Can a game help us explore life's answers? Or teach us about our own existence? Poker, neither a game of chance nor of mathematical precision, may hold clues. In her book "The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win," the psychologist and best-selling author Maria Konnikova enters the world of high-stakes poker as a novice and transforms into an expert. Along the way, she investigates the role that luck plays in our lives and why we can't control everything. In this episode of the podcast “The Next Chapter” by American Express Business Class, Konnikova and host Cardiff Garcia discuss what poker can teach us about better decision making.
Can a game help us explore life's answers? Or teach us about our own existence? Poker, neither a game of chance nor of mathematical precision, may hold clues. In her book "The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win," the psychologist and best-selling author Maria Konnikova enters the world of high-stakes poker as a novice and transforms into an expert. Along the way, she investigates the role that luck plays in our lives and why we can't control everything. In this episode of the podcast “The Next Chapter” by American Express Business Class, Konnikova and host Cardiff Garcia discuss what poker can teach us about better decision making.
[Theme Music]
Cardiff Garcia: How many psychologists can say they’ve won nearly half a million dollars in poker tournaments? There’s probably just one. And today on the show, I speak with her.
Hi, I'm Cardiff Garcia, and welcome to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. In each episode of this podcast, we introduce you to a bestselling book that everyone in the business world can learn from. And we're also gonna hear how the author's advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they would write for their next chapter.
Today, we're speaking with Maria Konnikova.
Maria is a journalist, and she also has a PhD in psychology. One of her early mentors was the great psychologist Walter Mischel, who conducted the famous marshmallow experiment to understand self control in kids.
Back in 2018 Maria decided to write a book about the psychology of poker, and to do this, she actually became a poker player herself despite never having played before. She chose world champion Erik Seidel as her new mentor, and she quickly went from not even knowing how many cards are in a deck to winning international tournaments, all in a single year.
And the book she wrote about this experience is called The Biggest Bluff, in which she argues that the game of poker is a surprisingly good metaphor for understanding risk, uncertainty, and self control in the real world—and that winning strategies in poker can also be applied to the much higher-stakes game of life itself.
I sat down with Maria to discuss what poker can teach us about making better decisions, and her 2019 book “The Biggest Bluff”.
ACT I [Music Transition]
Cardiff Garcia: Maria Konnikova, welcome to The Next Chapter.
Maria Konnikova: Thanks so much for having me, Cardiff. It's a pleasure talking to you.
Cardiff Garcia: I was tempted to introduce you by saying, Maria, you are all about deception. But I'm worried that that might get misunderstood. Uh, it's not that you yourself are a grand deceiver, but the psychology of deception and even self-deception is a theme that's come up in a lot of your work all throughout your career.
You've got a book about con artists, a book about Sherlock Holmes, and of course you've got The Biggest Bluff, which is a book about poker. So what is it that you think people generally misunderstand about the psychology of deception?
Maria Konnikova: Oh boy, where do I begin? Let me just start from just the most basic thing, which is that people seem to think that you can tell when someone is lying, that this is something that is relatively easy.
And what psychology tells us over and over and over, is that we suck, right? We're, we're actually incredibly bad at telling when people are telling the truth, when they're lying, and we're very bad about our own accuracy. So we have very little access to when we're correct versus when we're not correct. We think we're just as good when we're just completely off. And to me that's just fascinating because we really lack that feedback loop.
And I think the reason is that we don't often get feedback, right? I might think, you know, Cardiff you're lying right now, but unless I just stop and tell you and you're honest about your answer, I'm going to lack the correct feedback to know whether my intuition was accurate or not.
And I'm gonna have then no way to revise my assumptions going forward. Which is crucial, right? That's how you learn.
Cardiff Garcia: Very true. So obviously deception is a big part of poker, as are other things you like to explore in your book, things like risk and self control. But when you decided to write The Biggest Bluff, you did not approach it the way I think most journalists probably would, which is to do some reporting, maybe read other people’s research, conduct interviews, attend a few tournaments and see what happens. In your case, in addition to all that, you actually became a professional poker player yourself, and a really good one at that. Why did you approach the book in this way?
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. I made a very conscious decision when I started working on The Biggest Bluff to actually immerse myself in this world because I felt like I needed to in order to tell the story that I needed to tell. Which was a story about, really understanding chance on a visceral level, not through someone else, but through me.
