Notes on Maria Konnikova’s book
Ingo Fiedler (an economist) analyzed hundreds of thousands of online poker hands and found that (a) the actual best hand only won 12 percent of the time and (b) less than one-third of hands went to showdown.
Kant, from Critique of Pure Reason: betting is an antidote to false confidence from wanting to see everything as black and white (certainly THIS or certainly THAT). Once you have a stake in something, you start to regard odds (uncertainly THIS/THAT) with a lot more reverence.
“Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning. It’s why kids learn so much better – and remember what they’ve learned – if they know exactly how or when they’ll apply the knowledge.”
This is why the betting in poker is “a powerful window into probabilistic thinking.” You develop an understanding of the odds because if you don’t, it hurts you. In this way, betting/having stakes in something can be crucial to improving.
Other ideas: that poker is more skill than investing (evidenced by more significant margins of gains between the “skilled” and the “non-skilled” in poker than in investing); that an absence of ego is important for looking at things objectively (e.g. what was good or bad about your own decisions) so that you can learn from your losses; that when people win early, they end up with the illusion of control (coin-flipping experiment: when students were told that their early predictions for a series of coin tosses were frequently correct, they found themselves believing that they were good at predicting coin tosses and could improve at it with time).
“Less certainty, more inquiry.”