This Book Discussion Group meets the first Monday of each month at 7 PM. Registration is not required.

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself and Win by Maria Konnikova

"The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself." --The Washington Post

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before she convinced Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee, to be her mentor. She told him, she wasn’t interested in winning.  Rather - with a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior - she was interested in what poker could teach her about life. So, Konnikova follows Seidel into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em. Under his guidance, she has had many epiphanies about life including how to better read not just her opponents but herself, how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions, and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But then something extraordinary happened...she began to win. 

Author Notes

Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind and The Confidence Game. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker. and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Wired, and Smithsonian, among many other publications. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings. Maria also hosts the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media and is currently a visiting fellow at NYU's School of Journalism. Her podcasting work earned her a National Magazine Award nomination in 2019. Maria graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University.