Thinking in Bets
2019 • 290 pages
Ratings24
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings24
Average rating3.9
A Wall Street Journal bestseller, now in paperback. Poker champion turned decision strategist Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions. Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there's always information hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes, and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes. By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.
Reviews with the most likes.
I can tell this book will stick with me for a long time. Most notably, I'll remember the idea that we should reject a world of “definitely will” and “definitely won't.” Probability is all around us and we should acknowledge that we're rarely 100% certain. For that matter, we're also rarely 0%, we often have a guess. Simply making a bet with yourself can be a good way to think about potential outcomes.
There are great lessons on ego and bias. And mistakes and learning and scenario planning. There are plenty of poker stories, but less than I'd have guessed. The writing leaned more academic than I thought it would. Some passages were dense and I found myself skimming.
But there were valuable insights the whole way through. I read a hard copy and kept a document open on my phone to take notes. That's not a habit for me with hard copy books, but there was enough interesting in here that I was compelled to commit it to memory.
A good introduction to the habits of mind required to be a more rational decision-maker.
This was a good summary of how to avoid ROT, self-serving bias, and the fundamental attribution error, not only when playing poker but in other situations as well. I'd like to think I already do that fairly well, but I recognize that the self-serving bias is probably causing me to think I'm better at it than I actually am.
