Grand Slam Journey
This podcast discusses various topics around - sports, business, technology, mindset, health, fitness, and tips for growth. Topics range from what sports have taught us and how we transitioned from a singular focus and pursuit of our athletic goals and dreams to the decision to end our sports careers and move into the next phase of our lives. My guests share how they found their passion and purpose, tips for maximizing potential - holistically - physically and mentally, how they transitioned from one chapter of their lives to the next, and how to drive success in sport, business, technology, and personal life.
Grand Slam Journey
49. Annie Duke: The Power of Quitting and Exploration of Decision-Making in Poker, Tennis & Life
Sit down with us as we delve into an intriguing discussion with the brilliant Annie Duke. She navigates our listeners from the world of academia to the high-stakes realm of poker, and back, sprinkling invaluable insights along the way. The episode unfurls the hidden similarities between poker and tennis, and brings to light how the strategic game of poker has influenced her approach to tennis. We also uncover the role of skill and luck in the world of competitive games and how these elements can affect short-term outcomes.
Annie bares her personal journey as a woman in the predominantly male field of poker, bringing forth the challenges she faced and the decision that led her to quit. She enlightens us on the power of knowing when to walk away, a skill that is often overlooked. Our discussion also ventures into the purpose of betting in poker, proving that it is more than a gamble; it's a way of gathering information about your opponent.
In the concluding part of our conversation, we explore the connection between forced quitting, decision making, and opportunity costs. Annie's books serve as a backdrop as we navigate through the concept of open-mindedness and the complexity of changing beliefs. Tune in to this thought-provoking conversation that's brimming with strategies and insights from the captivating world of poker, academia, tennis, and beyond. You'll be left contemplating your own decision-making strategies and maybe even your next move in poker, or life in general.
Check out:
Annie's Website: https://www.annieduke.com/
Annie's Substack: https://annieduke.substack.com/
Annie's Podcast: The Decision Education Podcast on Apple Podcast, https://alliancefordecisioneducation.org/podcasts/
Annie's Books: https://www.annieduke.com/books/
Alliance for Decision Education: https://alliancefordecisioneducation.org/
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The thing that really brings to light is that one of the things that I think that we lose sight of when we're trying to decide Should we stop what we're doing is we don't really consider very well what we call opportunity cost, which is what are the other things I could be doing with this time? What other things could I pursue? What else could I spend this money on those kinds of questions, and I think we're pretty bad at considering those things. Well, when you're forced to quit, you have to consider those things. You don't have a choice but to consider them, and what you find out is you know what. There's a lot of good stuff out here.
Klara Jagosova:Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Green Slam Journey podcast, where I, together with my guests, discuss various topics related to finding our passion and purpose, maximizing our potential, sports, life after sports and transitioning from one chapter of our lives to the next, growing our skills and leadership in whatever we decide to put our minds into. For my guest today, areas of decision making under uncertainty and education. If you're someone who's been following poker or you're a fan of how to make better decisions, my guest today needs no introduction. I bring you any Duke. Annie loves to dive deep into decision making under uncertainty. Her latest obsession is on the topic of quitting. I love her book quit the power of knowing when to walk away In this book inspired one of my conversations with Anna and Dana, episode number 41, if you want to go back and re listen to it after this episode. Annie is an out there speaker and consultant in the decision making space, as well as special partner focused on decision science at first around capital partners, a seed stage venture fund. In his latest book, quit, the power of knowing when to walk away, was released in 2022. Her previous book, thinking in beds, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than four million in tournament poker. During her career, annie won a world series of poker bracelets and is the only woman to have won the world series of poker tournament of champions and the NBC national poker heads up championship. She retired from the game in 2012. And yet she still remains among some of the top women that have won the most amount of money, even though she has not been competing for over a decade. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, annie was awarded a national science foundation fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Annie is the co founder of the Alliance for Decision Education and on profit, whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. She is a member of the national board of after school all stars and the board of directors of the Franklin Institute and serves on the board of the Renew democracy initiative. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a few months and it has been such a joy having any on the podcast During this conversation.
Klara Jagosova:During this conversation, annie shares her journey from academia to poker and back to academia and how her a brilliant prepared her for career in poker accidentally, which at the time was not something at all. She could have even foreseen or aspiring to become, and then finding her path back to teaching and research, which were her first passions. You may not know this, but any really enjoys the game of tennis, and so I thought it would be a great opportunity to dive into some of the similarities and differences between tennis and poker. We then talk through some poker strategies and how we could apply them to tennis, particularly shot selection and strategic thinking. Any emphasizes the importance of doing what works rather than what looks good, and discusses how players should adjust their approach based on their level of skill, whether you're a poker player or a tennis player. And then we also dive into handling stress and high stakes situation. Annie explains how keeping opponents guessing is crucial and emphasizes the importance of viewing chips as tools and how this mindset can help players make better decisions. And we also talk about the importance of maintaining focus and calmness in high stakes situations. That applies to all poker, tennis and life. Any emphasizes the need to focus on task at hand and not get caught up in the overall outcome, and to make the right play regardless of past wins or losses. Wouldn't be great if this was the motto for our life overall. We also explore some of the challenges for women in poker and women in male dominated fields in general. She also discusses the low percentage of female entrance in the World Series of poker and shares her personal experience from the poker tour.
Klara Jagosova:Last but not least, we dive into Annie's decision to quit and her journey post poker writing fantastic book. I highly recommend you check it out, such as her latest book quit the power of knowing when to walk away, how to decide and thinking in bets. Please check out the episode notes for all of the resources and mentioned in the podcast. As always, if you enjoyed this conversation, please share it forward with someone you believe may enjoy it as well. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
Klara Jagosova:And now I bring you Annie Duke. Annie, thank you so much for accepting my invitation to Grand Slam Journey podcast. I've been such a huge fan of yours and all your work and all you do and literally have been looking forward to this conversation for a few months. When your admin told me that you accepted, I literally had to run out of the house and do a happy dance. I had such a big rush of energy, and so I hope this will be fun for both of us and look forward to diving into all the work that you do, including your poker career. That obviously relates a lot into decision making, as well as tennis, because I've heard on one of your podcasts that your dad, and perhaps you, are a tennis player, so which that's my upbringing and where I come from.
Annie Duke:Oh, ok, well, we'll have to definitely talk about tennis. I was playing tennis this morning, as a matter of fact.
Klara Jagosova:Oh same here.
Annie Duke:Oh my God, because why my hair is up like this?
Klara Jagosova:Exactly Awesome, awesome. But for any one listening who may actually not know you I hope there are not many people I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself briefly.
Annie Duke:I'm Annie Duke. I have a PhD in cognitive science. A strange journey with the PhD because when I was right out of college I went to University of Pennsylvania and did five years worth of my PhD work there in cognitive science. At the time Got sick literally right at the end. I mean I was going out for my job talk, so I was, had already gotten a set interviews for tenure track positions, but I got sick. I had a stomach issue that caused me to have to take time off. So during that time off I needed money and I started playing poker. So I did not go back at that time to the program for my PhD.
Annie Duke:I actually ended up continuing to play poker and just kind of had a knack for it and really loved poker because it was very much like a high stakes, real time decision making exercise, which was real practical application of the kinds of things that I've been studying in cognitive science about learning under uncertainty and decision making under uncertainty. So I played poker for 18 years, ended up with some championships, which was really nice. I won a World Series of Poker bracelet and the NBC National Heads Up Championship. At one point I was the winningest woman in poker not anymore since I retired in 2012. There's lots of people who have passed me I think I might be number five now, I'm not sure, but I haven't played since 2012 and there are lots of women who are much better than I am now but overlapping.
Annie Duke:With my poker career for about 10 years I actually dove back into cognitive science and started thinking about the way that poker and cognitive science could really inform each other. So the way that those two disciplines had like a really interesting conversation where not just the cognitive science could really help you understand the problem that poker was presenting, but more importantly, from the perspective of what I was exploring, the way that poker could really help to inform the cognitive science. And I started thinking about that for 10 years I started giving talks on that topic, sort of diving back into writing on it, and then retired from poker in 2012 because I really wanted to write a book on that topic, which ended up being thinking in bets, which I was lucky enough people were interested in it and ended up being a national bestseller. I was really thinking about decisions as bats and how. That's a really helpful frame for thinking about decision making under uncertainty.
Annie Duke:Ended up back teaching at Wharton doing research with Bill Tatlock and Barb Mellors back at Penn, and then I started thinking about the way that poker could really help you understand the problem. And then wrote two more books how to Decide and then quit the power of knowing when to walk away which came out in October 2023. That was also the bestseller, which was exciting, and in the meantime sort of during that period, I was deep into research with Bill Tatlock and Barb Mellors on forecasting. That ended up turning into a dissertation, which then allowed me to complete my PhD, which just happened this year.
Klara Jagosova:Congratulations. That's my journey. I love it and I feel there's so much in the journey to unpack, so look forward to diving into many aspects. But before we do, I'm also always curious about how we uncover at least our first passion in life. And so what drove you to poker? Actually, did some research. It seems like you grew up in Concord, new Hampshire, and your family was quite big in cards. But I want to hear from you how was your upbringing and how do you believe that childhood prepared you for then, later on, your personal poker career, which you probably haven't even foreseen coming at that point?
Annie Duke:Well, I certainly went to foreseen it because you know, I think that people forget, since poker has been pretty ubiquitous on television for 20 years now, obviously internet poker has been a big thing for at least 15 years, more than that probably. So most people growing up now the poker is like a legitimate profession, like something that people could actually do for a living. When I was growing up, there was no such thing like poker, wasn't on television, there actually wasn't an internet, to be fair, so there was certainly no internet poker and it was very firmly in the category of gambling, even though poker is not gambling by definition. Gambling means trying to win when you are at a mathematical disadvantage, and some people play poker at a mathematical disadvantage, certainly, but it is a game of skill and so there's lots of people who play poker at a mathematical advantage, which means they are not gambling, at least definitionally, right. But when I was growing up there was no like oh, maybe I'll be a poker player when I grow up, because I think that the way people would react to that would be somewhere between maybe I'll be a professional craps player or maybe I'll just be a drug dealer, right, like kind of in the same category. So certainly didn't cross my mind.
