![[Wu Xiaobo Channel] Life Is Like a Poker Game: You Have to Risk It All—and Stay Calm | Reading the Same Book](https://weizhichao.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/640-1.webp)
Xiao Ba Jiuling, Zhichao Wei (WeChat official account: Wu Xiaobo Channel)
Faced with a complex, tangled society and a world full of uncertainty, how do we make the right decisions in life? This brilliant book teaches you to build your own scientific decision-making system at the table of your times, overcome all kinds of irrationality, and become a smart player in the game of life.
—Wu Xiaobo
In 2015, during Super Bowl XLIX, the Seattle Seahawks faced the New England Patriots. With 26 seconds left and the Seahawks trailing by four points, Seattle was about to cross the Patriots’ 1-yard line. Everyone was waiting for Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll to signal a handoff to Marshawn Lynch, one of the NFL’s best running backs.
Who could have guessed that Carroll would signal the quarterback to throw? The Patriots intercepted the ball and won the Super Bowl trophy.
The winners are kings and the losers are outcasts. Carroll’s decision to throw became one of the most controversial decisions in Super Bowl history. Did it really deserve all the blame?
Today, Xiao Ba is going to introduce a very special book, The Poker Mindset, and use it to look at how we should correctly evaluate a decision—and how to make the wisest decision when we don’t have enough information.
1. The Legendary Woman Poker Player
The Poker Mindset is, as its title suggests, about gambling. Its author, Annie Duke, is a professional poker player with 20 years of tournament experience. She won a gold bracelet at the 2004 WSOP (World Series of Poker), and her total tournament winnings exceeded $3.27 million.
But what she wants to discuss with us in The Poker Mindset is obviously not just gambling. She approaches scientific decision-making through the lens of decisions at the poker table, drawing on her expertise in cognitive and decision-making psychology.
She discovered that professional poker players are professional decision-makers. A hand of poker takes about two minutes, and in those brief two minutes, there can be as many as 20 decision points. Every decision determines the final win or loss, and players must make choices about problems with major financial consequences within a highly compressed time frame.
Poker, then, is sometimes a deep reflection of reality. That’s probably why the big shots love it so much.
2. A Bad Result Doesn’t Mean the Decision Was Wrong
First, let’s look at how to judge whether a decision was right or wrong.
Back to Seahawks head coach Carroll’s decision at the beginning: although almost every authority in the field considered the mistake indisputable, some voices argued that, given the circumstances, the tactic was at least reasonable.
Given the clock and the approaching end of the game, Carroll had good reasons to throw. Besides, an interception was a fairly unlikely outcome. Statistics showed that during the season, players threw 26 times from the opponent’s 1-yard line and were intercepted once; over the past 15 seasons, the interception rate in the same situation was about 2%.
But none of this softened the criticism of Carroll’s supposedly wrong decision. Why? Four words: winners are kings, losers are outcasts. People tend to equate a decision with its result—in other words, they fall into result-oriented thinking. Think about it: was the best decision you made over the past year necessarily the one with the best outcome?
All along, people have tended to search for certainty and think in either-or terms, overlooking the impact of uncertain information on outcomes and exaggerating the causal relationship between decisions and results.
We need to change our mindset, break free from this conventional way of thinking, and learn the mindset of The Poker Mindset so we can make decisions more scientifically.
3. Wanna Bet?
When defining the word ‘bet,’ the author points out that we should pay more attention to the aspects it often overlooks: choice, probability, and risk. These are also elements we rarely examine carefully in everyday life.
Stanford University once conducted a very interesting observation.
In all recorded traffic accidents, 65% of drivers blamed someone else. If an accident involved at least two cars, that figure rose to 91%; even when an accident involved only one car, 37% of drivers could find someone else to blame.
In psychology, there’s a technical term for this: the self-serving bias, which basically means blaming others whenever something goes wrong. But when you say ‘take a gamble’ to someone else, you may find that you immediately break free from the grip of the self-serving bias.
A bet can be described as a zero-sum game: if you win, I lose. In a bet, people have an intense feeling about both their own wins and losses and those of others. You have no choice but to carefully consider every decision, including the probability of success or failure and the risks of failure.
In addition, the mindset of The Poker Mindset can trigger perspective-taking: when distinguishing between our own outcomes and other people’s outcomes, we gradually move closer to objective facts.
Once we actively train ourselves to test different hypotheses and try perspective-taking, we see very clearly that almost no outcome is caused by 100% luck or 100% skill. We become more rational in how we view the relationship between decisions and results and avoid result-oriented thinking.
4. Poker and Life
In the BBC documentary The Ascent of Man, John von Neumann says, ‘Real life involves bluffing, deceptive strategies, and weighing how the other person will interpret your intentions.’
The decisions we make in life—about business, saving, consumption, or relationships—fit von Neumann’s understanding remarkably well. They involve uncertainty, risk, probability, and occasional deception, all of which are core elements of poker.
A human life is even more like poker: it’s a game played with incomplete information, a time-limited decision-making game full of uncertainty. Even if you make the wisest, most cautious decision, the outcome may still be terrible. We need to acknowledge that the uncertainty created by insufficient information really can be troublesome, but we must not let it affect our objective assessment of the decision’s accuracy.
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