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

Description: FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history- With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck?Even the best decision doesnt yield the best outcome every time. Theres always an element of luck that you cant control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets- How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, its difficult to say "Im not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions dont always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions dont always lead to bad outcomes.By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you dont, youll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. Youll become more confident, calm, compassionate and successful in the long run. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the winner of the 2004 Tournament of Champions and the only woman to win the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. Now, as a professional speaker and decision strategist, she merges her poker expertise with her cognitive psychology graduate work at UPenn. She is a founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that creates curricula and tools to improve decision making and critical thinking skills for under-served middle schoolers. Review An elegant fusion of poker-table street-smarts and cognitive science insights. This book will make you both a shrewder and wiser player in the game of life. -- Philip E. Tetlock, author of Superforecasting Thinking in Bets offers a compelling, and eminently useful, new way to think about lifes decisions. Annie Duke has written an important, and often hilarious, book that will help you understand your own shortcomings--and make smarter choices as a result. You can bet on it. -- Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind "Through wonderful storytelling and sly wit, Annie Duke has crafted the ultimate guide to thinking about risk. We can all learn how to make better decisions by learning from someone who made choices for a living, with millions on the line." -- Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better Brilliant. Buy ten copies and give one to everyone you work with. Its that good. -- Seth Godin, author of The Icarus Deception "A mind-bending and indispensable book for entrepreneurs, leaders, and anyone who faces risk on a regular basis." -- Olivia Fox Cabane author of The Net and the Butterfly Review Text "A mind-bending and indispensable book for entrepreneurs, leaders, and anyone who faces risk on a regular basis." Review Quote "An elegant fusion of poker-table street-smarts and cognitive science insights. This book will make you both a shrewder and wiser player in the game of life." -- Philip E. Tetlock, author of Superforecasting "Thinking in Bets offers a compelling, and eminently useful, new way to think about lifes decisions. Annie Duke has written an important, and often hilarious, book that will help you understand your own shortcomings--and make smarter choices as a result. You can bet on it." --Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind "The insights Duke offers in this book are incredibly helpful when we contemplate decisions in the face of multiple possible outcomes, and that renders her book enormously applicable to the world of investing." - Howard Marks, co-chairman, Oaktree Capital Management and author of The Most Important Thing "Through wonderful storytelling and sly wit, Annie Duke has crafted the ultimate guide to thinking about risk. We can all learn how to make better decisions by learning from someone who made choices for a living, with millions on the line." -- Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better "Brilliant. Buy ten copies and give one to everyone you work with. Its that good." --Seth Godin, author of The Icarus Deception "A mind-bending and indispensable book for entrepreneurs, leaders, and anyone who faces risk on a regular basis." -Olivia Fox Cabane, author of The Net and the Butterfly "A highly-readable balance between memorable, real-world analogies and hardcore behavioral science studies... The book is packed with insights." - John Greathouse, Forbes Promotional "Headline" Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result. Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 Life Is Poker, Not Chess Pete Carroll and the Monday Morning Quarterbacks One of the most controversial decisions in Super Bowl history took place in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX in 2015. The Seattle Seahawks, with twenty-six seconds remaining and trailing by four points, had the ball on second down at the New England Patriots one-yard line. Everybody expected Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to call for a handoff to running back Marshawn Lynch. Why wouldnt you expect that call? It was a short-yardage situation and Lynch was one of the best running backs in the NFL. Instead, Carroll called for quarterback Russell Wilson to pass. New England intercepted the ball, winning the Super Bowl moments later. The headlines the next day were brutal: USA Today: "What on Earth Was Seattle Thinking with Worst Play Call in NFL History?" Washington Post: "Worst Play-Call in Super Bowl History Will Forever Alter Perception of Seahawks, Patriots" FoxSports.com: "Dumbest Call in Super Bowl History Could Be Beginning of the End for Seattle Seahawks" Seattle Times: "Seahawks Lost Because of the Worst Call in Super Bowl History" The New Yorker: "A Coachs Terrible Super Bowl Mistake" Although the matter was considered by nearly every pundit as beyond debate, a few outlying voices argued that the play choice was sound, if not brilliant. Benjamin Morriss analysis on FiveThirtyEight.com and Brian Burkes on Slate.com convincingly argued that the decision to throw the ball was totally defensible, invoking clock-management and end-of-game considerations. They also pointed out that an interception was an extremely unlikely outcome. (Out of sixty-six passes attempted from an opponents one-yard line during the season, zero had been intercepted. In the previous fifteen seasons, the interception rate in that situation was about 2%.) Those dissenting voices didnt make a dent in the avalanche of criticism directed at Pete Carroll. Whether or not you buy into the contrarian analysis, most people didnt want to give Carroll the credit for having thought it through, or having any reason at all for his call. That raises the question: Why did so many people so strongly believe that Pete Carroll got it so wrong? We can sum it up in four words: the play didnt work. Take a moment to imagine that Wilson completed the pass for a game-winning touchdown. Wouldnt the headlines change to "Brilliant Call" or "Seahawks Win Super Bowl on Surprise Play" or "Carroll Outsmarts Belichick"? Or imagine the pass had been incomplete and the Seahawks scored (or didnt) on a third- or fourth-down running play. The headlines would be about those other plays. What Pete Carroll called on second down would have been ignored. Carroll got unlucky. He had control over the quality of the play-call decision, but not over how it turned out. It was exactly because he didnt get a favorable result that he took the heat. He called a play that had a high percentage of ending in a game-winning touchdown or an incomplete pass (which would have allowed two more plays for the Seahawks to hand off the ball to Marshawn Lynch). He made a good-quality decision that got a bad result. Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: "resulting." When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didnt turn out well in the short run. Pete Carroll understood that his universe of critics was guilty of resulting. Four days after the Super Bowl, he appeared on the Today show and acknowledged, "It was the worst result of a call ever," adding, "The call would have been a great one if we catch it. It would have been just fine, and nobody would have thought twice about it." Why are we so bad at separating luck and skill? Why are we so uncomfortable knowing that results can be beyond our control? Why do we create such a strong connection between results and the quality of the decisions preceding them? How can we avoid falling into the trap of the Monday Morning Quarterback, whether it is in analyzing someone elses decision or in making and reviewing the decisions in our own lives? The hazards of resulting Take a moment to imagine your best decision in the last year. Now take a moment to imagine your worst decision. Im willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result. That is a safe bet for me because resulting isnt just something we do from afar. Monday Morning Quarterbacks are an easy target, as are writers and bloggers providing instant analysis to a mass audience. But, as I found out from my own experiences in poker, resulting is a routine thinking pattern that bedevils all of us. Drawing an overly tight relationship between results and decision quality affects our decisions every day, potentially with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences. When I consult with executives, I sometimes start with this exercise. I ask group members to come to our first meeting with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year. I have yet to come across someone who doesnt identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions. In a consulting meeting with a group of CEOs and business owners, one member of the group identified firing the president of his company as his worst decision. He explained, "Since we fired him, the search for a replacement has been awful. Weve had two different people on the job. Sales are falling. The companys not doing well. We havent had anybody come in who actually turns out to be as good as he was." That sounds like a disastrous result, but I was curious to probe into why the CEO thought the decision to fire his president was so bad (other than that it didnt work out). He explained the decision process and the basis of the conclusion to fire the president. "We looked at our direct competitors and comparable companies, and concluded we werent performing up to their level. We thought we could perform and grow at that level and that it was probably a leadership issue." I asked whether the process included working with the president to understand his skill gaps and what he could be doing better. The company had, indeed, worked with him to identify his skill gaps. The CEO hired an executive coach to work with him on improving his leadership skills, the chief weakness identified. In addition, after executive coaching failed to produce improved performance, the company considered splitting the presidents responsibilities, having him focus on his strengths and moving other responsibilities to another executive. They rejected that idea, concluding that the presidents morale would suffer, employees would likely perceive it as a vote of no confidence, and it would put extra financial pressure on the company to split a position they believed one person could fill. Finally, the CEO provided some background about the companys experience making high-level outside hires and its understanding of the available talent. It sounded like the CEO had a reasonable basis for believing they would find someone better. I asked the assembled group, "Who thinks this was a bad decision?" Not surprisingly, everybody agreed the company had gone through a thoughtful process and made a decision that was reasonable given what they knew at the time. It sounded like a bad result, not a bad decision. The imperfect relationship between results and decision quality devastated the CEO and adversely affected subsequent decisions regarding the company. The CEO had identified the decision as a mistake solely because it didnt work out. He obviously felt a lot of anguish and regret because of the decision. He stated very clearly that he thought he should have known that the decision to fire the president would turn out badly. His decision-making behavior going forward reflected the belief that he made a mistake. He was not only resulting but also succumbing to its companion, hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable. When we say, "I should have known that would happen," or, "I should have seen it coming," we are succumbing to hindsight bias. Those beliefs develop from an overly tight connection between outcomes and decisions. That is typical of how we evaluate our past decisions. Like the army of critics of Pete Carrolls decision to pass on the last play of the Super Bowl, the CEO had been guilty of resulting, ignoring his (and his companys) careful analysis and focusing only on the poor outcome. The decision didnt work out, and he treated that result as if it were an inevitable consequence rather than a probabilistic one. In the exercise I do of identifying your best and worst decisions, I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision where they got lucky with the result, or a well-reasoned decision that didnt pan out. We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isnt so perfectly correlated. No sober person thinks getting home safely after driving drunk reflects a good decision or good driving ability. Changing future decisions based on that lucky result is dangerous and unheard of (unless you are reasoning this out while dr Details ISBN0735216355 Author Annie Duke Year 2018 ISBN-10 0735216355 ISBN-13 9780735216358 Media Book Publication Date 2018-02-06 Pages 288 Format Hardcover Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Subtitle Making Smarter Decisions When You Dont Have All the Facts Country of Publication United States DEWEY 658.40353 Imprint Portfolio Place of Publication New York Short Title Thinking in Bets Language English Audience General/Trade AU Release Date 2018-02-06 NZ Release Date 2018-02-06 US Release Date 2018-02-06 UK Release Date 2018-02-06 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 30 DAY RETURN POLICY No questions asked, 30 day returns! FREE DELIVERY No matter where you are in the UK, delivery is free. 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