I needed to internalize it like that, and I thought, I didn't know if I was gonna be good. I didn't know how the book was gonna go. But I needed to do it myself, and I needed to go through it to be able to have that metacognitive awareness of my own thinking process, because I know that it's very, very different to just hear someone talk about something and then to try it. And I also know from the psychology of learning that oftentimes you think you understand something and then when you go to do it yourself, you really don't.
Cardiff Garcia: You mentioned the idea that you wanted to understand chance at a visceral level because, in that sense, playing poker is similar to what we go through in life. And there's a passage in your book that captures this really beautifully, and I just wanna read it now for the audience and then just ask you to expand on it.
So here's what you write, quote "For poker, quite unlike any other game, mirrors life. It isn't the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two.”
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. So this, obviously those are my words, but I got the insight originally from John von Neumann, who was the father of game theory and a poker player.
And you know, he had this insight that poker in his mind was the only game that was actually interesting because it was a game, like life, of incomplete information. So if you take a game like chess, he said, you know, that's boring because I see the board. I see you, we see all the pieces.
There's a right move. I can solve this, right? Give me the computing power and we solve it. There's a right move. Um, and roulette is boring because it's just pure chance, right? It's gambling and gambling's boring. Poker is neither the one nor the other because in poker, it is, at the end of the day, a game of skill.
The skilled opponent is going to win over the long term, over the unskilled, opponent. You can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand if someone else is better than you are.
Cardiff Garcia: because there's a human element, right?
Maria Konnikova: Exactly.
Cardiff Garcia: You're responding to other people. They're responding to your responding to them and so on.
Maria Konnikova: Exactly.
Cardiff Garcia: There’s more to it than just a spin of the wheel.
Maria Konnikova: Exactly. There's psychology, but there's mathematics as well because you have to try to figure out, okay, here's what I know.
Here's what you know. Here's what we know in common. Here are, you know, the number of cards, et cetera, et cetera. I can, I can do some calculations as well, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a probabilistic decision based on my best guess about the state of the world. Even though I don't know all of the information.
Some of it is hidden and there's no right move because I don't actually know with certainty what all of the information is. And what do you know in life, there's no such thing as a hundred percent certainty.
You can think you're a hundred percent sure, but you never are, right? There's no such thing. And so poker teaches you to make the best decision you can with the information you have. Knowing that it's not complete, knowing that it's not perfect, knowing that it can change and that the decision that was correct five minutes ago might no longer be good and you might have to change your mind and change your decision and act differently.
And that's true of life as well. And that's how you have to think about life. But that's not how the human mind works and that's not how we usually make decisions. And so I found poker to be this just beautiful teaching tool for helping me wrap my mind around a lot of the psychology concepts that I'd been studying in the abstract and realized how often I made a lot of those mistakes in my own decision making, even though I thought I didn't make those mistakes, because I was very aware of them.
But there's nothing quite like, you know, being under the lights and under pressure and having to make quick decisions to show you that actually no, you know, you, you are biased and actually you do make those mistakes.
But that's the beauty of learning from experience and actually learning from correct experience, which is the other thing that poker has on life. Because in life, and this actually goes back to what you and I were talking about, about why we're bad at spotting deception because there's no accurate feedback.
And that's true of a lot of things in life. It's hard for us to learn because life is a wicked learning environment. And that's a psychology term from Robin Hogarth. It's not like it's wicked evil. Wicked as in there's, there's no, um, clear feedback from what we do.
It's messy and it's noisy. and it can be very difficult to learn in a wicked environment. And so poker actually, by virtue of iterating these things over and over and over and over and over, you actually start to learn, quote unquote correctly, because you actually experience probabilities. You actually figure out, oh, this is what 1% feels like.
This is what 2% feels like, and you know what, 1% and 2% actually feel quite different, even though in your mind they might feel the same. And you know what? 98% is definitely, definitely not a hundred percent.
All, all you have to do is get one outed in poker one time to realize that even 99% is not 100%.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah. I gotta say there's a stunning statistic in your book that supports what you just said. Here's what you write, quote, the economist Ingo Feedler found that the actual best hand won on average only 12% of the time, unquote. Were you as shocked as I was when you came across that statistic? Uh, but now that you have all this experience in poker, are you at all surprised that that's true?
