• Thinking in Bets

  • Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
  • By: Annie Duke
  • Narrated by: Annie Duke
  • Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (5,985 ratings)

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Thinking in Bets  By  cover art

Thinking in Bets

By: Annie Duke
Narrated by: Annie Duke
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Publisher's summary

Wall Street Journal bestseller!

Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.

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 handing 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 doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't 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, it's difficult to say "I'm 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 don't always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don't 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 don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.

Includes a bonus PDF of charts and graphs.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 Annie Duke (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"A big favorite among investors these days."–The New York Times

"A compact guide to probabilistic domains like poker, or venture capital... Recommend for people operating in the real world."–Marc Andreessen

"Duke’s discussion is full of wisdom and also of fun, warmth, humor and humanity. Her sharp, data-driven analysis comes with a large lesson, which is that losers should be willing to forgive themselves: Sometimes the right play just doesn’t work."–Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge

What listeners say about Thinking in Bets

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Wasn't For Me

3 hours and it's nothing new if you're familiar with behavioral economics. For a more interesting listen I'd recommend Charles Duhigg's "Smarter Faster Better" which briefly touches on Annie Duke's story while driving home many of the key points of probabilistic thinking better.

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93 people found this helpful

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Great insights on improving decision making

Found out about this book via Michael Mauboussin discussing it on twitter - a highly credible source on decision making material - and the book did not disappoint.

'Think like a bettor. Think less about whether we are confident or not and more about how confident we are.'

Few key concepts that I think this book nailed:

Importance of accurate outcome analysis rather than 'resulting' and drawing too tight of a relationship between outcome quality and decision quality in a very uncertain world in which almost everything is a result of a combination of both luck and skill.

Biases she explains greatly - motivated reasoning, hindsight bias, self serving bias, internal conflicts of interest, knowing outcome when analyzing decision, temporal discounting + more.

Making decisions via explicit bets - thinking through wanna bet lens to better recognize there is always a level of uncertainty. Leads to tempering our statements as we stop to quantify the level of risk in our statements/beliefs which ultimately leads us closer to the truth.

Short term vs long term thinking - overestimating impact of momentary events on our happiness leads to irrational and emotional thinking which can degrade the quality of our bets and increase chance of bad outcome. Love the insight on the importance of this concept as she touches on temporal discounting, emotional decision making, and importance of accessing our past and future selves to put in the moment events in better perspective.

-Marcus



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46 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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A meeting that could have been an email

This is a really important and interesting book but it's unnecessarily long.

The concepts in this book would make an amazing ten-minute video or a really long blog post but as a book, it's stretching things out for the sake of it.

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Want to bet you will enjoy this book.

Would you listen to Thinking in Bets again? Why?

Yes, because I want to hear the many ideas and suggestions by Ms. Duke I missed the first time.

What did you like best about this story?

Ms. Duke takes complex areas of behavior science, decision making processes, and the pursuit of truth and couples those principles of sciences to the methods used by a professional poker player.

What about Annie Duke’s performance did you like?

Calm, upbeat, friendly narration.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I immediately locked into the theme of the book because of my experience as a professional and an amateur card player.

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15 people found this helpful

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The functional version of Thinking Fast And Slow

Easily digestible. Immediately applicable. Information was not sacrificed for brevity. Not too long like Kahneman’s book.

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14 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Great book for people looking to challenge the way they think

If you like to convince yourself you're right most of the time, you need this book... And you won't like it.

Great book looking at the ways we delude ourselves into bad decisions, and shows ways you can get better at that. Some good stories and anecdotes, and thoughtful discussion of ways to teach yourself how to make better decisions.

Tied in very well with another book I'm reading on behavioral economics.

Would have liked a few more concrete examples tied into the discussion, but I really enjoyed and thought was valuable. You should read it.

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13 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

would have been 5 stars but too much poker

in short, the book is fantastic and definitely worth the read. I was a little put off by the massive number of Poker references and quite frankly, almost called it quits after the first few chapters. If you power through all of that stuff, it gets particularly good towards the end. In fact, the two last chapters are by far the very best.

I realize the author was a professional poker player but she Begins the book stating that it is not about poker. you will question the statement as you go through the first few chapters.

I've read a lot of books similar to this and I have to say that this one has thus far had the greatest impact on my day-to-day decision-making by a long shot.

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Required reading for all traders

Of all the books I have read, this book has made the most impact on my trading results. It takes a concept presented by Mark Douglas in Trading in the Zone and crystallizes it. For everyone who seeks certainty in trading and investing, this is a must read.

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11 people found this helpful

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Meh.

This is a great example of a book where buying the summary would have been far more profitable than sitting through the whole thing.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Very basic, wide survey, well composed and told

This is a walk-through of big ideas in decisions-under-uncertainty. It is low-math, but about as useful as one can get without equations. It is top-level as an absolute entry-level walk-through. It touches very shallowly on game theory, probability, and behavioral economics. It is composed almost across the board of others' ideas and quotes, but it is a nice plain-English synthesis. It is easy to acquire some sensible ideas here. Anyone who has been rooting through this stuff knows it all already, but I am enjoying it as a light refresher. The author narrates it. She has a fresh, youthful, non-professional voice, with no gravitas whatsoever. It was a bit distracting but I got used to it. I came to appreciate her sparkle and verve. I find myself enjoying myself, as I did with, say, Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. As with popular math books, it is easy for an author to promise a lot of easy understanding but to get plodding and dense and unlistenable in a hurry. This author did not fall into that trap. But those looking for serious analytical math-tools may aim for a more advanced level.

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