like they thought that predicting
a coin toss was actually skill,
and that's the origin of the illusion of
control.
And we actually replicated this, so we
did this online. We did a virtual coin
toss,
and we were able to replicate this exact
same thing. To this day,
people still fall for that illusion, and
if they do that with a coin toss, just
imagine how often in life
you actually think that something is the
result of your action and your skill
when, really, it's just dumb luck.
We could, without a doubt, talk about
research that you've done
or read in psychology for the entire
time we have tonight.
I have a feeling that a good swath of
our audience is very curious about your
poker experience, and maybe I can move us
in that direction.
Walter Mischel was certainly not the
only amazing mentor that you talk about
in your latest book.
Erik Seidel, who is well known in poker
circles,
also took you on as a mentee.
And while I don't want to spoil anything
in the text, because it's really
well written and a good read
in and of itself, just those portions,
maybe you could tell us a little bit
about what it was like meeting him and
learning under him.
Would you describe it like learning
magic from Merlin the magician, or maybe
The Force from Yoda?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and it's funny,
in some of the reviews of the book, they
called Erik my Yoda.
I'm saying, "Yeah, absolutely, he is Yoda."
He's like this Yoda-Buddha
hybrid, just this zen master
that I'm lucky to learn from. So
Erik Seidel is one of the greatest poker
players of all time,
someone who has been winning since the
80s, which is
basically unparalleled. No one else has
been able to be as successful as he has
been for
as long as he has been, and
he agreed to take on this project,
even though he'd never really taken on
any students
and I'd never played poker. I mean, at the
beginning of this, I didn't know how many
cards were in a deck,
like, I really was starting from less
than zero.
He still teases me because I was
positive there were 54 cards in the deck,
and so he will still joke that when
those two jokers come out,
I will rule the world. That'll be the day,
that'll be the day, when I win
the World Series of Poker and become
world champion.
Don't worry, guys, I have learned that
there are 52 cards in a deck.
I've got it. I've got it
down.
But he agreed to take me on because he
was actually intrigued that I had zero
poker knowledge, and he wanted to...
I was a very clean test case, you
know,
can good thinking, can psychology, can
that kind of approach still win?
Because these days, all the new players
are math whizzes.
They're stats majors, they're PhDs in
applied mathematics,
they are people who just know the
numbers and know how to crunch the
numbers.
And a lot of people say that that's the
future of poker and that that's all that
matters
and that the human side has has become
irrelevant.
To me, that was very interesting because
I see that happening everywhere.
I see it happening even in writing,
where people are trying to quantify how
people read and what you're supposed to
do
and on what page your action is supposed
to ramp up, otherwise people are going to
put your book down,
Trying to quantify all these metrics, it's
certainly happening in academia.
It's happening in psychology, where no
one wants to hire social psychologists
anymore, which was what I studied.
Everyone wants neuroscientists because
it seems more scientific,
and the theory has gone by the wayside.
The big thinkers have gone by the
wayside.
People care about, you know, the math and
the nitty-gritty and the
the neural structure and the neurons and
that, and they
they forget about all of the other stuff
and all of the other questions.
And Erik wanted to see if
thinking psychologically, thinking in
human terms,
would still be a winning strategy, if he
could teach me from step one
as a blank slate, with zero bad habits.
Because I'd never played poker, that was
actually an asset in a way,
because I had no bad ways of thinking, no
nothing that he had to unteach me.
And I think the other reason he took me
on was that he loves the game.
He really loves it, he's passionate about
it, and I think he saw a
chance to potentially spread that love
further, to spread it beyond
the existing poker community. And I
didn't know anything about him other
than that he was a good poker player.
Here I lucked out again. He's unique
in that he's probably the only poker
player who
not only knows what the New Yorker is
but reads the New Yorker and has a
subscription to it and it has a
subscription
to every single theater company in
Manhattan and Brooklyn,
and knows every single music club and
every single newest group
and just loves life and loves culture
and loves learning.
And he just became someone who not only
taught me poker but
re-taught me to be excited about
everything else.
I mean, the guy revamped my entire playlist
and a lot of other things, and he has
a great family which,
I think is a testament to the fact
that
you can be good at something and still
maintain balance.
He has two daughters who worship him and
who say he's never missed a
single game or a single event in their
lives.
And that's rare, so I
chanced on someone who's just good at
life.
And so I realized very early on that he
was going to teach me how to play poker,
but he
was also going to teach me how to
be better, how to be a better
person.
It's pretty clear from reading your book
that he succeeded, and I hope that
continues to pay dividends.
