Annie DukeReviews

A great introduction to the latest judgement and decision making scientific research with real world application examples. However, a fair amount of straying into unproven methods by best selling authors without giving warning brings my rating down to 3 stars.

As with most advice books, your mileage will likely vary depending on how many of the behaviours prescribed you already engage in, and/or whether you find the strategies herein useful for yourself.

Respectively, I tend to do many of the things Duke advocates for automatically (adjust for risk, discount skill effects on the past, keep an eye on the future), and so while I unreservedly recommend that section to anybody who feels like this sounds helpful for them, it wasn't necessarily my jam. Her strategies for assisting other people in doing this and for making them complicit in improving my own decision-making are pretty great, though, and offered new ideas for me to try. So I am very appreciative of that.

I can't help but feel like this is one of those books that should have been somewhat shorter and was forced up to a certain length by a publisher, but I don't think that is necessarily Duke's fault.

Also, perhaps she is a bit too generous with her estimate of (this) readers' brain-power. She mentions that it is important to learn from every player at the poker table and to not discount anybody because of perceived skill-level - I would have an extremely difficult time learning from more than one player at the poker table simply because I don't have enough mental bandwidth to process more than that.

In any case, especially well worth reading if one wants a self-help book to validate the side of you that thinks more math will improve your life, certainly.

Very thinly stretched content, this is largely about reiterating a few admittedly good points over and over again. Most of the advice boils down to: instead of saying you think something is true or false, ask yourself how sure you are and consider other possibilities, then try to avoid hindsight bias.

That advice then gets re-framed by annecdote and example repeatedly. At one point the idea of a Ulysses contract is explained in about half a page and it's a good, clear explanation. But then it gets re-explained several times for the next two pages. Overall this feels like a corporate seminar presentation excessively padded out to justify the printing of a book.

Annie Duke makes me want to play poker again. I don't think that's the point of the book.

I'm going to take one big lesson from this book. The right strategy may still result in a bad result. She put a little blurb about how in her poker strategy classes, she teaches the strategy but purposely avoids telling the result. A sound strategy is a sound strategy.

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 more.

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 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 this

We 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.

Just don't. Skip it. The only book worth reading about decision making is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Great book on statistical thinking in business by a woman with a poker background and only a moderate ego, compared to a certain trader with a massive ego who has written about low probability high impact events. The first part of the book is more general statistical thinking, but presented well, and the last is more self-help about working around inherent cognitive biases and limitations.

Listened to the first third but the book didn't really grab me. Writing was pretty wordy, and it contained too many pop-sci references to studies in relation to presentation of new ideas.

Repetitive

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 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.

Totally ignored statistical inference with Bayes Theorem. But pretty interesting anyway.

An excellent book to improve decision making. Thought provoking and interesting with practical ideas and good psychological insights supported by research. One does wonder if the research cited is a function of confirmation bias which is a bias warned against by the author. I do wish that these self improvement books summarised all the tools, with examples and actions to take at the end.

Dryly and formulaically written (pop culture example, followed by research and the take away). A lot of "what" and "why" to think in bets, but often missing the "how". There's a few interesting ideas to try to implement, but many of the suggestions and lessons seem to either be a) too impractical to actually employ in real life or b) require so much discipline that you'd probably not be having the issue in the first place.

I also still think Pete Carroll made the wrong call.

Life is not the game of chess. It’s more like the poker due to the fact that there is some dose of uncertainty, fortune. This law is a spine of this book, which addresses the decision-making process.

Thinking in bets, written by Annie Duke starts off, about cognitive biases. She describes our tendency to judge decisions based on how they turn out. In other words, just because something turned out poorly does not necessarily mean that we made a bad decision. Annie provides a few really accurate examples of that.

Furthermore, the book tells about our tendency to look for the patterns where they may be none, and we often misjudge outcome with the quality of a decision.

The last 1/3 of the book is more about strategies for avoiding the psychological traps and biases. At first, we should get comfortable with... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog: https://leadersarereaders.blog/2018/11/03/thinking-in-bets-making-smarter-decisi...

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.

Derivative, trite, repetitive½

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 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.

This was fun. Not particularly impressive or moving or anything -- just a pretty straightforward discussion of her two most famous tournaments, interspersed with some discussion of her background. Interesting, and I learned quite a bit about Omaha, which is not a poker variant I was very familiar with.

This book is fabulous. It is actually three books in one. Poker tips, tournament information and biography all rolled in one. Kudos to Annie and her co writer for blowing the curtains off of televised poker. This book cured me of ever wanting to be a poker pro.
Note: The back of the book contains a poker glossary and mini bios of poker pros that you make have seen on t.v. It is a extra bonus not to pass up.

I found this book just Ok, her life as a poker player is definitely interesting, but I felt the book was missing something