But somehow, I’ve managed to survive out of the starting gate, and a few hours in, I’m surprised to find myself starting to experience a new kind of feeling. He’s the one who finagled this invitation for me in the first place, and I feel certain that I’m going to let him down. I get off to a rocky start, almost folding pocket aces, the absolute best hand you can be dealt, because I’m so nervous about messing up and disappointing my coach, Erik Seidel - a feared crusher considered one of the best poker players in the world. I’ve been practicing for weeks, playing online, running through hands, learning the contours of basic tournament poker strategy. And here I am, at my first-ever tournament. I have embarked on my latest book project, which has taken me into foreign territory: the world of No Limit Texas Hold ’em.

Placed in a stochastic environment, faced with stress and pressure, I knew how I’d go wrong - and I knew precisely what to do when that happened.įast-forward to 2016. And in the years that followed, I would pride myself on knowing so much about the tools of self-control that would help me distinguish myself from my poor experimental subjects. Dissertation defended, I thought to myself, that’s that. For many years, my life centered around studying the biases of human decision-making: I was a graduate student in psychology at Columbia, working with that marshmallow-tinted legend, Walter Mischel, to document the foibles of the human mind as people found themselves in situations where risk abounded and uncertainty ran high.

Why is online poker so hard