Maria Konnikova: No, I was completely shocked when I came across that statistic because, so first of all, he was looking at online poker, um, and he was looking at good players, at hundreds of thousands of hands. So this is a statistic that is actually worth something.
Cardiff Garcia: A big sample size.
Maria Konnikova: Because we have a very large, and yeah, the sample size is big.
And I thought, whoa, 12% of the time? That just made my heart sink a little thinking, uh oh, you know, I'm screwed. This is not gonna be good for me. But on the other hand, it's also empowering because it says, "Hey, if I can get that good, then it doesn't matter if I'm getting dealt good cards, I can find a way to win in
88% of these situations, give or take, if I'm better, if I have that much of an edge over the field." And I don't think I do, right? I'm not one of the best players in the world, but if I have at least a little bit of edge, then all of a sudden, you know, my cards matter a little bit less. So yeah, when I started playing, and the more seriously I started taking it, the more I realized that, oh, um, this makes sense.
Cardiff Garcia: If you play it well, you can have a lot of success. Yes.
Maria Konnikova: Exactly.
Cardiff Garcia: That's very encouraging.
Maria Konnikova: You just, if you just think about that as a metaphor for life, that you just need to play life well, that can be very helpful, especially when you're feeling down, when you're being dealt a lot of lousy hands. When you feel like, you know, this, this sucks and everything's terrible.
It's really nice to know actually there are, there's, there's a light at the end of the tunnel and I can actually do something. There is skill in how I play. There's no skill in what hand is dealt to me, but there is skill in how I then play.
ACT II [Music Transition]
Cardiff Garcia: A lot of the book is dedicated towards how you learn to emotionally process what you call “bad beats,” which is when you just run into a streak of bad luck or an instance of bad luck, there was nothing more you could have done about it. It was just a bad beat. And in particular, there's a story of how you were at a tournament and you played your hand as well as you could play it.
You played it perfectly and it just so happened that that one time, you had some bad luck and another player won the hand and you went to your mentor, a legendary poker player named Eric Seidel and you started complaining about it and he was like, whoa, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it.
I just want to hear if you played your hand the right way. And you've referred to this in the past as don't drag your garbage around with you. And I gotta say, of the people that I've spoken with about your book, this is the anecdote that they bring up the most. And I'd love to like, just hear more about this concept of not dragging your trash around with you both for yourself and for the people that you interact with.
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. So this is an anecdote that has stayed with me as well, especially because Eric Seidel is just the nicest guy you will ever meet. For him to tell you, just be quiet, I don't want to hear it.
Cardiff Garcia: For him to shut you down. Yeah.
Maria Konnikova: To shut you down, it means it's, it's very important. And what I had been doing, when I brought this to him was what so many of us do, which is conflate process with outcome, right?
So if an outcome is bad, that means, you know, something bad happened. If an outcome is good, yay me. But think about that hand. So it was an absolute bad beat. And he said, I don't wanna hear it. I wanna know how you played the hand. And he then asked me a question. He said “do you have a question about your process, about how you played the hand?”
And then I reflected on it and I thought, well, no. I mean, I had the top set, you know, when the money went in, I was an overwhelming favorite, um, you know, over 80% to win. That's amazing, right? If I could be over 80% to win in a decision, I'd make that same decision every single time. So the outcome went against me.
But who made the mistake? Not me. The other guy, the guy who won the hand actually made the mistake because he got his money in as an just overwhelming dog. He is going to lose that.
Cardiff Garcia: 80% of the time.
Maria Konnikova: Eighty something percent of the time. And, had I focused on just the outcome, I would've taken away completely the wrong lesson, right?
I would've first of all just felt bad for myself, which is bad. Um, so when, uh, the trash analogy was, Eric's, not mine. I'll give credit where credit is due. He said, you know, telling a bad beat is like taking your trash and dumping it on someone else's lawn. And if you think about it, it's not just toxic to the other person because it kills their lawn.
You had to haul that trash around, so it was weighing you down. You were breathing in the toxic fumes, it was just poisoning your mind. Imagine if I had thought after that, you know what? I shouldn't get my money in with top set because that guy might have something and he might, that's the absolute wrong decision.
Might maybe now I start taking fewer risks than I should take because I'm too scared. Because I don't take the correct risk that's the logical risk, because I remember this emotional thing about how this turned out, and that's completely the wrong lesson. Instead, you know, I can't control that. I can't control whether I win or lose because we got our money in, and you know, there were still two cards to come.
