Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Portfolio (2018), 288 pages
Description
Business. Psychology. Nonfiction. HTML:Wall Street Journal bestseller! Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result. In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? 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 is always information that is 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 business 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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member pw0327
I came upon this book when I read Stuart Firestein’s interview with Annie Duke in Nautilus magazine. The interview got me curious about the ideas in this book and I was fascinated by Annie Duke’s unusual background: being both a psychology graduate student at one time and a successful poker
It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics. Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references, other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s academic training.
The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that as a foremost compliment.
The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life. In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.
Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision making is objective and accurate. She delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.
Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable in Ms Duke’s narrative.
The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.
One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points. Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however, the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was not only necessary but critical.
I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus would be very good.
I obviously liked the book.
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player. Graduate studies I know about, professional poker playing I did not. So the unique combination piqued my interest.It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics. Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references, other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s academic training.
The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that as a foremost compliment.
The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life. In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.
Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision making is objective and accurate. She delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.
Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable in Ms Duke’s narrative.
The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.
One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points. Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however, the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was not only necessary but critical.
I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus would be very good.
I obviously liked the book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member waldhaus1
We all make decisions of varying importance continuously. Annie Duke provides a refreshing way to look at the process. Useful on a personal level with the potential to be useful on a societal level as well.
LibraryThing member Narilka
Annie Duke offers up the idea that life is more like poker than chess. You can play the perfect hand, make all the right decisions and still get unlucky. Given the presence of uncertainty in every decision we make, even those decisions we feel fairly certain about, it's time to recognize that every
What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure."
Duke uses the idea to lay out a framework to help us make better decisions on a daily basis. Ideas covered include: Understanding the concept "resulting" and how to decouple that from the decisions we make; how we form beliefs; the innate biases in our current decision making process based off our beliefs; how to adopt new habits in our decision making process; and how to be more truth seeking instead of just confirming our biases. Duke outlines these ideas in an easy to understand manner and uses examples from her own career as a professional poker player often.
I found this book thought provoking and plan to try out a few of her examples. It's also a case where I wish I had a print copy of the book instead of the audio so I could make notes more easily. I think I also need to add Predictably Irrational to my TBR.
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decision is basically a bet and how thinking in this manner can give us a better process to make great decisions.What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure."
Duke uses the idea to lay out a framework to help us make better decisions on a daily basis. Ideas covered include: Understanding the concept "resulting" and how to decouple that from the decisions we make; how we form beliefs; the innate biases in our current decision making process based off our beliefs; how to adopt new habits in our decision making process; and how to be more truth seeking instead of just confirming our biases. Duke outlines these ideas in an easy to understand manner and uses examples from her own career as a professional poker player often.
I found this book thought provoking and plan to try out a few of her examples. It's also a case where I wish I had a print copy of the book instead of the audio so I could make notes more easily. I think I also need to add Predictably Irrational to my TBR.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Razinha
I recently saw a stack of seven books on a city manager's desk; one was a dictionary of finance terms and another was The Daily Stoic and I decided to read the other five, of which this was one. Cognitive biases and decision making with incomplete information from a different perspective - poker. I
"We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isn’t so perfectly correlated." All too common a misconception.
"When I consult with executives, I sometimes start with this exercise. I ask group members to come to our first meeting with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year. I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions." Key difference.
"Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments." Or, simply treating decisions as not needing complete information...
This is how we think we form abstract beliefs: We hear something; We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false; only after that We form our belief. It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false. She further says, "It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation." This is sound.
SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas once said, “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”* That makes sense only if you believe the goal of a decision group is to train people to agree with you. But if your goal is to develop the best decision process, that is an odd sentiment indeed.It did not surprise me that Thomas was so blind. His decisions reflect that.
Duke nailed thisWe treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.
[...]
Pete Carroll and the world of Monday Morning Quarterbacks could have used the judge’s reminder that we tend to assume that, once something happens, it was bound to happen. If we don’t try to hold all the potential futures in mind before one of them happens, it becomes almost impossible to realistically evaluate decisions or probabilities after.