I can tell you that Erik and I have
two things in common. One is we both
love poker. You probably figured that out
already, but the others... We both have an
affection for the New Yorker, and I'd
love to spend a little time talking
about it
and some of your writing for it. On a
personal note,
my parents were introduced on a blind
date by a friend of theirs who was a
longtime writer for the New Yorker, and
I got named after the guy.
So it will always have a place in my
heart.
But do you have a favorite piece that
you've written in the New Yorker among
the many things that have appeared
there? I mean,
I don't have a favorite. The most
personal thing i ever wrote was
Walter's obituary for the
New Yorker,
which was the hardest thing I've ever
written because
I didn't want to write it, because it
it meant that he was dead.
It took me forever, and it's
actually the only piece I've ever
written for the New Yorker that was late.
I'm someone who is very, very good
about deadlines. You can talk to
any of my editors. I have never submitted
copy after deadline
unless I've had a very good reason
and we've talked about it and the
deadline has
explicitly been moved. This piece I
just wouldn't turn in
and wouldn't turn in and wouldn't
turn in
because I just, I couldn't write it. I
hadn't written a single word,
and then I just wrote it all. 
So to me, I don't know, it's certainly not
my most deeply researched piece,
although in a way it is, because I
lived the research.
I just didn't have to do extra research
for it. I didn't need to interview
anyone for it.
I didn't need to go out. I didn't need to...
You know, for some of my pieces, I
traveled
many hours to different states and
different countries.
For this one, I didn't do anything,
didn't do any of that,
and so it was very
different, and I have other pieces that
are favorites for other reasons, but this
is the one that
I think will always stay with me
because
it was meaningful in a way that nothing
else I've written for the magazine was.
If you don't mind me saying so, it showed.
I had a chance to read it before tonight,
and
while we've given our audience a reading
list already, I would
highly commend that piece as something
else to take a look at, because the love
you had for your mentor really shows
there and that counts.
Back to poker. For many who have never
been to the World Series
of Poker like you and I have, it's
something of a mystery, what it's like
when you walk into that big room.
For some people, they see it on ESPN and
they assume that it's lights and cameras
and
huge crowds flocking around the tables
all over the place.
For others who don't have any
understanding of poker, they think
of the poker episode on "Friends," or maybe
if they're of a certain
age, the home games that showed up on
episodes of "The Odd Couple."
But can you set the stage for what it's
really like when you walk into the
Amazon Ballroom at the Rio Hotel?
Absolutely, absolutely.
It's the most bizarre experience in the
world, and
I'll never forget the first time that I
did it because
there's nothing like the first time,
right? Afterwards you kind of get used to
it
and you stop appreciating a lot of
what's going on,
but there's just this this energy there,
this kind of this anticipation. Everyone
thinks they might get lucky ,so this is
this is 
the reason that poker has the appeal
that it does, you know, unlike other
professional sports where you can't
really walk in off the street
and say, "You know what? This is the year
that I win the
the NBA, that i get drafted into
my dream team. This is the
year that the ring is mine, you know."
Whatever sport you're you're talking
about.
In poker, because it is a game of
skill and it is a sport
in the sense that you have to have
physical endurance and mental strength
and all of these different things,
but there is an element of luck, and
in the short term, in any given
tournament, anyone can get lucky.
And so everyone thinks that they might
get lucky.
And there's especially at the beginning
of the World Series,
there's just this energy that you can
feel. I mean, you can just you can feel it
in the room,
of everyone just thinking this might be
my year, this might be my summer, this
might be my tournament, this might be the
moment
where I capture glory and win and
become world famous and win money and
prove that i'm actually good. And
there's nothing quite like it. In the
main event, I was
shocked by how silent it can be,
that there's not this... by the time you
see it on ESPN you're already seeing, you
know this is like day
seven day, eight of the event,
and you're seeing everyone's in the
money and everyone's excited and talking,
and you know this is now for the cameras.
But at the beginning, everyone is also
nervous and a lot of people
have never played before, and this is a
once-in-a-lifetime thing,
and they're taking their one big shot.
I mean, let's just back up a second. The
main event costs
$10,000 to enter. That is a
hell of a lot of money.
When you start playing poker
professionally... so eventually...
spoiler alert, you know it ended up that I was good at poker...
I started winning things. i became a
sponsored pro.
I started playing full time. And when you
when you kind of go on the circuit full
time,
especially when you're around the high-
stakes players like someone like
Erik Seidel, you quickly just become
completely...
You go into this into this
alternate universe where people
are paying $250,000
to enter a poker tournament, where people
are paying a million dollars to enter a
poker tournament,
where people, I mean, and it just is
happening all the time.
