Book Annie
Marrying her academic studies in cognitive science with the expert decision making experience gained through her years as one of the top professional poker players , Annie Duke has developed a series of educational and inspirational talks on topics such as how to properly evaluate feedback to become a better decision maker; how to avoid making emotional decisions; how to make the best decisions about resource allocation and avoid the Sunk Cost Bias; how to become a better negotiator and many other topics tailored to hone decision making skills.
Talk Topics
Poker is a game both of making good decisions for yourself and taking advantage of the decision making errors your opponents make. That makes it ripe for exploration into the kinds of rampant errors, irrationalities and biases in our decision making lives. Annie Duke has a suite of talks applying the lessons learned from the poker table to our everyday lives.
EVALUATION OF FEEDBACK In Annie Duke’s 20 years playing the game of poker, she noticed that players surprisingly really don’t get much better at the game despite an abundance of evidence about how well they are playing. Players win or lose hands several times an hour, and have the opportunity to watch others win or lose hands even more often, creating a very tight feedback loop in which to evaluate the choices they make at the poker table. Yet most poker players don’t incorporate the negative feedback they get in a productive way, which stalls their progress in becoming better players. Annie Duke explores both the decision biases that drive this inefficient use of evidence and how to mitigate those same decision biases by offering comprehensive strategies for embracing the feedback from the bad outcomes in our lives, not just the good ones.
SUNK COST
When it comes to poker, investing, sales, personal relationships, and almost any other decision people make about the use of our time or money, we have a strong bias to take into account resources already invested in our decisions about whether to move forward. Annie Duke examines this decision bias, reveals the underlying causes of this irrationality and provides insight into avoiding this costly decision making error.
TILT: MANAGING YOUR EMOTIONS
Has anyone ever told you, “Why don’t you sleep on it?” or “Take ten deep breaths before you decide.”? If so, you (and everyone else in the world) have been on tilt. Tilt is a state of emotional distress, sometimes brought about by bad luck, that causes us to make emotionally charged and irrational decisions. And emotionally charged decisions are unlikely to be good decisions. In poker, many of the best and most talented players in the world go broke because they play poker under this sub-optimal emotional condition known in the poker world as tilt. This systemic barrier to productive critical thinking is not just present at the poker table. Tilt is common in diverse corporate environments, finance, sales and, of course, in our personal lives, as anyone with a teenager can testify to.
TACTICS: MANAGING ULTIMATUMS
An ultimatum is simply an “or else” moment: Do this or else… People fall back on ultimatums as a way to manage another's behavior far too often and when they do deliver them it is usually in an inefficient and ineffective way. Annie Duke shows why ultimatums are very similar to bluffs at the poker table and how some simple-to-understand bluffing strategies help reveal the best way to manage those “or else” moments. Annie Duke does not just reveal the pitfalls to avoid in using ultimatums to manage behavior, she also offers more effective long term alternative strategies.