A good mental checklist:When we think in bets, we run through a series of questions to examine the accuracy of our beliefs. For example: Why might my belief not be true? What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief? Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true? What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief? What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what’s their support, and why might they be right instead of me? What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did?
Duke talks about how some focus on their successes and relates a story about Phil Ivey (poker dude) who had just won a huge tournament. She notes where most would have talked about their victory, Not Ivey. For him, the opportunity to learn from his mistakes was much more important than treating that dinner as a self-satisfying celebration. He earned a half-million dollars and won a lengthy poker tournament over world-class competition, but all he wanted to do was discuss with a fellow pro where he might have made better decisions.Elites in any field can work those details. A tennis player will work on a seemingly insignificant wrist twist; a runner can adjust arm motions: and I knew a bridge grandmaster 40 years ago who could recall hands from months or even years earlier and analyze where the bidding or play went wrong. It's a good practice to ask "how can I have done better", even if the outcome was better than expected.
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think that the premise is sound, but the deliverables fall short. Ms. Duke says, "So this is not a book about poker strategy or gambling. It is, however, about things poker taught me about learning and decision-making." And it is a book full of poker and pop culture anecdotes (some repeated a few times...) with more focus on the stories than any actual lessons learned. Duke also cited a lot of books I was less than impressed with...The Power of Habit, The Righteous Mind, Kahneman's... but she also gave me two jumping off points with a couple of books I need to find. Overall, I was not all that impressed with this book, but as always, there is merit to be found. Some selected takeaways:"We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isn’t so perfectly correlated." All too common a misconception.
"When I consult with executives, I sometimes start with this exercise. I ask group members to come to our first meeting with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year. I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions." Key difference.
"Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments." Or, simply treating decisions as not needing complete information...
This is how we think we form abstract beliefs: We hear something; We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false; only after that We form our belief. It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false. She further says, "It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation." This is sound.
SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas once said, “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”* That makes sense only if you believe the goal of a decision group is to train people to agree with you. But if your goal is to develop the best decision process, that is an odd sentiment indeed.It did not surprise me that Thomas was so blind. His decisions reflect that.
Duke nailed thisWe treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.
[...]
Pete Carroll and the world of Monday Morning Quarterbacks could have used the judge’s reminder that we tend to assume that, once something happens, it was bound to happen. If we don’t try to hold all the potential futures in mind before one of them happens, it becomes almost impossible to realistically evaluate decisions or probabilities after.
A good mental checklist:When we think in bets, we run through a series of questions to examine the accuracy of our beliefs. For example: Why might my belief not be true? What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief? Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true? What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief? What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what’s their support, and why might they be right instead of me? What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did?
Duke talks about how some focus on their successes and relates a story about Phil Ivey (poker dude) who had just won a huge tournament. She notes where most would have talked about their victory, Not Ivey. For him, the opportunity to learn from his mistakes was much more important than treating that dinner as a self-satisfying celebration. He earned a half-million dollars and won a lengthy poker tournament over world-class competition, but all he wanted to do was discuss with a fellow pro where he might have made better decisions.Elites in any field can work those details. A tennis player will work on a seemingly insignificant wrist twist; a runner can adjust arm motions: and I knew a bridge grandmaster 40 years ago who could recall hands from months or even years earlier and analyze where the bidding or play went wrong. It's a good practice to ask "how can I have done better", even if the outcome was better than expected.
Show Less
LibraryThing member writemoves
I preferred The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova to this book. Both were books about poker but I got more insights and ideas about psychology and decision making from the Konnikova book. I read 50-60% of the Duke book and it just felt repetitious to me. I had a hard time motivating myself to read
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Language
Original language
English
Physical description
288 p.; 5.75 inches
ISBN
0735216355 / 9780735216358
Local notes
Sevilla office