A poker great refused to hear about her bad luck

Annie Duke had just been knocked out of a poker tournament, and she knew exactly what had happened. She had been unlucky. She walked over to her friend Eric Seidel, one of the most successful poker players in the world with more than $38 million in career winnings, to tell him about it.

Duke, a former graduate student in cognitive science who had become a professional player at age 26, was doing what poker players call moaning, complaining about bad luck for sympathy. She was looking for comfort and for confirmation that she had played well.

Seidel would not give it to her. Seidel said, "why are you telling me this," saying that "if you really lost because of bad luck" there is "nothing to be learned from it so" please do "not offload your emotional distress onto me." If you have a question about strategy, he added, I am all ears.

The cold answer changed how Duke played the hands that followed. She began to see the difference between reasoning to be right, which means defending what you already believe, and reasoning to be accurate, which means trying to build the truest picture of what happened, even if it makes you look bad.

Reasoning to be right felt good in the moment. It protected her image of herself as a smart player, and it won sympathy. But it taught her nothing. Reasoning to be accurate was harder, because it required asking whether she had misplayed the hand, whether an opponent had simply outplayed her, and whether the loss was her fault.

Seidel enforced the second kind of thinking. He would not reward complaints about luck. He would reward a good question. So Duke started watching herself differently while she was still at the table. Instead of sorting hands into I got unlucky and I am so smart, she started hunting for mistakes, for spots she did not understand, and for opponents who might be better than she was. Those were the things she could bring back to him.

Then something else happened. When Duke returned and said, "I think I really butchered a hand," Seidel engaged. He talked through the hand with her, took her seriously, and treated the admission as smart, not weak. That praise became a new reward, replacing the old reward of being told she was just unlucky.

When she goes back to him with hands to review, she says, "I think I really made a mistake."