And so you know, you think, oh $10,000
tournament, okay, you know,
that's fine.
That's fine, that's not a big deal.
$25,000,
okay, that's a big deal, but
I mean, that's
crazy. Like just take a step back for a
second and realize
what an insane amount of money this is,
right? My first job
out of college, my first writing job, my
salary
was $23,000 a year
in New York City. And just think about
that for a second.
And then last year, I played a
tournament that cost
$25,000 to buy into. My entire salary
would not have been able to pay for that.
By the way I didn't pay for that buy-in,
right? Poker players learned very early
on, and I think this is important, I think
a lot of people looking from the outside
don't realize,
I'm playing for a tiny
percentage of myself,
which means I've sold most of the entry
to other people.
So people can buy percentages of players,
and it's a way to
mitigate risk and to play variants right,
so that if you're running badly, if
you're on the wrong side, if you're
losing,
you don't go broke. And this is very
important. It's a
life management tool that Erik taught me
very, very early on,
but it's still a mind-boggling amount of
money,
and so there are people there who,
they've been saving for years, this is a
huge present, this is a huge moment for
them to play the main event.
It can be life-changing, and for many
people it is.
And that dream that first day is so
alive. I mean, the only thing you can
really hear oftentimes is
the chips, the sound of the chips.
I liken it in the book to cicadas,
because I think that that's really what
it sounds like,
just this incessant chirping, and
it's fascinating, it's beautiful,
it's inspiring, and it's heartbreaking.
You have had a great deal of success in
a very short period of time,
and then the pandemic happened, and I
think we can agree
that playing poker live in a casino
right now would probably be in the top
three most
unsafe things to do, if Anthony Fauci
were in our audience.
Oh yeah, I would put it probably as
number one. I don't know what would be
more unsafe.
We don't have to decide that question
now. It's definitely not a safe thing to
do,
but my question for you is, if we had a
crystal ball and could tell the pandemic
was going to go away,
given everything else that you've done,
everything else that you've accomplished,
all of your other interests,
do you see yourself staying with poker
professionally long term,
or are there other pursuits you want to
move to? I see myself
playing poker long term. I don't see
myself playing poker full time
long term. I think that
the level of dedication that it takes to
be a professional... So when I
went pro and I played pro for almost
two years,
which meant that all of my income was
coming from poker. That's basically the
the definition.
And in order to do that, you really
have to dedicate everything to it.
You have to study, you have to follow the
evolution of the game, you have to be on
top of it. You have to
really be living and breathing it in 
a way that
will make you competitive, and I was
willing to do that,
but in the last few years,
I averaged about eight months of the
year on the road.
That's a lot. Being a live pro, a live
tournament pro,
takes a toll on you. It takes a toll
on
your relationships. I mean, I'm married. I
went for,
you know, months without seeing my
husband and without being home
and without actually having a chance to
see anyone in my family. I went for
multiple months without seeing my
parents or my sister, my nieces and
nephews,
and you know, that that starts to be
worrying.
And it was certainly worth it, and I knew
exactly why I was doing it, and I loved
it and I wouldn't
take back a single moment of it.
Going forward, if we had a crystal
ball
and knew, you know, okay, pandemic over
vaccine's here,
everything perfectly safe, I would go
back to playing for sure, but I wouldn't
be playing full time. I think I would be
picking my events and really ramping up
beforehand, because
I don't like half-assing things, so if
I'm gonna play,
I'm going to play. And if I'm going to
play an event,
you better believe that I'm gonna spend
at least a few weeks beforehand
really ramping up and preparing and
and gearing up and putting everything
into place to give myself the best
possible shot.
So I don't think I'll ever actually
go to playing it
fully recreationally in the sense of, oh
let me just show up and sit down and
play,
because to me that would be
disrespectful to the game,
because I want to do more and
treat it
with... I think it deserves more. 
But will I ever be
someone who's playing full time? I don't
know. As of now,
no, but that's also because I had no
plans of stopping
until the pandemic hit, and then I was
suddenly,
you know, I haven't left Brooklyn except
for
a trip in July to an AirBnB
in New Jersey to play online for the
World Series of Poker online.
I haven't left my Brooklyn apartment
since March,
and I...
that was not something that I could have
anticipated.
I mean, I had a full poker schedule
planned out. My book was out June 23.
That was supposed to be the middle of
the World Series of Poker. That was the
week before the main event.
I had all of these publicity things
lined up in Las Vegas. I was going to be
playing a full...