I, I can't control what's going to happen. I can control how I think about it. I can control the decisions that I make and so I shouldn't even worry about the rest of it. And it's very kind of let go of outcome because that's the way to make good decisions. The way to make good decisions is to focus on the things that are actually within you to control.
I can't refine the order of the cards in the deck, unless I'm cheating. That's a different story.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah. And in fact, there's a great anecdote in the book where you apply some of these ideas in a negotiation where an organization had gotten in touch with you asking you to write a freelance article. And I think the way you described yourself was that like in your pre-poker days, you would've been kind of nervous about this negotiation, or you would've taken like, you know, an offer that wouldn't have been paying you what you actually believed you were worth.
This time though, you had a little bit of experience with poker and the lessons you'd learned and you played it differently. Can you kind of tell us what happened?
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. So I realized that one of the lessons that poker taught me is not to play scared. And when you're playing scared, you can't play well. Because other people can take advantage of it, right? Other people can smell that. And then you end up losing, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you're not taking the risks you should take, so even if other people can't smell it on you, you still lose because you're not playing well.
And so you're leaving expected value on the table, you're leaving money on the table, and you end up, even if you don't lose in the sense of actually losing, you don't win as much as you should have won. And so those are all very important things to keep in mind. Now, when you take it into a negotiating situation like I did with, with the story that you're talking about.
In the past, I wouldn't have even realized that I was playing scared for a variety of reasons. Not least of all, because I don't want people to dislike me, and that I, I want to be someone who people think of as easy to work with, and as, you know, nice and amenable.
Cardiff Garcia: So you wouldn't have wanted to risk their disapproval if you played a little hardball in a negotiation.
Maria Konnikova: And I would've actually, I think, been scared of them walking away, um, no matter what. And in this particular case, you know, I didn't actually need to do this story. I wanted to, it was, it was actually quite interesting. But I realized that, hey, you know what? They probably want me more than I want them in this particular situation.
So it was also an analysis of what the negotiation was. And so I, just decided to play hardball a little bit in, in a way that was more natural to me. I said, you know, I'm not really freelancing right now, which I wasn't. That was actually, that was true.
And so, you know, step by step I was able to negotiate them up to a much higher rate. And it wasn't even, they agreed pretty easily, which made me realize, oh, you know, how much money have I left on the table in the past.
Cardiff Garcia: Should have gone even higher right?
Maria Konnikova: But I think the key thing there, and the key thing at the poker table is actually you, you need to be willing to walk away.
And when you're willing to walk away, you almost never have to walk away. Is is actually the, is the paradox there because you just, you're in a very different position
I realize that that's all very abstract, but I think, I think that makes sense?
Cardiff Garcia: No, no, it does make sense. The idea that being willing to walk away is both powerful in a negotiation obviously, but then if you find yourself in a situation where you actually do end up walking away, you can be proud of yourself for having done so.
Maria, you also found yourself quite often at a poker table where you were the only woman. And statistically we also know that the vast, vast majority of poker players are male. It's like 90 something percent male. And you write about how in some cases you would come across certain types of guys who clearly didn't have much experience playing against women and then they would treat you a certain way.
And I'm wondering what the broader lesson is for making the best of a situation where, you know, you are maybe the only person at the table or in a situation who looks like you, or the only person who has your particular background or set of characteristics.
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. I think that the number one lesson is to be incredibly attentive to behavior and to how people are acting because at the beginning I had just a blanket theory that people would bully me more and would bluff me more because I was female. But that wasn't true across the board. There were some people who would never fold to me if I bluffed, because they would just rather die than, than be, than fold to a bluff by a woman.
And the thought that I might be bluffing just made them call everything. And there were other people who just didn't think I was capable of bluffing, right? So they would just always fold. There were some people who always wanted to show me their cards because they didn't wanna take my money.
And so whenever they bet big, I knew to fold because they were just kind of showing me. But in order to see that I had to be really extra attentive to those types of behaviors. And I think a lot of times people will show you who they are, and will show you exactly how you should play them. Whether it's at poker or not at poker, um, if you let them, right?
If you just, if you pay attention, if you're quiet and you listen and you observe and then you adjust your behavior accordingly. And if you don't do back to them what they do to you, which is make assumptions based on how they look, and things that are not data and I actually write about in the book when I made big mistakes, when I did this same thing that they did, which is profile them based on how they looked.