Annie Duke:My dad was an academic, is an academic. He was a teacher at the school actually that I went to high school at during my childhood. He actually went and got his PhD and linguistics and he ended up being a writer writing about words and language and just really loved words and language. So academics was kind of something that was revered when I was growing up and I think that I always just kind of assumed that I would be some sort of academic and following those footsteps. That being said, our social time as a family was spent playing cards and games. My dad and mom met over a game of bridge and they continued to play bridge when I was growing up and we played lots of gin and a game called oh hell, which is a little bit of a simpler version of bridge, but like Scrabble, things like that. It's not even a poker, not a lot, but we probably played card games four nights a week, I would say so this was really woven into the fabric of our family. So certainly that had to have helped with becoming a poker player, because there are just certain things that you understand about playing a game where, like, information is hidden, there's an influence of luck, and in any card game that's going to be true, because you can't see your opponent's cards and any of the games that we would have been playing, and there's a random deal of the cards, so you're sort of learning how to navigate that space whenever you're playing cards. I think it's actually very helpful for understanding sort of the probabilistic nature of the world and what's like to make decisions without information.
Annie Duke:I think that that definitely prepared me for what I ended up doing, but it wasn't something that I would have planned. It's not something where I would have said my passion is to be a card player, I think because the opportunity wasn't available to me and even so, like I don't know that I would have ever said that that was the thing that I wanted to do with my life, because I think that I really didn't want to be an academic and a teacher and I think that that was something that was very important to me and I always sort of had felt that way. So the accident that occurred, which was me getting sick and just needing money and thinking that I'm going to do something in my time off my childhood definitely prepared me for that. But poker wasn't my first passion. Teaching was my first passion. Research was my first passion. There's no question about that, and I think that the way that I know that is that, even though I found this other passion, which was poker, pretty quickly actually eight years in I found my way back to teaching because when I was giving talks to companies I'm essentially giving lectures, we just give a different word to it, like I'm giving a talk, a keynote speech, something like that to a company, and so I started thinking in that space and how do I actually teach these concepts now that I have this different platform?
Annie Duke:And I did that for 10 years. And then writing a book is teaching and exploring your own ideas, which is part of what makes teaching really exciting is that you have to explore your own ideas in order to get to the point where you can't. And so I started teaching these concepts in order to communicate them to other people. And then I ended up back at Wharton. I teach executive ed there. Then I ended up back doing research, continuing to write in an academic way, and even when I was in poker, I taught poker. So that's clearly that first passion that I had, and I've just found different ways to express it, but I would have never ended up playing poker when it occurred to me to find this sort of secondary thing that I was very passionate about.
Klara Jagosova:I think that's interesting, and what comes into mind is the quote from Steve Jobs you can't ever connect the dots Looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. And it really seems like serendipitously, in good or bad way, in some shape or form, it happens that the world pulled you into this game of poker, which seemed like at that moment the best option you have had to survive financially. And then it's so beautiful how you used that journey of poker which is making decisions and uncertainty. I'm using your words. I've listened to many of your podcasts which I never thought about poker that way, actually, until I've heard you talk about it. And then you apply it back to how we think and how we make decisions, and I again left over your book, so I hope we dive into all of that soon. But I'm also curious about your tennis background, because I've heard on another podcast that your dad was a tennis player. Have you played any sports or tennis when you were young, or was that?
Annie Duke:later on. Okay, so my dad was a tennis player until this year, so he just turned 85 and he has gone to the dark side and he's playing pickleball Wow. And the reason is that his rotator cuffs are kind of shot and so it's very hard for him to bring his hands over his head, which makes pickleball more ideal. The other problem is he's 85 and it's just hard for him to get a foursome together when, as if he goes over to pickleball, there's always like 80 people waiting. You know he can always get a pickleball game, so he resisted for a very long time.
Klara Jagosova:I'm resisting to pickleball. So far too, I'm totally resisting.
Annie Duke:I won't do it. I mean no offense to pickleball players, but I sneer at you. But he has now pickleball is what he plays, but he played until he was 85. Amazing, and he was really good. So I did play some tennis when I was little. The thing about my dad and I'm sure that this certainly influenced me as an academic or me as a poker player is that my dad really likes to win. He even likes to win when he's playing against someone who's like four.
Klara Jagosova:Oh, my dad was the same way.
Annie Duke:By the way, it seems like we share the upbringing, so when I was learning tennis, it was before they had red ball, orange ball, green ball. Not only that, I was learning on clay, where you know the bounce is quite high, yes. And so I was little and I was short, and my dad was six, four and I'm sure he was trying to feed the ball to me, but it was bouncing over my head. How I wish they had red balls. It would have made it a lot better. You know, I took lessons until I was eight, but then, when I was eight, every picture of me when I was little I'm upside down, like every picture I'm on my head, and so I think my parents when I was eight were like she's always upside down, we should put her in gymnastics. So I went into gymnastics and that took out all the tennis time away, because not only did I do gymnastics during the year, but I also went to camp, to gymnastics camp. Wow, you're a serious gymnast. I was a serious gymnast, yeah, like I wasn't an elite gymnast. So they have different ways that they categorize it now, but at the time that was class beginner, class three, class two, class one and then elite, and I was class one. Wow, I was good, but I wasn't like amazing, but I loved it. I was too tall to ever be super amazing, but I did love it. And from eight to 14, that's really what I did was gymnastics, which meant that tennis was very, very, very occasional. But I loved gymnastics.
Annie Duke:And then when I was in high school I played soccer, I rode crew and so I was always doing athletic stuff. Then I went to college in New York City. Any exercise I was getting was dancing at clubs. So I wasn't exercising in college except for I was doing a lot of dancing. But then when I went to graduate school, my advisor actually really loved tennis and there were some other graduate students who really liked tennis. So I actually started playing a lot of tennis in graduate school. I would play singles with my advisor, singles with some of the other players, and then occasionally I would partner with my advisor for doubles Sad for her, because I had never really played doubles in my life so I didn't know how to play the net. So I'm sure I was a terrible doubles player, although at the time I didn't know it. It was fine because I think maybe, like the people she was playing with were three O's. So just because, like I was young and I played tennis in my life, was enough. And then, like many people, I started having babies, and tennis takes a long time and it's hard to do, but I was always exercising in some way, exercise as very integral to my life.
Annie Duke:And then, about 11 years ago, I was dating my now husband and he asked me right at the beginning. He was like, do you play tennis? And I said, well, yeah, but I haven't played in like 15 years or something Like I'm sure I'm going to be terrible at it, but you know, like I mean, I had a tennis racket in my hand when I was three, so there's only so terrible that you can be able to play tennis for you know, even if it was sporadically throughout your whole life. So we went out and we played a little singles and he called me a hustler because I had given him such a thing about how I had him played in a while. But I realized like, oh my gosh, I really love it. And my kids were starting to be a little bit older, like being in school, because my youngest at that point was 10. And so now it's like there's more time and space in the day and I had more time and I started getting back into tennis and since then, like I play almost every day Wow, impressive, got totally back into it.
Annie Duke:My dad is so happy because it was his thing. And my sister, who was very good when we were young she got to be number two 12 year old in New Hampshire, the state that I grew up in she really dropped it, so none of his kids really ended up playing tennis. So when I took it back up, he was like so thrilled, he was so happy. I was like I'm so happy you get to share this joy that I've had for my whole life.
Annie Duke:And then my sister actually just took it back up, which makes him really happy. And, like my dad was really good. He was an amateur but he was always like the city champion and then the state champion and both doubles and singles, and then it would be like New England regional champion and both doubles and singles, and he was like he was a great player, he played in college and so he was just like he was so happy that we ended up doing this. And so now, like my exercise really comes mainly from tennis. I stopped all the other stuff, but I can still do like a cartwheel.
Klara Jagosova:I feel like gymnastics is such a great thing to prepare you for life overall because you learn to use your whole body. I did gymnastics for a while. They dropped me early because they realized I was never a talent. And looking at my family, six foot tall gymnast nobody's ever seen. So that doesn't happen often.
Annie Duke:I'm saying I was too tall and I'm only five, five now, and I was very clearly too tall. I will say that when I'm playing tennis and now I love the net.
Annie Duke:I'm actually it's my preferred place to be, which I was terrified of before. But people always say, oh, you play very tall. That's great. But it's because I can jump really high in the air from back in my gymnastics days so I can jump and I'm very flexible so I can get my arms sort of out of my joint to get a high ball. But yeah, the tall thing in gymnastics does not mix.
Klara Jagosova:Yes, I think I realized that early on. I was never really great at the competition and probably didn't have the inborn sort of even the feel of you know, when you fall back you got to get up and shake things off, which is such a great skill again for life, right Overall, but I don't think I had the pain tolerance. I think gymnasts are on another level when it comes to tolerating pain and what you put your body through then tennis players Well, yes, we are in pain a lot.
Annie Duke:if you're a gymnast, it's true.
Klara Jagosova:I do just want to comment. We talked we both play tennis. This morning I played doubles with some newfound friends that I'm trying to create a community here in Austin and right next to me where four men they were 91 years old and playing. How amazing If I'll be able to do this when I'm 91, I'm going to call my life a success. So kudos to your dad, and I actually commend him on sticking with it and knowing when to quit and change seems like as well.
