Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
- Published2019
- Read in 2026
- Genre Management
Synopsis
A professional poker player with a phd in psychology explains how poker helped her in life as well.
The big ideas that I took from the book ( and other ideas I reminded myself by opening the book now are ):
- bad decisions and bad outcomes are 2 separate things yet we mix them together often
- most decisions are actually bets: risks taken with chances of failure and rewards, that's why poker is better than chess
- my favorite parts was the time travelling: pre-mortems, backcasting, and the 10 (days) - 10 (months) - 10 (years) from now what will I think
- avoid being influenced by recent emotions
- being less wrong over time is the goal of learning and growth
The big ideas that I took from the book ( and other ideas I reminded myself by opening the book now are ):
- bad decisions and bad outcomes are 2 separate things yet we mix them together often
- most decisions are actually bets: risks taken with chances of failure and rewards, that's why poker is better than chess
- my favorite parts was the time travelling: pre-mortems, backcasting, and the 10 (days) - 10 (months) - 10 (years) from now what will I think
- avoid being influenced by recent emotions
- being less wrong over time is the goal of learning and growth
My take
I enjoyed part of the book. Like most self-help books, it doesn't allow to have daily small steps to grow or really embody the knowledge, it did though convinced me of some tools ( pre-mortems for example ) or made me think in a frequent manner about endings/quality of decisions