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 percent on the strategy that works 90 percent 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.

Listening Length

6 hours and 50 minutes
Author

Annie Duke
Narrator

Annie Duke
Audible release date

Feb. 6 2018
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Audio
ASIN

B0795384DJ
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	6 hours and 50 minutes
Author	Annie Duke
Narrator	Annie Duke
Audible.ca Release Date	February 06 2018
Publisher	Penguin Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0795384DJ
Best Sellers Rank	#2,049 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #18 in Business Strategy & Competition #18 in Systems & Planning (Books) #19 in Business Systems & Planning (Books)

Customer reviews

5 star		58%
4 star		24%
3 star		12%
2 star		4%
1 star		2%

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Dave the Rave

One point book

Reviewed in Canada on May 11, 2019

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This is what one of my undergraduate teachers called a one point book. It makes the same point over an over interspersed with the occasional cautionary tale from the poker table. Perhaps the most useful advice is to avoid evaluating outcomes by "resulting". You will have to read at least some if this book to see how the author describes the term.

7 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

a brilliantly contrarian thinker

Reviewed in Canada on May 23, 2019

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Leave it to a multi-millionaire poker champ and trained psychologist to explain that decisions involving uncertainty and imperfect knowledge need to be judged by their process and not their outcomes. Just because you lose a hand that statistically wins 75% of the time does NOT mean you played it poorly. Yet, we humans make the mistake of judging decisions based on the outcomes instead of process. This excellent book explains the many ways this is wrong and how we should instead view risk in our daily lives.

3 people found this helpful

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Kevin Roy

Great topic but not a great book

Reviewed in Canada on April 27, 2019

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The topic is very useful but the book feels like an article stretched into a book. Examples are limited and there is plenty of filler and repetition. It could have been done in a quarter of the pages.

7 people found this helpful

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Ian From Barrie

Non technical, and the anecdotes help press home the point

Reviewed in Canada on June 26, 2019

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The combination of a research background plus big-bucks experience as a poker player makes the author an authority worth reading. This is an valuable bookend to the book "Fooled by Randomness", and presses home the point that when we live in a world with shades of grey, the notion of "right" and "wrong" isn't very useful when applied to real-world decision-making. At least, I'm about 90% certain of that <grin>

One person found this helpful

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dariohead

Tell me something I don't know

Reviewed in Canada on September 15, 2020

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The book points to a number of valuable points, but the problem is that they are not new - they are re elaboration off important work within behavioral economics and decision making science - ; poker is pulled into the equation and rightly so, but adds no value or meaning to what it's been already known in the literature of decision making.
I'm now reading The Big Bluff (M. Konnikova) who takes on a similar challenge.

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Knox

A one pager made into a book

Reviewed in Canada on March 12, 2021

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The central point of the book is worth writing about, but after the first 30 pages became increasingly repetitive and mind numbing. Finished it begrudgingly.

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Munawar Ali

Three Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 5, 2018

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Simplistic with some interesting points. I wouldn’t buy it.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon User

Blank pages!

Reviewed in Canada on January 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

There are 6 blank pages from near the middle of this book. Never seen this before.

Printer dropped the ball on this one.

One person found this helpful

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Nathik

Reading this book has been a good bet

Reviewed in India on September 3, 2018

Verified Purchase

Thinking in Bets’ by Annie Duke is probably the best book on decision making that I have read. The Basic idea of the book is that thinking in bets will substantially improve the decision-making skills in our day-to-day life. Annie Duke is a professional poker player and according to her life imitates poker, not chess. Poker is a decision making game under uncertainty over time. It has valuable information hidden, there is element of luck in any outcome. The decision we make in our lives- raising kids, health, business- have uncertainty, hidden information & luck.

What a bet really is?
A bet a decision about an uncertain future. Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out:

the quality of our decisions
luck.
Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

What’s your best and worst decision?

Take a moment to imagine your best decision in the last year. Now take a moment to imagine your worst decision. Chances are you will equate the outcome of the decision to the quality of the decision. This is because we’re susceptible to “resulting” and hindsight bias.

We must disassociate outcome with decision. A great decision is the result of a good process and that process must represent an accurate picture of our state of knowledge.

Resulting: tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome

Hindsight bias: tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

When we work backward from results to figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry- picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.

Two Brains:

We’re susceptible to these mental traps because our brains are not built for rationality. Our brains work basically in two modes. Daniel Kahneman popularized the labels of “System 1” and “System 2”.

System 1: encompasses reflex, instinct, intuition, impulse and automatic processing.

System 2: is how we choose, concentrate and expend mental energy.

Both systems are necessary for survival. Mistakes happen when System 1 overtakes System 2 in decision-making.

Since most of what we do daily exists in automatic processing. We are used to thinking in System 1 mode. The challenge is to figure out how to make decisions within the limitations we already have.

Embrace uncertainty and Redefine wrong:

Embracing “I’m not sure” is difficult. We are trained in school that saying “I don’t know” is a bad thing. Not knowing in school is considered a failure of learning.

Of course, we want to encourage acquiring knowledge, but the first step is understanding what we don’t know. “I don’t know” is not a failure but a necessary step toward enlightenment.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision- makers. Here are two of them. First, “I’m not sure” is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can’t be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black- and- white thinking.

Decisions are bets on the future, and they aren’t “right” or “wrong” based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn’t make our decision wrong if we thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and allocated our resources.

Redefining wrong allows us to let go of all the anguish that comes from getting a bad result. First, the world is a pretty random place. The influence of luck makes it impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out, and all the hidden information makes it even worse. Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good.

All decisions are bets:

All our decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value.

The betting elements of decisions— choice, probability, risk, etc.— are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain

Most bets are bets against ourselves:

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

Whenever we make a choice, we are betting on a potential future.