Annie Duke:Yeah, I think the really wonderful thing about tennis which is very different than something like gymnastics is that you can play through your whole life. And what my coach says obviously this wouldn't be true for somebody who's on a professional tour, but for an amateur he said you can keep getting better until you're 70. Assuming your body can take it right, you can keep getting better until you're 70 and then at 70, obviously you're probably going to break down a little and start going backwards. So you have lots of runway and the fact is that there's a rating system so you can match up against people who are going to be the right level for you, and so even if you do start sort of going the wrong direction, that's fine, because you can find people who are at that level.
Annie Duke:And the other thing that I love about it because it is by level is that some of my best friends are 20 years younger than me, because we're at the same level and I partner with people because we make good partners, and so it's very age neutral, which I also really like.
Annie Duke:You're as likely to be hanging out with a 30 year old is like there's some great players who are 70 you get to play with. The other thing is that it's such a social sport, which I also think is really wonderful. So for me it's a way to really meet people who I know are going to have a much higher likelihood of having characteristics that I would be attracted to in a friend, because if you play tennis, you're going to tend to be pretty competitive, you're going to like to be athletic, you want to be moving around, you're going to tend to be a little bit on the perfectionist side, to be honest, and so I know I'm picking from a group of people that I'm probably going to be more likely to get along with and like to actually form real friendships with. So I just think it's a wonderful game and totally love it, and my dad is so happy if he hears this.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, and I'm curious about the connection that you see or don't see between poker and tennis, because when I was young, growing up, the saying has been on a tennis court, you need to have a poker face.
Klara Jagosova:So nobody should know what you're thinking, what you're feeling. It actually helps you with the strategy If the opponent doesn't know that you're in pain or you have negative thoughts. It actually only helps because you don't show it, and so you are actually the perfect person because you play high stakes poker and I have to say I've also seen poker as gambling kind of similar to what you described, until I started listening to you and I know there is a lot of skill to it that goes into making the right decisions. But actually listening to you speaking really helped me rethink how I consider poker and it made me think about some of the commonalities in tennis and how you play the game, because there is also a lot of the decision under uncertainty. You never know which ball is coming, and so really making the right decision what is the best shot to hit from the ball that I have on my hand? Although the timing or the swiftness of the decision, I don't know if it's the same You're better to comment. How do you see the two commonalities or differences?
Annie Duke:So the way that you figure out if a game is a game of skill, one of the simplest ways is to ask if somebody can lose on purpose. So if you think about something like the lottery and I'm assuming you're following the rules right, so you're filling out your ticket and you're actually giving it to the shopkeeper you cannot lose on purpose. You can't create a situation where you have a higher likelihood to lose than somebody else who is filling out their ticket. That's not true in tennis. If you wanted to lose a match in tennis on purpose, you could, and if I wanted to lose at poker on purpose, I could Now notice I did not say that what tells you if something is skill is that you can win on purpose. Right, because we know in tennis you can't win on purpose. It depends on who you're playing, and I can't win in poker on purpose. Okay, so let's just identify that, and that's going to separate games of skill from games of luck. So, like backer, for example, which is a casino game, is a game of luck because you can't do anything to make you more likely to lose than somebody else, because the bets are sort of automatic, right, so there's nothing that you can do to make yourself lose. So now we understand that. So then what we can next say is yes, it's a game of skill, but the question is how much luck is involved in the short term outcome, and that's going to tell us, kind of like, how much volatility matters. How big of a skill gap do you need before you're going to get like a really clear results in the short run. So in a game like tennis, what we can think about is this just true with any game is that the narrower the skill gap, the more the element of luck determines the outcome. So let's think about this for tennis If I take the number one player in the world and they're playing the number thousand player in the world, the number one player will win every single time. So this is now a very large skill gap where luck is playing very little role in the outcome. That's not to say that there are luck things that are happening Balls might be hitting the net court and falling one way or the other, which we know is very much a matter of luck, so on, so forth but the appearance of luck is very small because skill is really determining that outcome. But if I take number one versus number two. Now we really narrow the skill gap and the appearance of luck is going to be much greater. Things like does Alcara cramp in the match? So that's just a matter of luck, right? So Alcara cramped at the French open. He did not cramp at Wimbledon, right? And you'll see this kind of flip flopping where sometimes Djokovic is winning, sometimes Alcara is winning, right, and it takes a lot of matches in order to actually figure out who is the more skilled. So we narrow that skill gap.
Annie Duke:So when we now think about that and we compare that to poker, basically the deal in poker is sort of twofold Thing. Number one is that there's just more luck period because you've got like this random deal of the cards right, so there's more luck. That sort of the skill gap has to overcome. So even if the number one player is playing the number 30 player, luck is going to have a much bigger influence on the outcome of that game than if the number one tennis player is playing the number 30 tennis player, just because there's more luck in general. But then the other piece is that there's a narrower gap between most of the people who are playing poker, because once you know the certain things about the game, like the betting, checking what he ends to play, things like that the things that will differentiate you are sort of smaller. So what that means is that it's going to take a longer time to figure out who the best player is, who's better than who. It's just going to appear over a longer period of time, but other than that it's the same.
Annie Duke:So it's really just about how quickly can you figure that out, which is, how much of an influence of luck is there generally in the game that the sort of skill gap has to overcome? Because if the skill gap is big enough, even though there's some luck involved, it's just not going to matter. So the way that you could think about that is that I could create a bot that played poker. That was totally unskilled, in other words, it was random in its actions. So we could think about that like two aces in the game of Texas Hold'em are the very best hand. If the bot is random in its actions, it's as likely to fold that hand as play it. A skilled player is going to beat that bot very quickly. But as soon as I start to give the bot some skills like aces are better than 7-2 and things like that it's going to be harder. So it's just, it's a longer feedback loop, but other than that, there's a lot of similarities between the two. So how can we make tennis exactly like poker Like if the net cord got involved a lot more, if there was some role of the dice that could make you randomly lose a game.
Annie Duke:So we could start to create more luck elements where, even if there was a role of a dice that could randomly make you lose the game, what we know is that if you put Alkares against the number 30 guy, that Alkares is clearly in the long run going to win because the exertion of that element of luck right, like do you win game on the role of dice is going to be distributed equally between Alkares and his opponent. But what it's going to mean is that the opponent is just more often going to win in the short run because we've added this element of luck that could just go the opponent's way. Yeah, so that's the way that you could think about that. Otherwise, they're actually incredibly similar to each other.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, Thank you. What actually came into mind this morning? I was playing against ladies and one of them kept hitting a lot of let's on the first serve and I just had an idea. It would be interesting how they would change the tennis game If the let them the serve and she kept hitting them actually in every single leg she hit. It was actually a ball in which came in in such a way you wouldn't be able to get it, and it made me think about if we were to change the rule in a way that this would now be legal and you have to play the point out.
Annie Duke:So they have in the US and NCAA and college tennis you have to play. Let's on the serve you do now?
Klara Jagosova:Oh, I didn't know, because when I played I think we still called them and they had to serve again. I have to say I don't follow tennis as much as I used to.
Annie Duke:Yeah, it's an NCAA rule now, and there's certain things like, as an example, in doubles in college, we play a superset that adds an element of luck, right? So how can we tell that it adds an element of luck? When we think about the influence of luck, what we can think about is who is it hurting, who is it helping? If you were to say, for example, should the number one player in the world, should they want to play a five setter or a superset? And the answer is very clear the number one player in the world should always choose five sets, and the reason is that the more repetitions that you have and this is true in poker as well the more repetitions you have, the more that the skill will overcome whatever luck elements there are. So if you're a bad player, you should choose a superset because you could have something good happen to you, right? You could have a lot of let's go your way. You have some good net chords, like the wind just going in your direction or whatever, right, like there's a variety of things that could happen. To help you and this is actually a very important principle is to understand that when you are an underdog, meaning that you are, the less skilled, you should choose to bring more luck into the equation, and when you are more skilled, you should want to bring less luck into the equation. So, if we think about, how would that translate to tennis where, like, I can't choose how many sets that I'm playing against somebody.
Annie Duke:If I am the less skilled player, I should be taking on more risk, meaning I should be much more aggressive. I should go for shots that are over the higher part of the net. You know, I should be going for more lines, and the reason is that if I hit that ball straight down the middle and I don't make a mistake, I will lose, right. So I could play a game against somebody who's much better than me and I could have no unforced errors, but I will lose because they will hit winners and they will give me four stairs, right. So I should be trying to up the volatility. So I should be going for more lines, which is a less reliable shot. I should be going over the higher part of the net, more those kinds of things. And what's interesting is that in those situations, as you know from playing tennis, people tend to do the opposite. So when people feel like they're outmatched, they tend to try to play safe tennis, and it's actually the opposite of the way that you should react in that situation.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, I agree what this comment made me think about. I'm actually now wondering even how does your poker decision making skills and all the studies you have done now influence your tennis strategy? So when you play against people that are at least a similar level, do you see that because you're able to measure probabilities better and you've kind of trained this in a high stakes poker table, you were able to make the more accurate decision? So when it comes to some of the important points, do you see that it helps you perform?
Annie Duke:Yeah, I think these things are hard to say. I mean, what I would say is like what my partners would say about me, which is like I've good shot selection, which was not surprising, I guess, given what my background is. I think that I construct points well, but that is definitely a poker skill, because in poker you have to play on many, many moves ahead, and so I tend to be like a point constructor. So nobody who watched me play would describe me as somebody who's just like a really hard hitter. The way that I play tennis is much more like thinking many shots ahead, trying to really figure out what my opponent's weaknesses are and going for that, and I think one of the things and I definitely attribute this to poker is that I am always fine choosing a shot that someone else might not think is a high level shot. So an example is that there's a certain point in tennis where I think that people think that lobbing is for silly people who are very good.
Klara Jagosova:I hate lobs. It's such a skill to have an amazing lob, but I'm not a lobber. But there's many people who lob me and I was angry. I was like how is that even possible?
