Quotes About Strategy

A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens.

This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.

When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things. For clients of mine who are institutional investors, I have suggested that type of strategy as a way to improve their sell-side decisions. Have the committee approving what to buy be different from the committee approving what and when to sell.

The result is that we'll quit when we're ahead, even if we're giving up good opportunities to win more. If we're behind, we don't want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse.

Deciding which hands are worth playing and which hands are not is the first and most consequential choice a player makes. And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time. In the battle of whether to hold 'em or fold 'em, amateurs usually hold 'em. Professionals usually fold 'em.

In order to become a better decision-maker, it's imperative to actively explore all four of the ways that decision quality and outcome quality relate to each other.

might have been absurd, but I was making the point that a necessary part of succeeding in poker is to fold some hands that might have won. To be good at the game you just have to learn to live with that. Playing every hand you are dealt is an easy and fast way to go broke since you would be playing too many hands that aren't profitable in the long run.

Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you're in the losses.

The real advice we should give people is more complicated than you can fit in a four-word slogan: Quit while you're ahead . . . when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

I can say that Nick the Greek lost a lot of money based on his beliefs—or, more accurately, because he ignored lots of feedback that his strategy was a losing one. He eventually went broke because he didn't recognize learning opportunities as they arose.

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it's not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment. That's because quitting is a problem of being able to glimpse at the range of ways the future might play out and see that the likelihood that things will turn out poorly is too high to make it worth your while to continue.

So in loose multi-way action games, the math says play tight. In tight games, where the pots are tiny, the math says play loose.

In the short-term, for any single decision, there is only a loose relationship between the quality of the decision and the quality of the outcome. The two are correlated, but the relationship can take a long time to play out.

You can't tell that much about the quality of a decision from a single outcome, because of luck. When you make a decision, you can rarely guarantee a good outcome (or a bad one). Instead, the goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want.

Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can't create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.

such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.

The difference such minimal instruction made in participants' ability to recall information, they noted, was "striking": students who incorporated movement into their learning strategy remembered 76 percent of the material, while those who engaged in "deliberate memorization" recalled only 37 percent.

Only a stupid golfer throws his club behind him. The smart golfer throws his club ahead so he can pick it up on the way to the next hole. Always remember: Golf clubs don't float

When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the Fire Department usually uses water.

If you're in a card game and you don't know who the sucker is, you're it.

Divide and rule.

This is a business. I'm a professional athlete. This isn't, 'poke somebody and start a street fight.'