I was going to be spending the summer in
Las Vegas. So
I reassessed and had to kind of pull
back because of the pandemic, and so as
of now,
because of that, I've ramped up other
writing projects in other
areas. So right now, I couldn't go back
to playing full time,
but who knows what the next year will
bring? Who knows what the next two years
will bring?
One of the things that poker taught me
was to be
incredibly open-minded about the future
because
you know what they say about the future:
You don't
know what's gonna happen. I don't think
any of us could.
I know Erin has a few audience
questions, but I do want to interject one
more before we get to that, which is,
given your experience with Walter
Mischel
and then later with Erik Seidel, could
you see yourself
now or in the future post-pandemic
being a mentor for some other young
player who's just starting to learn how
to play, who wants to get better,
if you were approached? I think it
depends.
I don't think I would be
a good coach for someone right now,
because I think
someone who is coaching needs to be
someone who's playing and who really
knows what's happening
in the game. In terms of just
life mentoring, I do do a lot of that, and
I think
that's that's a very different thing, but
both
Erik and Walter were people
who were much later in their careers and
so
I think that you have to
kind of assess what this person needs
and what I have to offer. I've had a lot
of people come to me and just ask for
coaching, not for mentoring Say, you know,
they'd be willing to pay, and more often
than not, I send them to someone else.
And I know people who are good
because...
I'm a good teacher. I mean, I've taught
before and I love teaching,
and I think that I'm a good coach for
certain things but not for other things,
especially right now.
Because I do think that someone who's
training you needs to be someone who's
current
and who knows what's going on and what
all the trends are, and that's Erik still
I mean, Erik is someone who's still
playing full-time. He's in London right
now
playing a full schedule. He relocated
abroad so that he could keep playing
full-time,
because you can play poker full-time
when you're in Europe
in a way that you can't in the United
States.
And so I think you need someone like
that if you're actually serious about
becoming good at the game.
Excellent. Well, Erin, I offer to you
now... I know there are some questions that
came in before,
and I can see that the chat has brought
in a few now.
I think Maria and even I am ready if
there are questions from the audience.
Jeremy, can you
tell me... We have a question about how
old
is too old to start learning poker. We
have an alum who is a
Psychology MA from 1955. He says he is
87,
and he wonders if it's ever too late to
start to learn to play poker.
Short answer to that one is no. It could
be a lifetime pursuit. It could also be
something that you pick up at any time
and then
get a new hobby when you're no longer
interested in it,
but I would strongly encourage anyone
who's interested...
Maria's book is a great place to start
to learn about the game. She does
mix in a few discussions of poker basics
and
how she was learning as she was learning,
and she also
very cleverly drops in a helpful
bibliography of other sources that she
read.
Dan Harrington's book, fittingly called
"Harrington on Holdham,"
is one of the books that appears quite a
bit and would be a good read for anyone
who wants to learn.
Which of the 13 poker game variations do
you like the best?
So i'm confident that if we gave it
enough thought, we could find more than
13 variations,
but... I'm just reading the question. No,
that's fine. Seven-card stud high-low is
the game that I was brought up on and
it's the thing that I've played the most
in tournaments. Texas hold'em, which is
what Maria got most of her experience in
and which is written in great detail in
her book,
is easily the most popular game in the
world. In fact, you actually have to
really try hard to find
tournaments in other games these days.
It's pretty much a hold'em moment world.
But seven card stud high-low has been
and probably always will be my favorite.
I started doing no limit hold'em, and
the reason I did that was because of the
balance
of known and unknown information. So i
learned from
John von Neumann, who was the my
inspiration for getting into poker in
the first place, he was the father of
game theory, and game theory was actually
inspired by poker,
and he looked at a lot of different
variations
and the amount of information you know
versus don't know, and
in no limit hold'em, the balance is
actually
the best for figuring out the balance
between skill and chance and life.
Because there's just enough unknowns. Two
cards everyone has two hole cards that
no one else can see,
and that's just about perfect,
it turns out, in terms of the statistics
and the probabilities
for having a good balance of skills. So
other variants of poker,
you have way too many hole cards, so
there's too much unknown information. It
becomes too much like gambling. It
becomes a guessing game.
In other variants, you only have one
unknown card, you have one whole card,
and so it becomes too much like chess,
and he found chess
von Neumann, profoundly boring because he
could solve it,
because he is also the father of the
computer, and he said, you know,
give me give me the computing power and
I'll solve chess for you, and obviously
the computer has solved chess,
there's always a right move. He said,
"That's not life. In life, there's no right
move.
Life is not chess if you want to
actually teach someone to think in a way
that's useful for life.
Don't teach them chess. Teach them poker."
Thank you.
As a psychologist, do you have any
advice for other poker players about
tells?