Annie Duke:But I think that people don't think about it as like a good shot or an offensive shot. It's not like that ridiculous power forehand that's going to rip through the middle. And so I find that there's a lot of people who are reluctant to lob a lot because they sort of feel like it makes them look like a bad player. And for me I'm like, if the lob is the right shot, I'm going to hit a lob, I don't care, I'm just going to go over your head and maybe it doesn't look like the most fabulous shot, but in my mind it's the right strategic shot which makes it a fabulous shot.
Annie Duke:And I remember playing a match a few years ago and it was a very windy day. And if you sort of take a windy day and you decide to sort of lob to the center, depending on which side of the court you're on, you're either lobbing purposely a little bit short or purposely a little bit long. It's very hard for them to track that ball. So I must have thrown up a gazillion lobs, like I'm actually not someone who likes to let lobs bounce, but on, like a super windy day, I'll just let the lob bounce. I'll throw up another one if you happen to have gotten it Anyway. So we won that match and I came off and my opponents were just very angry at me and basically insulted me by being like nice lobbing.
Klara Jagosova:Wow, that's kind of weird. I hate that type of behavior.
Annie Duke:Nice lobbing Right and I was like, okay, nice, lobbing, whatever. So I think that there's this thing that comes from playing poker, which is that you do the thing that is strategically correct, and it doesn't really matter whether your opponents admire your game or think you're incredible or that what you did is so amazing, because you're actually sort of trying to stay under the radar and you don't necessarily want people to notice what you're doing. And that's not to say that there are things that I do on the tennis court where people are afraid to hit a shot to me because they kind of know that a scary shot is going to come back to them. I mean, obviously that's just true, and that's true at poker as well. But I want to do what works, not what looks good. Yeah, you know, I think that's the biggest sort of lesson that I take from poker over to tennis is like do what works, not what looks good, yeah.
Klara Jagosova:I think there's so much wisdom in that and I wish I learned that wisdom even earlier, when I was still really competing in tennis. It takes certain, I think, maturity, and maybe that comes with getting to know yourself and being okay with what others think is obviously a right decision.
Annie Duke:I'll tell you like a shot like that is chipping. Yes, it looks like such a like oh, you're just starting the point, but it's not. It's a great way to get yourself into the net and a lot of people don't like a chip because it's low, particularly if you chip to the back end. But it's not a power return that like goes flying, like off into the corner of the court and I think people don't like to use that shot because I think they think it looks sort of silly. I love to chip because I think it's very effective.
Klara Jagosova:It is. There is not much you can do from that shot. I have to say I'm more of a power hitter, so I go for the big shots. I've never been the touchy-feely person and that probably comes a little bit with. I think there was a certain level of style. Now, as I look back, that we're taught most of the time in specific countries and so, being from the Czech Republic, I think if you look at all the Czech tennis players, we have a powerful game. Typically, we create the game, and so that's sort of the style that we have been taught.
Annie Duke:What I would say about that is obviously, if you can hit a hard enough ball, you're going to win that way. So that's the right ball for you to hit. It's not the right ball for me to hit, because I don't have that power.
Klara Jagosova:I never liked the chipper. I have to say Right, so that's why I chip?
Annie Duke:because the chipper deals with people like you. Yes, but if I could hit the ball that hard, obviously I would be hitting the ball that hard more. Now, by the way, if you hit it to my backhand, you will get a very hard ball back. You just won't get a very hard ball back from my forehand. So I'm sort of lopsided, you know, when I say, like I want to choose the shot that works, not the shot that makes me feel good.
Annie Duke:I should amend that and say choose the shot that works for you. Yes, right, because if I could power that ball right down the middle, of course I would, but I can only do it on one side. I can't do it on the other side, even though I practice the other side a lot. I just it's not my thing, it's for whatever reason. I probably started too late to really develop that. So I think it's like know what your own game is, know what your own strengths are, know what your opponents don't like, because the other thing is, I'm sure you hit the ball very hard, but I'm sure that you come across opponents who like that. Yeah.
Annie Duke:At which point you have to say, yes, I can hit the ball really hard, but my opponents happen to really like it, so I can still hit the ball hard, but I better put some height on it, for example, right. So you have to like start changing it. To get to your opponents within what are the things that you're good at, and I think that that's what's really important. It's like know what your skill set is, know what you're good at, and know what your opponents don't like, more so than what you like to hit. What do your opponents not like?
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, I agree, I think that's where really my game elevated, when I started more broadening what strokes I hit, adding much more spin and really being strategic of when you hit hard versus when you spin up and do a deep lob, because that variety makes people always guessing. So if you always play the same game it's going to become predictable. But switching things up that's when you always have opponent oh which shot he's going to hit now, or even on serve is one of the easiest, like even kicking instead of the first serve. So really doing a variety of different serves I think it's very effective, and always switching it up so the opponent keeps guessing. I feel like we have a match coming up. If you come visit Austin, we should play.
Annie Duke:Yes, well, I think you're clearly much better than I am, so we could play, but I hopefully you would be on my side of the court. Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that I tried to think about is, like, what's the purpose of the shot? Right, if you have, like a huge power forehand, I think about the purpose of that shot is to push your opponents back, to open up the angle, to open up the slice, because they're not expecting it, because you can then totally get them off rhythm and you can keep them back so that when you hit them short, they can't actually hit anything good off that, so that you can set up that ball to be able to really put it away. And the thing is and it's true in poker, no matter how good you are at something, if you do the exact same thing over and over again, your opponent is going to get used to it, they're going to get rhythm and you're going to find out it's not going to work very well. So what's true and if you think about decision making under uncertainty, is that you have to keep people guessing. Yes, and that means like hitting different spins, for example. Right, like, you have to always keep people guessing, and poker is all about keeping people guessing, because the thing that you don't want ever your opponent to be able to do when you're playing poker is to be able to map perfectly the bet that you make to the hand that you have. So, like in the simplest sense, you can think about what's the purpose of a bluff.
Annie Duke:And people think that the purpose of bluffing is to win the pot without the best hand, and certainly like that's part of it. If you hit a drop shot, part of the purpose of that is you're hoping that your opponent is not going to get to it for sure. But the main purpose of bluffing is not about winning the hand right then. It's about making it so that when you do make a big bet later, when you have a really good hand, that your opponent doesn't know that's what you have. Because if all you ever did was bet big when you had good hands, your opponent would figure out pretty quickly that if you bet big, you have a good hand and then they're either going to fold when they don't think they have a better hand than you or they're going to take all your money when they do so.
Annie Duke:Bluffing is like to keep your opponent off rhythm, it's to make them guess. Look when I bet sometimes I have a really good hand, sometimes I don't. You're going to have to guess at this, and that's what the purpose of dropping the ball is Like. When you watch Alcares, for example, he's brought back this idea of drop shot, and why? Because he hits this heavy, hard, deep ball and his opponents can't go too far back for that, because they don't know if there's going to be this short little gap that's going to come in. So it makes them guess at what's coming at. That it makes him much less predictable and that makes it much harder to sort of counteract what he's doing. So it's very, very similar in that way. Right, bluffing is not about winning the pot, right then, sometimes you do, which is great, but it's about making them guess on later actions that you might take, which is really important.
Klara Jagosova:It's playing really the long game and trying to figure out how do you get the win Right. I want to go to poker because I'm so curious about your poker career. You've obviously achieved so much.
Annie Duke:You're one of the best poker players in the world I'm not anymore, by the way. Please, like I haven't played so long, I would get my lunch.
Klara Jagosova:I feel like, especially when it comes to winning, I feel like you've actually still were able to perform and make accurate decision under high stakes table and won some amazing dollar amounts, and so I'm actually curious even about just that, because I think one thing is to play poker or cards that doesn't involve your investment. Another one is really investing the money in it, and you know when I think about it from my perspective again, I actually know nothing about poker, so maybe it's valid decision to never bet money on myself and join poker, but I'm curious how it was for you learning. I'm putting this money in and obviously, as you grew your career, you had to invest more and more. Does it become automatic, or what is the pressure difference between low or high stakes tables?
Annie Duke:Part of what determines the stakes that are appropriate for you to be playing at a table. It comes from your ability to separate the chips from money, which probably sounds weird to people because you buy the tips with money. But let me explain what I mean. At any time in a poker hand, if you are omniscient, there's a play that you would make that would maximize your expected value right, how much you're going to make on the play and sometimes that means betting a whole lot with a hand that isn't very good.
Annie Duke:You have to be willing to sort of move these chips around in a way where you can be putting like a lot at risk even when you're not holding very much in terms of the quality of your hand. And you have to do that because, again, it's not a winning formula to only put a lot of money in the pot when you know you have the best hand. You will lose at poker if you do that. Trust me. For everybody out there who's thinking well, I know, I'll just only ever play the best hand, you will lose if that is your strategy. So, again, because you're making the decisions under uncertainty you're not omniscient At any point that you're facing one of those decisions like should I put a whole bunch of money in here when I don't have something very good, or should I decide that the other person's going to call and it's not the right time for me to put the money in? Or maybe I should make a smaller bet in order to try to sort of feel them out. If you're thinking about the chips as money, you're going to be much more likely to talk yourself into a less aggressive choice, meaning you might be more likely to fold. Instead of raise a lot of money or bet a lot of money, you might decide to make like a smaller feel or bet which actually isn't going to get you the information that you need or do what you need to in the hand. So remember that we're making these decisions where I'm guessing at a whole bunch of stuff. I'm guessing at what your hand is. I'm guessing at, given your hand, what I think that you'll do with it, like how do you actually use your hand? How are you going to react to a variety of different bets that I might make? And all of those things that I'm thinking about are probabilistic. I don't know those things for sure. And when we think about the problem of cognitive bias and particularly something called motivated reasoning, where you reason in a way that's getting you to a conclusion that you want to get to if you're afraid of the money, that motivated reasoning is going to motivate you to choose sort of the less risky choice, which, in the long run, is going to make it less likely that you're going to win, which is really bad. So you can kind of think about it this way, like if we were playing penny poker, you wouldn't be worried about losing that money, it wouldn't matter to you, right? Like you would have a stack of pennies and you would be betting pennies, and so at that point, the pennies that you're using would be simply information gathering tools.
