Keeping poker-faced is no use – it’s the hands that give the game away

This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a hand of poker in her life. She has read, re-read, dissected and annotated poker textbooks. She has scribbled notes while trying to keep up with her power-walking mentor, the poker legend Erik Seidel, as he tells her she’ll need to develop the ability to be reckless. This is a swot’s progress, a fish-out-of-water experiment. It’s hard to imagine her taking on, say, Devilfish in Vegas. As she finally joins a charity tournament on page 115, I’ll admit to thinking, this had better go somewhere.

And it does. Within 18 months she has turned pro, recruited by Poker Stars after winning an $84,000 trophy and another $60,000 game. She becomes one of the top five women tournament players of 2018. The wager paid off: Maria Konnikova asked if diligence, intelligence and training could conquer chance, bluff and mind games — and the answer was a triumphant yes. A welcome story for a generation questioning the ‘work hard and prosper’ promise of the American dream.

Konnikova is a popular psychology writer (the New Yorker, Scientific American) who studied under the most prominent exponents of the genre: Stephen Pinker at Harvard and Walter ‘Marshmallow Test’ Mischel whe supervised her PhD at Columbia. Lumpy academic tags — ‘the description-experience gap’, ‘the ludic fallacy’, ‘internal vs external locus’ — are expertly integrated here, concealed vegetables in her easily digestible prose.

Her interest was sparked by the unfairness of life — idiopathic illness striking at random, her husband’s start-up failing, and so on. ‘I wanted to tame luck, through poker,’ she writes. Based on John von Neumann’s game theory, her PhD experiment mocked up a city trading model and showed that a ‘blank slate’ beginner who learns cautiously is better than a falsely confident pro: hence her determinedly slow start at poker.