There was a guy at some point, you know, who had a shaved head and you know, huge biceps and tattoos all over his arms, and I was like, oh my God, you're gonna be an aggressive maniac, I'll show you. And it ends up that he was a totally conservative player, and I just looked at him and drew assumptions, which is exactly what people do to me all the time.
And so realize that you do that too, and don't do it. And catch yourself when you're doing it, and instead just be very observant and really pay attention to the behaviors and to what people are doing, not to what they're saying because they will play differently against you. Um, and by the way, this is also metaphorical, right?
Play differently, not necessarily cards.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah.
Maria Konnikova: Um, and learn how to take advantage of that because you'll be able to. Because the moment someone else is, everyone is biased, but the moment you act on your bias is the bad moment, right? That's, that's the moment where, I can now use that against you. So I'm biased too, right?
I was biased against, guys with tattoos and big biceps, and everyone has these sorts of biases. It's just human. So you just need to know what yours are and not act on yours and watch out, try to figure out what others' biases are, how they're acting on them, and how you can use that to your advantage.
Cardiff Garcia: And when they are doing that, take all their money
Maria Konnikova: Exactly. Take them for all they're worth.
[Music]
Cardiff Garcia: You're listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. When we come back, we'll hear about Maria's poker career since the book came out, and what she would write for her next chapter.
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ACT III [Music Transition]
Cardiff Garcia: Maria, the title of this podcast is The Next Chapter. So let me ask a very relevant question. If in fact you could write one more chapter to this book, either in response to what the public thought of it and you know, some of the feedback you might have gotten, or just because it was something that intrigued you, what would it be?
Maria Konnikova: It's so funny. So those are actually two different questions, um, in the sense of, I'd write two different chapters if it's something just for me or for the public response. Because for the public response, I would actually just reiterate certain things that I already wrote in the book, but I would just put them in like, bold, huge letters.
That, first of all, poker is not gambling, because you have no idea how many people, just like, I feel like they didn't read the book at all. Because they still, they call me a gambler. And they call me evil and they think that I'm corrupting the world by playing poker.
Cardiff Garcia: Wait. People called you evil in response to your book?
Maria Konnikova: Oh yes. And I corrupt children because I actually also advocate poker as a teaching tool in schools. So, so I'm banned.
Cardiff Garcia: How did you sort of process that? Because that's in keeping with some of the, the very themes that we've been discussing.
Maria Konnikova: Absolutely. I would actually respond head on to that and talk about, why I actually think poker is quite different and why I think that if you teach it from a young age, it will make people much less likely to become gambling addicts because they will understand that it's not gambling. They will understand the math, they will understand the thought process.
They will treat it as a probability problem. It won't just be an emotional, "Ooh, let's gamble," which it is to a lot of people who don't understand and who don't actually understand the theory, the math, the statistics, the thought process behind it, and teaching those tools of critical thinking of analysis are powerful weapons against addiction in a lot of different realms, not just, not just gambling.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah. That's fascinating. Maria, towards the end of the book, you write really quite movingly about some of your health struggles, and in fact, you have this new audiobook out now about migraines, which you yourself suffer from. Can you explain how you've navigated that in light of your experiences writing The Biggest Bluff?
Maria Konnikova: Yeah. Um, so the health struggles towards the end of the book stemmed from incredibly severe migraines. You know, it's something that I've dealt with for most of my life, but, um, they took a turn for, for the worse, and I wouldn't, uh, I, I won't spoil the ending of the book, but it was, you know, it was…
Cardiff Garcia: It was a scary moment.
Maria Konnikova: Bad. It was a very scary moment. And so this is something I've never really delved into, even though it affects my life so closely. So I ended up doing a deep dive into the history of migraine, of our lack of understanding, the cultural awareness of it, and into where migraine is today.
And it also actually taught me about some new treatments that I hadn't realized were available because they're not really publicized and one of them ended up working really well for me. So right now they're actually as a direct result of doing this book, my own migraines are under much better control.
Cardiff Garcia: Your two greatest mentors were Walter Michelle, legendary psychologist, and Eric Seidel, legendary poker player. I'd love to ask a question about mentorship itself. And it's not just around what are the ingredients of a good mentor, although I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, but also around how to pursue the right mentor for you, how active we should be, how kind of on the lookout for a certain characteristics we should be, and what those are.
