What Do You Look for in a Poker Player?

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If you meet a young person who says they want to be a top poker player, what do you look for in them? I think the number one thing really, honestly, is like, open mindedness. In order to succeed at the top levels of the game, you just have to be so open-minded. And that if you're not willing to ponder that, it's difficult rigtly....

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps.” She’s spent a lot of time studying human cognition at the poker table and off it — her best-known academic article is about psycholinguistics and her forthcoming book is titled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices.

Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded June 24th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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