Annie Duke:So when I used to teach poker, what I used to explain to people is that at the poker table there's a language it's not the language where I say to you tell me what your cards are, and if I make this bet, clara, what would? So obviously you're not speaking in that way, but you could think about it this way, like if I bet, implicit in that bet is a question that I'm asking you, so I bet and I'm saying to you, clara, how much do you like your hand? Because you have to now respond to what I've done. So it's a call and response. It's like a real conversation that's occurring in the way that you're using your chips. So your chips are these tools that allow you to start to unlock things about your opponent. They allow you to unlock your best guess of what cards they have that you can't see, that are faced down. They allow you to start to unlock tendencies that your opponent might have. When your opponent has a good hand, do they like to raise? Do they like to play it slow? Are they easily bluffed? Are they tired? Are they loose? These kinds of questions you start to sort of unlock that and sort of build out this model of who your opponent is and like what they're holding by using these tools to ask them these questions. That is what your chips are for.
Annie Duke:So when I used to teach poker, I would ask people like what do you think the purpose of betting is? Everybody would answer the same thing to make money. Right, like, I'm trying to get money from my opponent and I would say that is not even on the list. The first purpose is to get information, to get your opponent to tell you things about them and tell you things about the hand that they're holding. Now, the result of that, if you're good at that, is that you will get money. But that's like a second order of fact. It's like not the purpose. It's the result of being skillful in the purpose of what the chips are for.
Annie Duke:So what that means, going back to what we were talking about, is that you have to view your chips as tools, not as money, which means that you have to be playing at stakes that where you can mentally do that. Now, some people can't do that even at low stakes, right. So this is something that you have to train your mind to do. That's the first thing is you have to sort of train this temperament, or be born with this temperament that allows you to see your chips as tools, like a screwdriver, and not as money. But then the second thing is that you have to be playing within stakes that make that easier.
Annie Duke:So what do I think by that? Let's say that you've got $10,000 to your NAMM and you play in a game where you're buying in for $5,000. So you have $5,000 at risk. I don't know, maybe you're superhuman, but I don't think anybody under those circumstances could separate the money from the chips, because you've got half of your net worth on the table that you're putting at risk. So a lot of what poker players think about like professional poker players think about is what percentage of their total available money are they risking at the table at any given time? And most players will only risk between two and a half and five percent in general of the total money that they have sort of available to them what you would call your bankroll your poker bankroll at any given time.
Annie Duke:That's for two purposes. One is that it's just good management of your money, meaning that you're able to withstand the ups and downs, like if we go back to tennis. You're able to withstand the fact that someone's rolling dice and just giving your opponent a game randomly. So it allows you to stay in the game long enough to overcome what we call that volatility and have the skill show through and still have money to be able to play. But the other thing that allows you to do is this mental separation between the chips and the money. That right there, if you take those two things, that determines how big a game you can play in. And we define the size of the game by just how much money do you have at risk in the game. So poker can vary from a game where the buy-in is $10 to a game where the buy-in is $1 million or more, right, so there's a wide range of choices.
Klara Jagosova:In looking at your again past and what you have achieved, it seems like you've been able to do this very successfully. So I'm really curious about the separation, because it does translate a little bit to tennis and just give an example. It's kind of the same we all want to win when you get on the court, but thinking about the winning will only get you more anxious, more tight. You kind of have to forget the result and really focus on just that moment and one point at a time. I do find it's a little bit still different at poker, because you really see the chips there. So I'm curious maybe it's from amateur perspective what were the tips that helped you find that separation and that calmness when sitting at the table? Is there something you would recommend?
Annie Duke:I actually think that tennis is very similar. I don't think it's all that different. I feel like this just happened to Jabur, right? Yes, you see it all the time. It's hard for people to close sets out. You wonder, like, how can somebody who has match point at 5-2 lose a match? And it's like, well, because it changes your play. And it's the same thing as the money mattering in poker is that, if the money matters, it's going to change the way that you're going to play the game.
Annie Duke:When you're thinking about different shots, maybe it can cause people to go in different directions. You might become too aggressive. It's usually, though, that you become too tentative. Is that you play not to lose? Yes, right, like I've got it on my racket, I have to play not to lose, when actually you should be playing exactly the same way that you played. That got you to 5-2 in the first place. But what you'll see is that people will sometimes become too aggressive. Mostly, they will start playing not to lose. And then, of course, what happens? It would be like me hitting to the center of the court against you. Obviously, I would just lose. I have to take on a little bit more risk than that. So I think it's very similar in poker, and I think that the solution in both games is very similar is that you have to focus on the task at hand Right, like if I'm in a hand I can't be thinking about, like, am I winning or losing in the game overall, or how are things been going? It's what is the right play right now. And look, do you get perfect at thinking that way? No, but do you get better? Of course, how do you handle those situations where the right play is to raise and maybe you've lost a couple hands in a row and the question is are you going to raise? And if the answer is no, you should get up from the table, like you actually shouldn't be playing then, which is a little bit of a difference. Well, it depends on whether you're in a tournament or not. There are situations in poker where you can't get up from the table in that situation. But you have to be able to put yourself in a situation where, if raising is right, raising is right and you should do it regardless of whether you've lost three hands before that or not, because otherwise you shouldn't even be in the game. You shouldn't be in the hand.
Annie Duke:If you were thinking about tennis. Ideally, what would happen is that the player would play the point and then someone would say, oh, by the way, you won the match, and they'd be surprised, because they should be playing each point as it is. Now I understand that there are certain things in tennis that have to do with, like, managing momentum, where you might make some different choices just to stop someone from picking up momentum, but you would do that anyway, regardless of whether it was match point or not. You would be managing momentum anyway. So you have to get yourself into the mindset where you don't even know it's match point, yes, which is different, by the way, than like obviously you want to know it's 40 love, and the reason that you want to know it's 40 love is because that has to do with, like, how are you managing risk and what is your opponent's mindset? Like, how, under the gun, are they going to feel, or are they just going to want to get out of the game? Those kinds of things and those things do come up in poker.
Annie Duke:If I've won a lot of hands in a row, my opponents are going to tend to be kind of scared of me.
Annie Duke:So I'm tracking it in that way for trying to decide like what's the right play percentage wise.
Annie Duke:So if I've lost a lot of hands in a row, it might not be good for me to try to push my opponent around at that moment, because they might be kind of not scared of me.
Annie Duke:But that's a separate situation for me. Being afraid to put the money in the right spot. It's me understanding that the probability that I'm going to win in that situation is lower because the person does not perceive me in that moment to be lucky. In the same way that if I've won a lot, I should recognize that I should be willing to be more aggressive because my opponent will perceive me as lucky. That's different than not doing the right thing when the math tells you that it's the right thing, and that's where you get into trouble, because you've got caught up in where am I globally, as opposed to is this the right thing for me to do in this moment? And you have to stay in the moment. And I think that you have to stay in the moment, in those spots, so much so that that can really be a huge difference between being great and just being good.
Klara Jagosova:I love that and love how you're really kind of following and also being aware of the results and the table and how everybody's sensing. Like that is very similar to tennis. You always kind of looking at what the opponent is reacting is he, she making shots and sort of adapting to that. I have a few more questions about your poker and then I want to move into your books as well, because I think they're all fantastic. I've read all of them, I've listened to a few of them a few times. But, looking at your poker career, I want to give you an opportunity. How do you reminisce on it now?
Klara Jagosova:I've listened to the podcast that people I mostly admire with Steve. I thought it was a fantastic conversation and you talked also a little bit about being one of the few women or the only woman at the table often. So I'm wondering if you want to comment a little bit of that or even thinking about poker. There's really not the physical difference that you have in other sports. Right In tennis I always say there is a female power and then there is a male power, like there is a clear difference between the physiology. Poker is clearly intelligence making decisions game, and so I feel it's one of the few games where women can compete with men at the same table, because it's really just about thinking, and so that also makes me think of even just your view of why you believe there is still so few women in poker playing and why there aren't more.
Annie Duke:You know, it's interesting actually that you bring that up. So one of the things that I felt was always weird, that I got a lot of flack for, was, like the World Series of Poker Like this is the World Championship there was a ladies event and I was very vocal against it. I did not play in it. I played in it one time, which was before I was a professional and I hadn't really thought about it and someone offered me to put me in the event and it was like fun and whatever. But since then I never played in it because I thought it was insulting, because I was like why do you think there needs to be a separate ladies event for a woman to win a World Championship? Like that doesn't even make any sense. Like, as you just said, it's not tennis. Yes, this is a matter of like mind against mind. It's as absurd as having a men's only event. Like why would you have a men's only event in poker? Like that would be super weird and sexist. But what's interesting was I got a lot of flack for that from women, which I thought was interesting. So I still have that stance today. I'll stick by that stance that women are just as good as men at the game. They have the potential to be just as good as men at the game. The things that make it so women don't play, you know, I think are separate from like whether a woman can be amazing. There have been plenty of incredible women, like Vanessa Selfs, for example, who I think is as good as any man who ever played the game, and I don't think that, you know, you should say, oh you will, ladies go play over there. So I'm going to stick to that, even though I got a lot of flack for that opinion. So I agree with you. Right Now I will also say, like in tennis there should be like a men's bracket and a woman's bracket, because again, we're talking about something where the physical differences between the two biological sexes are quite extreme, and so a woman would never get to win anything in that case. But that's not true in poker, and many, many women have won many, many championships. So then the question becomes like why aren't there more women? So I actually saw a stat about this year's World Series of Poker, which is like the big main event in poker every year, and the number of female entrants was slightly over 3%, and I was really intrigued by that because the first year that I ever played in the main event, which was 1994, the number of women who entered were slightly over 3%. So what I thought was really interesting there is that obviously the absolute number of women who are playing poker is greater just because more people are playing poker, but the percentage of women playing poker has not changed, and I think it's for a variety of reasons. I think number one it's for the same reasons that women are less likely to be options traders, for example. So you got to unlock that one right Like. Just in terms of those things, you're seeing some similarities in certain professions and certainly when you're talking about poker it's going to be very similar to something like options traders. I think that women are a vast minority as trial lawyers as another example, and I think there's just certain professions where that's the case. You sort of have to think about why that is. But then also, poker is a tough life and when I think about poker I have very mixed feelings about my time in poker.
