THINKING IN BETS

Here poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.

Even the best decision doesn’t yield the best outcome every time. There’s always an element of luck that you can’t control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?

Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it’s difficult to say “I'm not sure” in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don’t always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don’t always lead to bad outcomes.
By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don’t, you’ll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You’ll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.

SOUGHT-AFTER EXPERT: Annie Duke is a regularly sought out expert on decision-making and risk. She’s been interviewed by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times and appeared in NPR’s Radiolab, Slate, Fast Company, Wired, Forbes, Reason, USA Today, The Moth, and other publications.

HUGE PROFESSIONAL AUDIENCE: Duke is a frequent speaker and consultant for companies like Marriott, Citi Bank, Bank of America, and Pandora.

Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the winner of the 2004 Tournament of Champions and the only woman to win the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. Now, as a professional speaker and decision strategist, she merges her poker expertise with her cognitive psychology graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that creates curricula and tools to improve decision making and critical thinking skills for under-served students.