The Poker Player Who Taught Us to Think in Bets

It is 1 February 2015, and this is the Super Bowl, the biggest game in American football. More than 100 million people are watching on TV. The Seattle Seahawks are losing 28–24 to the New England Patriots. But Seattle has the ball, just one yard from scoring. There are 26 seconds left.

Almost everyone expects Seattle to run with the ball. They have one of the strongest runners in the game, Marshawn Lynch. Instead, the coach, Pete Carroll, calls a pass. The quarterback throws. The ball is caught, but by a New England player. The game is over. Seattle has lost.

The reaction was brutal. Newspapers, TV experts and angry fans all said the same thing: it was the worst decision in Super Bowl history. For weeks, Carroll was one of the most criticised men in America.

But one person watching disagreed. Her name was Annie Duke, and for almost twenty years she had made difficult decisions for a living, with real money on the table.

Annie Lederer was born in 1965 in New Hampshire, in the United States. Her father taught English and wrote popular books about language. She studied English and psychology at Columbia University. Then she started a PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. That's the science of how people think, learn and make decisions.

She was close to finishing when she became seriously ill. She left the university and moved to Montana with her husband, and money was short. Her older brother, Howard, was a professional poker player. He suggested that she try poker. Soon she was playing in a bar in the town of Billings, and winning.

She quickly realised that poker was a real-life laboratory for everything she had studied. Every hand is a decision made without all the facts. You can't see the other players' cards. You can play perfectly and still lose. You can play badly and still win. The good players are not the ones who win every hand. They're the ones who make good bets again and again, and accept that luck decides the rest.

She became one of the best players in the world, in a game where almost all the top players were men. In 2004 she won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and a prize of two million dollars. In 2012 she left professional poker, and started teaching people how to make better decisions.

In 2018 she published her book, Thinking in Bets. It begins with Pete Carroll's pass. Her argument is that the call was not nearly as bad as people said. Over many seasons, passes thrown from one yard out were almost never caught by the other team, only about 2% of the time. A pass that fails also stops the clock, so Seattle would still have had time for two more tries. If a Seattle player had caught that ball, the same newspapers would have called Carroll a genius. Same decision, different luck.

Duke has a name for judging a decision only by its result: resulting. We all do it. A friend drives home after drinking, arrives safely, and decides it was fine. A company makes a careless choice, gets lucky, and calls it strategy. A doctor makes a careful choice, the patient dies anyway, and the doctor blames herself.

Her solution is to treat every decision as a bet on an uncertain future. The mathematician John von Neumann, who invented game theory, said that real life is more like poker than chess. In chess you can see everything. In poker, and in life, some information is always hidden, and luck always plays a part. So instead of asking "Did it work?", we should ask better questions. What did I know at the time? How sure was I? What could I have learned before deciding? And was the result mostly skill, or mostly luck?