The first book that I’ve read cover to cover in many years. Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke was recommended to me by a friend and the concept immediately struck a chord with me with the tagline “Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts”. It’s pretty much what I’ve been trying to do for many years now so it piqued my interest from the first page and I knocked it over in just a few sittings.
Annie Duke is (or was) a professional Poker player, and while this is not really a book about Poker it does use some analogies and examples from Poker which make sense and make the book pretty accessible to most people. The key takeaway of the book, for me, was the emphasis on trying to separate Decisions from Results. For instance, if you are placing a bet on a sporting team or even making an investment…it might be a really smart Decision that you’ve made, but it still results in a LOSS. This is pretty frustrating and you never really know for sure in hindsight whether it was a smart Decision. Most people see a LOSS as a Bad Decision, but that narrow view discounts the element of Luck and can impact on your confidence and the ability to learn from bad AND good decisions.
When I first started playing Poker years ago I actually found the game quite therapeutic for the rest of my Punting and general decision making in life. The reason was that you could make a Decision (bet) in Poker and then once the cards had played out you could enter the card setup into a calculator and see what the odds of you winning actually WERE. In this way it was easy to figure out whether you had made the right play and it was easy to separate the Decision you made from the Result you ended up with. Results are heavily influenced by luck when risk is involved, but if you are making good Decisions along the way then the good and bad luck will even itself out in the long run.
This book does a pretty good job at explaining the concept of separating Decisions from Results and why it’s really important to do so if you want to keep learning and make better Decisions in the future. For me it was a confirmation and a refinement of the way I had been thinking for some time….and it inspired me to go back and undertake more therapy play more Poker too.