Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
4/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.
In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck?
Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?
Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes.
By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate and successful in the long run.
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Reviews for Thinking in Bets
260 ratings20 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Derivative, trite, repetitive
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There is no guaranteed bet in life.
Liked this title from the first second.
Great Book! :) - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5content can be summed up in 10min... too much dilution
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thoughtful, yet a bit repetitive book about truthiness, objectivity and uncertainty.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An easy to understand guide to probabilistic thinking to avoid fooling ourselves and "we're the easiest person to fool ourselves"
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Surprisingly great. Will help you think more clearly and make better decisions.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It gives you a new perspective thar I haven't considered before. I recommend it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good book but can be a bit basic if you know a lot about investing
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Don't think im binary true/false but instead think in increments 1-10 (how right you are). In the book, more details about why and how to do so.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Was a bit dense, sometimes boring, couldn’t finish even though I usually finish complex books.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A masterpiece on logical thinking and improved decision-making.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot of new things. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some good ideas. Could have been shorter but worth the time.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I learned a lot. Very useful and good examples. Practical tips for making decisions in life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book has such high wisdom density that it'll knock you out in it's very first chapter. Every round after that the book beats your mental defaults and thinking mistakes to a pulp while it's rebuilding the new you. After all the pain you endure through this book by reviewing your life's decisions the twist ending is, you, the imperfect self emerges as the winner. I highly recommend this for anyone looking to make better choices in life and I'm willing to bet on my recommendation!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A good topic and some nice insights, but a lot of repetition took away from this book. Skimming the print version would make more sense.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Examples from american football, loads of fluff and no real life insights. Also the voice its very high pitch for the recording, it makes difficult to hear it on a speed mode.
3 people found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5What an annoying voice. Being a great author doesn't mean you are good voice actor. Could not listen for long as the author's voice sounded like an obnoxious snob bragging about her achievements.
1 person found this helpful