Annie Duke:I love the game. I do. I think it's a fabulous game. It's like super interesting, really intellectually satisfying to try to solve deep right, so deep. I still think about it today. Like you know what's the right strategy in the game.
Annie Duke:But socially it's hard. If you're a woman, I think that it's. You know, men don't enjoy not all men, obviously but there's a portion of men that are not okay with losing money to a woman. You know, I started off playing in Montana where I was certainly the only woman anywhere that was sitting at the table and just the sexualization was extreme, the types of you know epithets that would get thrown at you. You can think about things that someone might call a woman. That would be unpleasant. It was just a daily basis. And what I thought was interesting was when I would sort of look over to the floor, man, and the answer was always you're here voluntarily, which was true. Like I'm not in an office, there isn't an HR department. You know you're here voluntarily. If you don't like it you can leave. Now I'm super competitive and that just motivates me more. I want to win and I really love the game. So I stuck through it.
Annie Duke:But from my perspective now I sort of look back, particularly because, you know, three of my four children are daughters. I'm kind of sad for me, that version of me who was really, I mean, being abused in a lot of ways. Now, again, people would say well, you were voluntarily being abused. But I think that we've heard that a lot. Yes, if you think back to the way that secretaries were treated in the 1950s, I think they would have said the same thing If you don't like the job, you can leave it, right, like you're being voluntarily abused, right. So that kind of thing you hear a lot. Again, I haven't played poker since 2012. It may be better, but then you look and you're like I don't know, because I sort of hear some similar things from women who are still playing today and I just think that it's hard, unless women all of a sudden become 50% of the people who are at the table. I think that when you're in that big of minority, I just think that there is going to be that kind of treatment that occurs and, honestly, then you're going to self-select out.
Annie Duke:That's number one. Number two is it's hard to have a family if you're a poker player. If you're really going to do it, it requires a lot of traveling. I actually had a strange thing happen, which was when, right around the time a little bit after poker became on television, my first husband and I had been having issues and we ended up getting divorced friendly divorce. We're still friendly today. But what was interesting is that then the week on, week off, actually aided me in being able to travel, because I wasn't missing out on time with my kids because my husband had them. But had that not been the case, as I was having all these kids, I think it would have been very difficult for me, in the environment that poker became, where you had to travel around for tournaments, for me to actually maintain that. And right before that happened, interestingly, I was looking at a job in finance to have more stability so that I could be with my kids more.
Annie Duke:So I think it's hard, also from that perspective, if you are a woman who wants to have a family or has a family, to be able to have a healthy sort of relationship or family life in that way and not feel really guilty and that kind of thing. I think it's also very difficult. So I think that women select out for that reason also. Again, I had a very cooperative ex-husband and we sort of worked it out and it ended up actually working out pretty well for me and my family. But I think that that was sort of an unusual situation that came out of a divorce, which is nobody's rooting for a divorce, right, like so don't get married, have kids and then get divorced so that you can make it, so that you can travel around.
Annie Duke:You know, some of these things are challenges, obviously, that very successful women in any field have to face, which is how do you be a mom but also be really good at your career, and I think that those things are challenges for all women. We try to make it better for women and you certainly see more female representation in the C-suite in businesses, but it's hard. It's really hard, and I think that poker adds extra challenges onto that that make it even harder. The hours are weird. You know all that stuff separate. Apart from, there's just a lot of aggression that's coming at you all the time. That that's quite difficult, you know.
Annie Duke:It's interesting, like I think, like if I had to do it over again, would I do it and gosh, like I love the game so much. I really did. It was so great and obviously it gave me this unique perspective in terms of informing the way that I was thinking about cognitive science that I wouldn't have otherwise had. I think that it made me a much better psychologist because I played poker. And the question is would I be willing to give that up? And interestingly enough, it's not a clear answer for me. I think it would depend on when you asked me, and I think that people would be very surprised that I would say you know, if I had to do it over again, I might not have played poker, given what it ended up doing for me. I'm actually not sure what the answer to that is. I think I could argue both sides of that.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, thank you for that kind of feedback and opinion. I agree with you on so many fronts. Even on the tennis court I'm a certain man that are amazing and welcoming and there are certain men that just hate losing against women.
Annie Duke:So I really can understand and imagine sort of that aggression, which probably is even more so in the casinos or where you're playing the venues, because there are so much more men so it's not as visible, probably, and I think it's more normalized, that there was a podcast that I heard from Malcolm Gladwell which was sort of talking about women who were coming into the workforce and the difference between having one and getting to a point where there's like 10 women in the workforce in terms of the treatment. And I remember what he said was that when you look at sort of the break room behavior of men, when there's only like one woman who is now invaded the space, there are more stereotypically men In the sense of like locker room dude jokes, like sexualizing sort of you know those kinds of things. And then once you get enough women in there, they go back to acting the way they would if there were no women there, right, so like if there's no women there, they aren't just like body, like telling, like dirty jokes and stuff like that. But then you put one woman in there and it's almost like it's like challenging the situation. And so he was talking about this in the context of what's happened in corporate America, that it took a while to get enough women into positions of power, like in the break room, whatever.
Annie Duke:That that sort of became normalized. Well, like in poker again, it's like still only 3% of the people who are entering that event are women, so you're still not in that situation, which I think makes it really hard. I do want to say like obviously all male poker players aren't like this. There are lots of really intelligent, incredibly thoughtful, really deep thinkers, people who really care about the world, who are playing poker, as is true in anything that you do but that is not true of all. It's not all of them, and obviously the bad apples make it difficult.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, and so what made you decide to quit?
Annie Duke:poker. It was a few things. In 2002, I started to get asked to give talks, mainly on finance, thinking about how poker might inform decision making under uncertainty, and so I started to give talks and started to get referred out and started to build kind of this business and discovered that I really loved it and part of what I loved about it was that it was positive. Some right, it's like you were winning, they were winning, everybody was happy. I found it to be more pleasant. I was happier in that situation.
Annie Duke:At the same time, toward the end of from sort of 2008, 2010, the poker economy really cratered because the US government shut down online poker and that caused all sorts of problems in the poker community, which was hard, you know, in an environment that has a really booming economy. And then it craters and then some of the online poker sites had legal troubles and my brother was involved with one of those sites, which was making his life difficult, and I started a company with someone who had run the World Series of Poker and we started it right before that economic crater had happened. And then, obviously, when it cratered, the company didn't succeed. We were putting on professional tournaments and the company didn't succeed and that was really hard. And so there was just a whole bunch of stuff that was going on that was just making poker not not fun. It's like never fun to have a startup fail and to see the economy crater and the thing that you're doing. And I was giving all of these talks like I had already before any of that happened. I was spending the majority of my time giving talks as opposed to actually playing poker at that point, because I was really liking it a lot more.
Annie Duke:So then, in 2012, I started dating this man and we fell pretty hard in love, and he lived in the Philadelphia area and I lived on the West Coast, and he just assumed, like how are we going to do this? Because you live in the West Coast and you play poker and that's where your life is, you know, and I live in the Philly area. Well, first of all, I'd spent a lot of time in the Philly area and I loved it, and at that point, I was really ready for a change. And so when he asked me, would you think about moving, I was like you know what I would. I'm ready to stop. I wasn't finding a lot of joy in poker for a variety of reasons, and I was really loving what I was doing in thinking about the intersection of poker and decision making, and I really loved this man, so I moved to the Philadelphia area. He's still my husband today. I still really love him.
Annie Duke:That was a very positive choice that I made, and what it allowed me to do was I had been thinking about writing two books. One was writing about sort of like how to an instructional book on poker that was informed by the lens of decision science, and then the other book that I really wanted to write was a book about decision making that was informed through the lens of poker. So in 2011, I actually published a book called I Decide to Play Great Poker, which was that first frame. I wrote that one first because I sort of thought well, you know, people know me as a poker player, so I should just write this poker book that I want to write, and so I published that.
Annie Duke:But I always really wanted to write this other book, which was like how would you think about decision making through the lens of poker, sort of informing the way that you think about that as a problem, and it was, you know, sort of difficult for me to find the time. So when I moved to Philadelphia, it gave me the sort of time and space to actually sort of think through that book and what it would be. And in 2018, I published Thinking in Bats, which was that book, and people seemed to respond to it, which I'm really grateful for that. People liked it and that allowed me to have a much more public face of what like there was a small community that was hiring me for talks and things like that through word of mouth, but to get known as something like not as a poker player, but as a decision scientist, which is the way that I'd always kind of thought about myself anyway, and so that was a really nice transition for me, yeah.
Klara Jagosova:And it just seems, in the concept of quitting just going back on what you went mentioned, quitting something you left for something you left even more, it seems like the right decision making and we not all have that path. So I resonated with a lot what you wrote about in the book of quit. Even through my tennis career I feel like I should have quit way sooner than when I did. Everybody feels that way.