What are the most common tells, and
is there any way to deal with them? No.
Do not look at faces and try to think
that you're going to know whether
someone is lying or not.
Psychology tells us that we are
absolutely awful
at being able to spot deception. We suck
at it.
There is no psychological way to
reliably tell if someone is lying, and
there are psychologists working on this.
This is why, by the way, never trust
results from a lie-detector test.
I would completely agree with that, and
if you've seen
movies or television shows where people
give it all away with a tell,
that's really fictional at the end of
the day and not something you're likely
to see in everyday practice.
Jeremy, do you have any tips for somebody
who
is getting better at poker but wants to
play professionally?
I have one and I'm pretty confident
Maria would agree with this. A lot of
people debate whether poker is
luck versus skill or both, and that's a
general theme of her book,
but I would argue as others do that it's
really a game of making good decisions
and teaching good judgment, and
all you can hope to do if you're going
to be a very good poker player someday
is apply that judgment to the
information that you have
and make the best call that you can
under the circumstances.
So anyone who is already interested in
poker and who's played for a while,
I think, would benefit greatly if they
work on their decision-making skills
and their judgment, remembering that
luck is always going to be there or not.
How you react to the probabilities
and using the information you do have is
something you can control.
Thank you. We were talking about
tipped
people that are that are getting better
at poker and may want to play
professionally, and I also want to
mention that
we have a few people that are pretty
starstruck by you and they are...
I think if maybe this would be the last
question: just if you have any tips for
people
who are you know trying to ramp up
their poker game and thinking that they
might like to play professionally.
Yeah, I mean, I think there
are no shortcuts, and I think that
you will do yourself a disservice if you
think there are shortcuts.
I did get very lucky that I was
able to succeed pretty quickly,
but I did this full-time. I left the New
Yorker to study poker full-time,
so I spent seven days a week, eight, nine
ten, eleven, twelve hours a day studying
poker,
learning poker. Every single day I was
either playing
or watching someone else play, reviewing
hands, reviewing my own play, reviewing
someone else's play, watching videos and
actually actively watching videos and
studying and taking notes and talking to
people
and learning from people. I think that's
the only way to do it.
If you're very serious about it, you're
all
people who know how to study. That's
something that I
also know well. This is like an intense
language immersion course.
Think of it as that class where you
actually had to learn a foreign language
in one
semester, and you hated it because it was
the class that started at eight in the
morning
and you had to come, because if you
didn't you were going to fail.
I took those classes. That's what this
is, and that's how you have to approach
it,
as full immersion, and I think that
that's my tip to you, and it's not
a
"Oh, if you just do this, then all of a
sudden you'll be great." There
are tips for plugging very elementary
mistakes that people make, and of course
I can give that to you in 10 minutes and
you're going to become a better player,
but if you're actually thinking about
taking this seriously,
you have to treat it
seriously. You have to actually
immerse yourself in this world and do so
actively. So you have to want to do it. As
with anything, you're going to learn much
better if you're passionate about it, if
you actually
are motivated intrinsically, and that's
the other thing that I got
from Erik.
He doesn't play for the money. Sure, he's
made a lot of money, but that's because
he's very good,
and he's very good because he plays for
the game, he plays for the process, he
plays for the learning, for the challenge,
for
what it teaches him about his own mind
and about thinking clearly,
and about learning how to think better
and constantly improve.
Because the money you can't control.
That's the outcome,
and the whole point of poker is that you
shouldn't be focused on the outcome.
You should be focused on the process. You
should be putting yourself in a position
to, statistically speaking, win, but that
might mean that you go through long
periods of time when you're losing as
well, and that's perfectly okay.
And so I think that ultimately, you have
to be motivated by the right things,
not by the gold stars but by
the actual process of learning.
Well, thank you very much, Maria, and thank
you very much, Jeremy, and
I think that despite the technical
difficulties, I
think that we got lucky tonight to have
to have you speak to us,
and it was really fantastic conversation.
And I urge people to
to pick up Maria's book, and
for other writing,
I just want to mention that Columbia at
Home will be taking next week off to
celebrate the end of summer,
and you can check
columbiaalumni.columbia.edu
next week for
information about our next program, and
those of you who are GSAS alums, GSAS
Conversations will return in September.
And thank you all to everyone who
attended, and again
thank you so much to Maria and Jeremy
for sharing so much with us.
It was really fascinating to
listen to you,
have this conversation that you both
clearly know so much about and you're
both so passionate about. So thank you
to Maria and Jeremy, thank you to
everyone that stuck it through
with us tonight,
and be well and stay well.