Our bets are only as good as our beliefs:

Our bets are only as good as our beliefs. our default setting is to believe what we hear is true.

We might think of ourselves as open- minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs. Our pre- existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. This irrational, circular information- processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

Being smart makes it worse:

Being smart makes it worse the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view. we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind- spot bias is greater the smarter you are.

Wanna bet?

Offering a wager is the best way to fight these mental traps and brings the risk out in the open, making explicit what is already implicit. We can train ourselves to view the world through the lens of “Wanna bet?”

Once we start doing that, we are more likely to recognize that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that we are generally less sure than we thought we were, that practically nothing is black and white, 0% or 100%. We don’t need someone challenging us to an actual bet to do this. We can think like a bettor, purposefully and on our own, like it’s a game even if we’re just doing it ourselves.

Instead of thinking of confidence as all- or- nothing (“ I’m confident” or “I’m not confident”), our expression of our confidence would then capture all the shades of grey in between. Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits.

Use CUDOS:

CUDOS stands for

Communism (data belong to the group)
Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from)
Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group’s evaluation)
Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent)
Techniques to become a better bets:

Techniques like Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10, temporal discounting problem, pre-commitment, pre-mortem can help us make better bets on our futures.

Our irrational, impulsive & instant gratification tendency are because we favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self. This is called “temporal discounting”. Thinking about the future and recognizing when we commit temporal discounting and helps us maintain the right frame of mind.

Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 has the effect of bringing the future-us into more of our in the moment decisions. Before taking a bet/decisions visualize how it will affect us in the next 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years.

Tilt is a poker term when a player is not in a mental or emotional state to choose optimal strategy.
whenever you feel you are experiencing “tilt”, pre-commit to walk away from the situation.

Backcasting is a useful time-travel exercise where we imagine a successful future and identify necessary steps for reaching our goals. Working backward helps even more when we give ourselves the freedom to imagine an unfavorable future. It also makes it possible to identify when there are low-probability events that must occur to reach the goal

Premortems: working backward from a negative future. It’s an investigation into something awful, but before it happens. Asking “Okay, we failed. Why did we fail?” frees everyone to identify potential points of failure without the for fear of being viewed as a naysayer. Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.
We are going to do better, and be happier, if we start by recognizing that we’ll never be sure of the future.

Final thoughts:

Although the book becomes repetitive places, this is easily one of the best books have read on decision making and cognitive psycology. If you are planning to read only one book for the year, I recommend you pick this up.

In case if you are looking for super-short and concise book summary of the same, you can check out my twitter thread.

76 people found this helpful

Hande Z

Heads she wins, tails you lose

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2019

Verified Purchase

This book probably deserves one star but I give it two because it is not entirely gibberish. In fact it is quite entertaining, and has some interesting points on the making of bets. The better books on the area of decision-making - if that is what you, like me, want - are Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', and Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk'. Thinking in bets, as a book on betting, is probably for people who have been losing badly in casinos, in which case, this book won't help much either. Hence, if you are stuck with no much choice and wish to spend an afternoon reading on light reading, this book is a candidate.

18 people found this helpful

Peter - Denmark

It is worthwhile - it gets better after 100 pages.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

I was in doubt whether this is a 3 or 4 star book.
Duke writes well and tells many anecdotes - making her points more memorable.
Some of the points are somewhat trivial - and is covered in by greater works by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking fast and slow) and Nassim Taleb (Fooled by randomness). Duke prefers to use the term of "luck" over "randomness" - although it does feels like, quite a bit of inspiration comes from Taleb.
I like the book, although, especially the first 100 pages are rather repetitive, re. the simple message of recognizing randomness (luck) from skill when evaluating the outcome of a decision.
I recommend you to hang in there and finish the book - the last 50-80 pages are quite good.
The list of recommended readings is quite useful.
I settled on the 3 stars due to the points being made in a repetitive manner - but it is close to a 4.
I might read more from Duke. There are some real world (mine is in investing) lessons that are useful to keep in mind.

6 people found this helpful

Donnie

Its Value Could Be Summarized in One Page

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2018

Verified Purchase

A positive write-up in the Wall Street Journal led me to purchase the book. I was looking for multiple and unique strategies to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. I had to stop after reading 40% of the book. From what I read, the book's entire value can probably be summed up in one page. The book repeated the same thing over and over and over again just in different words with boring filler descriptions, published work of others and examples (like the AA sobriety program). It was like reading the same chapter over and over.

Forget a one page summary, here is the crux of the book: Make a decision as if you are betting all of your money on your choice. Don't take shortcuts based on your inborn biases and seek contrarian opinions and experienced counsel. Don't blame bad luck on bad outcomes; figure out how you could have made a better informed decision. Oh, and surprise, surprise, join groups with participants who have had similar experiences and expertise who can critique your choices and illuminate your blindspots. There you go.

962 people found this helpful

Gumshoe

How to make smart decisions

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

To guess is to gamble. Applying some methodology to decision-making reduces, if not eliminates, guesswork thus making any decision less of a gamble. Thinking in Bets describes that sort of methodology quite comprehensively.

For example, considering negative predictions, besides positive ones, can insert some scepticism into a decision so rendering it more realistic. A smart decision involves knowing all the pros and cons of each option, which is where history comes in, then weighing up those pros and cons. A few hands, of poker, come to mind where if I had done exactly that I would have folded a cooler.

Annie Duke describes how to manage the decision-learning process. Not all negative outcomes are down to flawed decisions. Random factors will also influence the outcome. Outcome quality is different from decision quality.

Thinking in Bets is useful because it helps you to identify the flawed assumptions in your decision making.

3 people found this helpful

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

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