Annie Duke:I feel like I should have quit poker sooner than I did, but I didn't want to be like I didn't want to let them win. You know that kind of thing. So people feel that way. So that's the thing about quitting is that we generally get to the decision way too late. I think I actually had a little bit of an advantage in my life because I got sick at the end of graduate school.
Annie Duke:One of the things that I write about and quit is what I call forced quitting. So sometimes you quit because you decide I'm going to stop this and I'm going to go do something else, but sometimes, like you get fired from a job. Well, that's just forced quitting. I am forced to quit doing the thing that you were doing before. And in my case, I got sick and I was forced to take time off from graduate school. I was forced to quit what I was doing, and that's when I found poker. And the thing that that really brings to light is that.
Annie Duke:One of the things that I think that we lose sight of when we're trying to decide Should we stop what we're doing is we don't really consider very well what we call opportunity costs, which is what are the other things I could be doing with this time. What other things could I pursue? What else could I spend this money on? You know those kinds of questions and I think we're pretty bad at considering those things. Well, when you're forced to quit, you have to consider those things. You don't have a choice but to consider them and what you find out is, you know what? There's a lot of good stuff out here. I mean, I was doing this other thing, but it prevented me from being able to do all these other things that I love. And, as an example, like as long as I was playing poker, it was kind of preventing me from writing this book because I didn't really have time to read the book and so quitting poker actually is part of once I got myself settled on the East Coast. It's part of what allowed me to get enough focus to really sit down and like write a proposal, like do the research actually sell the book, because there's opportunity costs to anything you do, even if you love it. So I have a suspicion although I don't know any research on it that people who have some sort of forced quitting event in their life where they just, for whatever reason, they don't have a choice and they have to quit something that they love, are more likely to be pretty flexible in their decision to quit things later on and it's a little bit anecdotal, but one of the pieces of evidence that I would have for that is actually what's now known as the Great Resignation During the pandemic.
Annie Duke:We know that after vaccinations, when things start to open back up, all of a sudden people started quitting. Like the quit rates like went through the roof, like every month like broke a new record, yes. And so the question was well like, why was that happening? Why were people all of a sudden quitting left and right? And what I think is really interesting is that the quitting was not happening in all sectors. It was happening pretty specifically in the service sector. So that's like well, okay, why was that happening in the service sector?
Annie Duke:Well, it turned out that when you looked farther back in the pandemic, that when the pandemic first hit, there were a whole bunch of people who were forced to quit.
Annie Duke:In other words, they were fired or furloughed or laid off.
Annie Duke:And those people were in the service sector, because it was like restaurant workers, hotel workers, people like that who didn't have jobs because people weren't going to hotels, they weren't going to restaurants, whatever, and so they were forced out of their position, and then, when things open back up, they quit.
Annie Duke:When they were offered their jobs back, they were, like you know, I don't really like this, I'm going to quit. It didn't just happen in every single sector, and so that, for me, is at least some support for this idea that I have that. Well, they were forced to quit, and so then they explored other opportunities, number one and number two. They actually had a chance to think about whether they really liked what they did, and that then opened them up, having actually left the thing that they were doing by force so it wasn't their fault by force that when they had the opportunity to make that choice for themselves, they chose to walk away, and I feel for me that that's a little bit what happened, that quitting for me ended up not being quite so scary because it had already happened to me.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, and I agree with it. It sounds logical and it follows kind of the rules of, I think, what you've laid out, even your books and the research. Speaking about the books I've mentioned, I've recently read through all of them. Actually, funny, I started from the back, although I've had the thinking and bets book for a long time you know when you first talk about it on some podcasts but recently, through the last two months, started with a quit. I really listened to it a few times and did my own podcast on it, then went back to how to decide and thinking bets, which it seems like such a perfect pairing. Right, you have to think in bets and probabilities. When you kind of know your probabilities, you got to figure out how to make the right decision and then, when you decide, you also need to evaluate what is the right time to quit. Have you foreseen these three books sort of lining up that way, or did it just come to you in that sequence? I'm actually curious.
Annie Duke:Yeah. So I thought I was going to write one book. I wanted to write thinking and bets. I thought this idea of like look, the world is probabilistic, outcomes are probabilistic In the short run. Whether you've won or lost does not tell you a lot about the quality of the decision. You have to start focusing on the process. You have to start thinking about the forecast. When you're betting, it's like you're investing your resources, time, money, attention, effort into something where the outcome is not perfectly knowable.
Annie Duke:So that was the book that, like I quit poker to write. I knew that I wanted to write that book. So then, when I wrote that book, people started asking me okay, but how, how do you actually do this? And so then that's really where how to decide came from, which was well, let me actually walk people through, like, how do you actually construct a good decision? And so I wrote that. And then it was like I'm not going to write another book again, ever.
Annie Duke:But what ended up happening was that there's a very small section in how to decide, which is on the value of the option to quit, and it's in chapters seven, I think, which is it's a very simple thing that I say. It's like really just a couple paragraphs where I say if you have the option to quit, you can decide faster. You don't need to take as much time on the initial decision if you can quit later for the reason that it's less costly if you make an error. If you can actually get out of the thing that you're doing and the simple example of that is, you need much less time to decide to go on a date with someone as you do to decide to marry somebody, because a date you can just not go on another date with a person again. So if you make an error and it turns out to be a bad date, it's not such a big deal. So that was it. It was like two paragraphs. I just made that point. Hey, think about whether you can quit, because if you can, it's going to make your life a lot easier. So when I was promoting that book, I found myself wanting to talk about that a lot. I just kept going back to this idea of like what's the value of quitting? And then I started to like, talk about that. Like, actually we're pretty bad at it. We actually quit things very late.
Annie Duke:There's a lot of cognitive biases that create that, the most famous of which is some cost fallacy, which is basically that if you've ever had the feeling of like, well, if I quit now, then everything that I've put into this will have gone to waste. And I'm guessing every single person has thought that in their life, including me you have fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy, because what you've already put into it you've already spent. And the question is is it worthwhile to do it going forward? And the way that you would know that you're sort of caught up in the sunk cost fallacy is would you start it today? Having never done it before, would you start it today? And if the answer is yes, then great, keep doing it. And if the answer is no, you ought to quit. But even when the answer is no, we won't quit Because we say but then everything that I've put into it will have gone to waste.
Annie Duke:So that's one of a big, big, long list of cognitive biases that make it very hard for us to stop things once we've started it. And I realized, oh my gosh, you have this very valuable option, right, like, starting things is so hard because you're starting them under conditions of uncertainty. I don't have a time machine, so I don't really know how the future is gonna turn out, and I have so little information, so I'm gonna discover all sorts of new things after I've decided to start. Like I'm gonna take this job, and after I start I'm gonna find out that I don't get along with the boss. There's no way for me to know that beforehand. Like those cards are hidden from me, right, and also like we change over time in ways that are unpredictable. Maybe when I'm in my 20s I love a job that's 100 hours a week, but when I'm in my 30s I don't like that so much because I have a family now. So it might not be the right thing for you, like in the future. So it makes it very hard to start things because we're gonna discover new information afterwards and we're sort of afraid of that information, and so it's like you know, when we think about like getting sort of paralyzed in the analysis of the decision, it's because we're trying to protect ourselves against sort of the bad versions of the future. So I said, but the great news is like we have this amazing thing which is this option to quit, which allows us to sort of get out of the paralysis of starting things, because you know like, look, I can try it and if I don't like it I'll stop. Except, we waste it, like when you say you quit tennis too late because you wasted this opportunity that was available to you to stop so that you could stop tennis, which maybe you weren't enjoying, so that you could go do other things that would bring you more joy and more happiness.
Annie Duke:So it was like during that time when I was promoting that book that I just became absolutely obsessed with this topic and I think, like the week before, I had said to my agent you're not gonna see a book for me for a long time. And then, like seven days later, I call him up and I said I wanna write a book called quit. I named it at the time and he said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, I want to have a conversation about grit. I want that conversation that, yes, grit is good because it gets you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile. But the problem is this worthwhile part, like what happens when something isn't worthwhile anymore, you ought to be quitting it. And I feel like someone needs to write the other side of that equation and I'm gonna do it. So he was like, okay, I thought you told me a week ago you didn't wanna write a book anymore. I was like, yeah, but now I did. So I immediately it was in the fall of 2020.
Annie Duke:So, like nobody was leaving their house and I just started pinging Daniel Kahneman and Richard Taylor and like Phil Tetlock and Michael Moveson and Maya Schunker and Barry Starr and Don Moore and like basically like anybody who would get on a Zoom with me Max Bazerman, katie Milkman and I just said to them like look, I'm thinking about writing this book about quitting. What are your thoughts? And everybody was very excited to talk about it because I think that they all felt this need that like grit, which is an incredible book, like I really recommend people read it, that it needed a counterpart, right, like you needed to kind of understood that. So I did about two months of just talking to people and then started researching it. By February, I had a proposal that was like 60 pages long and by the next February I had turned the book in Like it was so fast.
Annie Duke:But I really was like I'm not writing a book again. This was a book that I just felt like I had to write and, yes, like what you're sensing is this through line from thinking in bets to quit. And it's true. And the reason why I felt like I had to write it was because I realized there was a hole in what I had set and that I needed to fill that hole. I love it, so that's how that ended up happening Again.
Klara Jagosova:I left all three books, especially now.
Klara Jagosova:It seems like I go from one to another and I'm kind of weavering and switching and there's so much obviously in quit that resonates in my own personal and family journey, as well as corporate life, as I've been now part of corporate for about 15 years, as well as sports, putting this actually in the perspective.
