This TED Talk features science communicator and poker champion,

Liv Bury, recorded live at TED 2018.

So I'm a professional poker player, and today I want to talk about three things that the game have taught me around decision-making that I find apply to everyday life.

Now, the first of these things is about luck.

Now, like poker, life is also a game of skill and luck.

And when it comes to the biggest things we care about, health, wealth and relationships,

these outcomes don't only depend on the quality of our decision-making,

but also the role of life's dice. For example, we can be perfectly health-conscious and still get

unlucky with something like cancer. Or we can smoke 20 a day and live to a ripe old age. And

this kind of ambiguity can make it hard for us to know how good our strategies

are sometimes, especially when we're experiencing a lot of success. For example, back in 2010,

I won a really big poker tournament known as the European Poker Tour. And because I'd only

been playing full-time for about a year, When I won, I assumed I must be rather

brilliant. In fact, I thought I was so brilliant that I not only got rather lazy with studying

the game, but I also got more risky, started playing in the biggest tournaments I could,

against the very best in the world. And then my profit graph went from a thing of beauty

to something kind of sad with this worrying downhill trend

for a long time until I finally realized

that I was overestimating my skill level and got my act together.

And this kind of reminds me of what we've been seeing

in the cryptocurrency space, at least in 2017,

where the only thing that's been going up faster than the markets themselves

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