I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Maria Konnikova, a two-times New York Times bestselling psychology author, former writer for The New Yorker, and most recently, a national poker champion.

What made Maria’s story all the more compelling is that she didn’t know the first thing about poker when she decided to use he game as a vehicle to better understand the role that chance and skill play in our lives.

She didn’t even know what the turn, the river or the flop was…she was by all measures, a total noob.

But she didn’t stay a noob for long. In fact, twelve months after starting her poker journey, she won the 2018 PCA National Championship. She chronicles her journey in her brand new book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.

What began as a conversation on her story, turned out to be a masterclass of sorts on accelerated learning.

Here’s what I took out of the conversation (you can also listen to the full conversation below).

Imperfect Information is a Feature of Life

The reason Konnikova chose poker over say, chess (like her grandmother had willed her to do), is because chess is a game of perfect information — there is always a right move.

She sighted legendary mathematician, John Von Neumann’s work on game theory, and his book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), as the catalyst for pursuing poker.

Von Neumann wasn’t a proponent of using games to model life, except when it came to poker.

This is because poker is a game of imperfect information. It’s a game of what you know and don’t know, what your competitors know and don’t know, and what the collective group knows and doesn’t know. This is a lot like life.

Von Neumann famously said that “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.”

Seek Out Mentors

It might be tempting, and easier, to just do it all yourself. But your learning curve is going to be a lot slower. Konnikova used her background as a writer and her studies into human behaviour to score the mentorship services of Erik Seidel, the Michael Jordan of poker. Seidel has won eight World Series of Poker straps and a World Poker Title. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2010.

This relationship was one of the reasons that Konnikova was able to level up her game exponentially in the short amount of time she was playing.

The lesson here is to not only seek out mentors, but also to use whatever credentials you have to open doors to those mentors in the first place. While life is a game of imperfect information, you’re certain not to tap into world-class mentorship if you don’t reach out in the first place.

Transfer Skills

I shared with Konnikova how my 13-year-old niece is questioning the value of learning languages from countries that she has no immediate plans to visit. Konnikova credits her having learned several languages as best preparing her to learn poker, which, as Seidel pointed out to her, is like a new language in itself.

“This whole idea of learnings things you ‘know will be useful’ is such a bad way to go through life. Who are you to know its useful?… can you see the future?… seriously?”, said Konnikova.

I played this soundbite to my niece later.

See Things Through Fresh Eyes

What Konnikova brought to the table (excuse the pun) that perhaps many of her competitors didn’t is her study in human behaviour. Konnikova has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Columbia and was able to see problems through a different set of lenses.

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