Klara Jagosova:And in the book quit you write fantastic examples of even governments, social initiatives that waste the most amount of money, and I'm actually wondering, just to put this into macro perspective, if you look at all the things that are happening in the world COVID, inflation we've been going economic crisis, even the wars we've been fighting Afghanistan or the current war in Ukraine from my perspective it just seems like many of these main decision makers that get us into these problems are because they're not able to think in baths, they don't know how to decide and they don't know the right time to quit. So I'm actually wondering what is your idea, because you're so much smarter about this, how can we actually up level this wisdom to even this higher level of where the decision making is, so we don't get ourselves into these troubles we are in?
Annie Duke:This one is such a hard one. I think it's easier to handle on the individual level than the sort of political or national level we can sort of divide up, like if we take COVID, you know it's interesting Like I see people talking about decisions that were made at the beginning of COVID as wrong because we discovered new information. As an example, right at the beginning of COVID we were like washing down our boxes because what people thought at the time was that it was spread through respiratory droplets. Now, when I look back on washing off my boxes, I don't think that was a wrong decision because as soon as I found out that it's not spread through respiratory droplets, like I stopped watching my boxes down. But I think that once you start to sort of incorporate that as wrong, then what happens is that you aren't reacting to new information as rationally as you should.
Annie Duke:In certain situations, or when levels of COVID are a certain level, or, depending on what your own risk is, or risk that you might be exposing others to, depending on who you expose that to, wearing an N95 might make sense and then at other times it might not make sense. Like if you're outdoors it probably doesn't make sense to have an N95 on, you know, depending on what your risk tolerance is. But what you see is people sort of divide up into camps because they don't want to be wrong. And I think that people don't want to say at the time, wearing an N95 in that situation made sense, because either we didn't understand things or like there was a certain level of risk that went along with that, or I feel like I would be particularly vulnerable to long COVID or whatever it might be, and they're not willing to sort of like go with new information. And when somebody else does something, like if a 20 year old chooses not to get a booster, they're like you're wrong and it's like okay, but the 20 year old isn't you. If you're a 60 year old and you're pointing at a 20 year old who's not getting a booster and you're telling them you're wrong, you're not really helping the conversation along. These are not understanding that people have different risk tolerances and different viewpoints and they also have different exposure to risk. Right, like a 20 year old doesn't have the same risk as a 60 year old, for example. And that's something that I think that on an individual level we can really work on, which is being tolerant of the fact that new information comes in all the time, we should be trying to react as rationally as we can to that new information. We're trying to make the best decision that we can, given the information that we have at the time. If it turns out that new information exposes itself to us, it doesn't mean that our old decisions were wrong, because we're making the decision based on the information that we had then and that we should be okay with us changing our mind, but also other people changing their minds, and we shouldn't be pointing fingers, and I think that our discourse would be a lot better if we could incorporate that Now. Hopefully, if people I don't know like read my books, that would help them to get there.
Annie Duke:But when we get to something like the war in Ukraine now, it's a different piece. So I remember very early in the war I did a podcast with Gary Kasparov and I remember saying at the time it's not gonna end. It's gonna end either because Putin actually takes all of Ukraine. I'm not sure that even ends it right, cause I think he has a broader stated goal which is to restore the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. Either that, or he's no longer president right Like he gets deposed or he dies.
Annie Duke:And the question is, why did I have that very strong opinion at the time? Cause at that time people were talking about like off ramps and peace talks and things like that, and I was like, no, it's not gonna work. And the reason is that, having stated so publicly a goal that was clearly going against what most of the world, particularly the Western world, thought was okay. So this is gonna be an identity defining goal, which is I am gonna take Ukraine, and at the time he said in three days. Then how do you have to do that? Because that is an attack on your identity. This is something that I write about and quit that we all individually feel Like people who are flat earthers are in this problem as well. How can you abandon that belief when you so tagged your identity to it?
Annie Duke:And this is the case for Putin. So Putin either has to succeed in this goal that preserves this identity, or he's dead or deposed, at which point he's forced to quit. And I don't think that there's anything in between, and certainly that's borne out right Like Avery, peacetalk has been a joke. He's like, yeah, a ceasefire, oh, no, I'm just gonna shoot all those civilians over there or whatever, because I don't think there isn't an off ramp that doesn't involve him getting everything and, as it goes along, if he gets pressure internally, maybe there's some wind that involves him getting Crimea and the Donbass, but I don't think Ukraine's gonna be okay with that and I'm not even sure that that would do it or that that would be the end of it.
Annie Duke:And I think that this is generally a problem in politics is that people declare their beliefs very publicly and even in a simple sense of like in America, republicans and Democrats they also define those beliefs as like this is my identity and I'm being defined as distinct from you. That is part of what this is. And so then how can you quit those beliefs? Because you have to quit your identity, and in politics we know that that's death, like you're a flip flopper or whatever I mean. For Putin it would be like a total sign of weakness. So I just don't see people coming off of that, and when you do see politicians who say, like I changed my mind, they get attacked.
Annie Duke:So I don't really know what the solution for that is. I mean, I think that we all just need to individually think about how do we as individuals get better at this and then hopefully that somehow translates to the broader populace. I think that it was better before social media, just because we were forced to sort of integrate the fact that we had different viewpoints than other people in a way that we don't now because we can descend into our sort of like echo chambers. But look, these are really tough problems. I have solutions and quit that have to do with how you as an individual can be better at this. How can you be better at changing your mind? How can you be better at quitting things that you're doing? I have suggestions for organizations. If politicians would adopt those suggestions, I suppose they would be better, but I don't know that they could run on plans to stop if things aren't working out right. Like I mean, I think that's the problem. So it's human nature and it's a mess.
Klara Jagosova:Yeah, we talked about all that is happening in the world and there's a lot. My recommendation would be for everybody to at least read your books. I love your podcast, follow it. But I'm curious what would you want to inspire people to be doing more or for less of?
Annie Duke:I mean obvious answers. I'd love people to be quitting things more, but what I mean by that is not just look, it's better for your life if you do more exploration and you try more things over the course of your life. I think that a lot of regrets that people have is that they didn't try stuff right. They stayed in the same job, you know. But more importantly and I think this speaks more to the political situation, which is something that I think about a lot is that I think people just have to be much more open-minded. You have to be willing to change your mind.
Annie Duke:One of the things that I'm thinking about which, by the way, I'll just preview I might write another book, I don't know yet, but I'm thinking about it is I don't think that people have good literacy around figuring out how do I understand the information that I'm being given.
Annie Duke:We're so good at incorporating it into our worldview, like interpreting it in a way that supports the model that we already have of the world, that when we scratch our heads and say I don't understand why, the other side doesn't see the truth, like here are these facts.
Annie Duke:It's like, okay, but they're not modeling those facts in the same way that you are and, by the way, there's facts that you're seeing that you're not modeling in the right way either, and that's how we end up in a situation where people talk about alternative facts, but I don't think it's actually alternative facts.
Annie Duke:I think it's alternative ways of modeling the same information, where you can just model it in a way that gets you to the answer that you want to get to, and I just really wish that people were much better at holding their beliefs more loosely and being really open to information that would contradict their beliefs, really understanding how to understand that information and thinking in advance like what's the information I could find out in the future that would tell me that I need to change my mind, because if you don't do that, then when you do cross that information in the future, you don't change your mind if you haven't actually declared or thought about it in any real way in the future. And I think that people don't think enough about like what would disprove me, and I really, particularly at this moment in time, I wish that people would think more that way.
Klara Jagosova:I love it. Thank you, annie, so much. I know you were so generous with your time. I so appreciate the conversation. Just one thing as I reflect, even on your tennis expertise, I feel like your decision-making really helped you to become almost an elite or a very highly competitive tennis coach. So, if you ever want to take it on, I think you were fantastic with just the way of your strategy and how you think about the game. What's the best way for people to reach you?
Annie Duke:Right now, honestly, the place that I'm the most active is on Substack. I have a substack called Thinking in Bats and I write there and I do Q&As with really smart people that I want to talk to and I write things on decision-making under uncertainty, and that's really kind of right now where I'm the most active. I would love it if people went and looked at the Alliance for Decision Education, which is a nonprofit that I co-founded with my husband and we're trying to bring decision education to every K through 12 classroom. So this idea of like what do I think would change the world. Well, I think that if you started teaching kids how to make better decisions from the time they were in kindergarten, that would really change the world and we're trying to do something about it over there. So that's the Alliance for Decision Education. If people are interested in learning more about decision-making.
Annie Duke:For me, separate and apart from my books, a few times a year I teach a class on mavencom and I'll be doing the next one sometime in the fall and it's a couple weeks course, a couple times a week, with office hours and that kind of thing, where it's a pretty good introduction to how to make good decisions and the kinds of things that you think should think about. So people can check me out there and then you can find my books in the normal places. You would find books, excellent. I also have a website, annadukecom. You could book me there, I suppose.
Klara Jagosova:Awesome. I will ensure to add all of those links, obviously, again, fan of your books, love your sub-stack and podcasts as well, especially the season four. I love your conversation, so I'll continue to listen. Thank you so much for all you do and you're creating. It certainly helps me think about my own decisions, and even decisions I make as part of my corporate job, and so I hope I'll inspire many more people to make the right choices for themselves. And thanks a lot again for your time. I so enjoyed this.
Annie Duke:Thank you for having me. This was a super fun conversation, thank you.
Klara Jagosova:Thank you. If you ever have a trip to Austin, open Invitation Annie, we can play tennis.
Annie Duke:Thank you. You're obviously a very good tennis player. I am a mere 4-0. You would clearly eat my lunch. We'll find a way. It's a fun social game. I hold my own. I am at the point where I can sometimes beat a low 4-5. But I'm still just a 4-0. But I'm very proud of being a 4-0. You should, evan, you should Thank you so much again. Thank you for this episode. I want to ask you to please do so.
Klara Jagosova:Thank you, I'm going to run out of time. That would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.