Maria Konnikova: Well first of all, I think having mentors is incredibly important. You can't go it alone and thinking you can is just quite silly. You learn much faster. You just, I think, the experience of life and the experience of doing anything is much better if you have someone to learn from. That said, mentorship is a two-way street. So you can't just go to someone and be like "Mentor me."
You have to do the work and they have to know that you're going to do the work and that you're worth mentoring.
And so then how do you actually find a mentor? I think one of the things that we often do wrong, and I've done this too, is just go by reputation, right? And realize, oh, it's like I wanna go to this school cuz it's ranked number one.
Or I want to do this because, you know, I've read X. it's about sitting down with yourself and figuring out, okay, why do I want a mentor, for what, what am I hoping to get out of this?
And I had identified Walter as the person I wanted to work with, because I just wanted someone who I could learn from about life.
I wanted someone who was wise, who could teach me about just in general, psychology and humanity in the world. Um, and of course it helped that he was a marshmallow guy, I knew who he was, but it was a very specific thing. And I knew he wasn't taking grad students anymore. He'd had his final grad students several years before me.
He was kind of winding down. But I still tried. And I explained to him, you know, that I promised he wouldn't have to do any of the work he didn't wanna do as an advisor. That I would design all my own studies, that I would kind of do all of that. He wouldn't have to hold my hand. That I was very self-motivated and that all I wanted from him was just to just talk at me sometimes and share his ideas.
Um, and so he was like, okay, you know, let's see if it will work. And he, even then he didn't agree to be, you know, 100% my advisor. He said, okay, let's see. And then he, then he took over and became my full-time advisor after he saw that it was working. But it was, it was one of these things where I had to know that if I went to work with him, I wouldn't get the sort of guidance in terms of nitty gritty of study design and statistics and all of that, that I would from someone else, that I had to do all of that work on my own, because I wanted something very different from our relationship.
So someone who wanted that, and who actually wanted to learn, okay, this is how I write a paper. This is how I design a study. This is how I do statistical analyses, would've just died working with Walter because.
Cardiff Garcia: That's not what he's gonna do for you.
Maria Konnikova: That ain't it.
And so that's really important to have that correct match and I think it's much easier to get someone to say yes if that matchup is there, as opposed to if you just go for some sort of more superficial, um, level because you didn't take the time to actually think through what this was going to be.
And the other part of this is it might not work, and you have to be okay with that. I've had situations where I thought someone could be a great mentor and just the rapport wasn't there or something else wasn't there. And that's okay. You don't wanna waste anyone's time. It ends up, I think the best mentorships end up being friendships as well.
Um, so Walter ended up becoming a friend. He was, uh, still alive when I started out on The Biggest Bluff journey. Um, he never saw it published, but he knew what I was doing and he was so excited.
And that helped me. You know, that was really great to see cuz so many people were dismissive and were saying, "Are you insane?
You know, you're, you're gonna go on leave from the New Yorker to play poker?" Like you, you don't know what you're doing.
Cardiff Garcia: And by the by, you're still playing right? How is it going? Is this a lifelong thing, and what's next?"
Maria Konnikova: So in terms of how it's going, um, I'm still taking it very seriously.
I'm still learning. I'm still studying, I'm still playing. And I still want to be a good ambassador for it because it's something that will give back to you if you let it, that will teach you to think better.
And it's still teaching me, every single day I'm learning something new when I play, which is why I'm still doing it. And so in terms of how long do I plan on playing? I don't know. Until it stops teaching me things and it stops being fun because that's the other thing that you need to realize. It's a game.
But it's a game that I've come to love and that I feel very strongly about passing onto the world at large because I was someone who really didn't care about it. And yet I think it's made me so much better at everything, including writing. Um, and I hope that it can do that for other people as well.
Cardiff Garcia: I think that's a lovely place to wrap up the chat. Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff. Thanks so much.
Maria Konnikova: Thank you so much, Cardiff. It was an absolute pleasure, as always.
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Cardiff Garcia: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to Maria Konnikova for coming on the show today. And please tune in to our next episode where I’ll speak with Mashama Bailey and Johno Morisano about their book Black, White, and The Grey.
Until then, be sure to follow or subscribe on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks so much for listening.