Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

✍️ Annie Duke

This book is a solid 3.5 stars but as I am becoming stingy with my stars lately I am going to round it down to 3 stars. Annie Duke is an accomplished poker player and after reading this book I discovered her research and writing skills.

The book’s main takeaway message is two-fold: 1) think probabilistically (learn to embrace uncertainty and stop thinking in black and white terms), 2) be aware of all the cognitive biases that impair our decision making. In that sense Annie Duke is drinking from Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting” and Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” but with the difference that she frames this problem of decision making in terms of bets, which is truly fascinating. Everytime we are making a decision we are betting on a setting of beliefs we are holding at a given time. The issue here is how we form these beliefs (all the cognitive biases and system 1/system 2 struggles play a role). As Annie points out the outcome of every decision (bet) we make is due to the quality of the decision itself or simply due to pure luck. After each outcome we refine our set of beliefs for the next time we neek to make a similar decision.

In the second half of the book, Annie lays out very good and actionable tips. Another positive aspect of the book is that she uses a couple of cases throughout the book showing how each of her tips would have helped making sense of the decision. Also, her peppering of poker analogies was really nice.

The poor aspect of the book is that, like most books of this kind, the writing can be a too repetitive and some chapters have long introductions that could have been cut in some places without losing the gist of the message.