How A Professional Writer Turned Herself Into A World Class Poker Player
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2020
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Switching careers is always difficult. But former New Yorker staff writer Maria Konnikova did it in dramatic fashion. Konnikova decided that the best way to learn about the role of skill and luck in life is through poker, and so she decided to become a great poker player. And she made it happen, winning just over $300,000 in tournament play in a couple of years. On this episode, we speak with her about how she did it, and her new book, "The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned To Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Osage County, Oklahoma is getting a lot of attention right now. |
| 0:04.4 | It's the setting of Martin Scorsese's latest film, |
| 0:07.8 | Killers of the Flower Moon. |
| 0:10.0 | The movies based on a book about the 1920s Osage murders, |
| 0:14.1 | when white men poured into Osage County |
| 0:16.4 | and killed Osage people for their oil wealth. |
| 0:20.1 | I'm Rachel Adams Heard, the host of InTrust, a podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Media. |
| 0:26.8 | For over a year I was reporting a different story about other ways white people got |
| 0:32.1 | Osage, land, land and wealth and how a prominent ranching family in Osage County became one of the biggest landowners here. |
| 0:40.0 | Their ranching empire was built on land that at the turn of the century was all owned by the Osage Nation. |
| 0:47.0 | So how did they get it? |
| 0:49.0 | Listen to the award-winning podcast, Trust on the I Heart Radio app Apple |
| 0:55.3 | Podcast or wherever youlots podcast. Hello and |
| 1:15.0 | I'm Tracy Allowight. |
| 1:18.0 | Tracy, so you guys are going into hard lockdown again in Hong Kong, |
| 1:22.0 | yeah, we are. We're experiencing our third wave of |
| 1:27.4 | coronavirus and unfortunately it's worse than the first and second wave. So yeah, we're going back into social distancing measures. People are being |
| 1:36.0 | told to work from home, bars are closed, and restaurants are implementing new restrictions. So, |
| 1:41.6 | yep, back to lockdown. So obviously this is all getting pretty |
| 1:47.2 | tiresome. I think people are ready for real life to resume. But there's actually one at all there's a few aspects of lockdown life that I kind of prefer but there's one thing in particular that I find to be better. You know what it is? Yeah I think I do. I think I've actually done it with you a couple months ago. Oh yeah. Yes, I find playing poker online with friends to be much better than playing poker in real life with friends. |
| 2:18.0 | I'm not sure if poker is a better game online period, but at least on like a sort of social version, I much prefer like playing in a room with a Zoom chat going on, then actually like gathering around a table with friends and playing poker. |
| 2:33.4 | Wait, you're going to have to explain that because I thought poker, you know, when people play on a casual |
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