JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Oh, I don't know. We're talking about ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: We're in a doubtful state of mind. Constant doubt, that's the topic.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Like, in the last chapter we met a person who had a real doubt pile up. He lost his faith in God, he lost his girl.

JAD: That's maybe an extreme example of something that we all go through every day, right?

ROBERT: Yeah. I mean ...

JAD: You wake up.

ROBERT: And then—and you have to get something done, and then some little voice inside you says, "No, you can't do that."

JAD: "Yeah, I'm not so sure about this." But still you gotta act because you're an adult.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: So what do you do in that case? How do you act without the feeling of certainty?

ANNIE DUKE: Hello.

JAD: Hi.

ROBERT: Is this Annie?

ANNIE DUKE: Yes.

ROBERT: Okay

ROBERT: And we met someone who thinks about this all the time.

ANNIE DUKE: This is an area that I'm pretty well versed in.

JAD: Would this be your stock and trade?

ANNIE DUKE: This would be very much so.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Her name is Annie Duke.

ANNIE DUKE: I'm a decisions strategist.

ROBERT: But you might know her better as a badass poker player.

JAD: [laughs]

ANNIE DUKE: Well, in 2004 I won a bracelet, which is a world championship. I also won the Tournament of Champions that year. That was ...

JAD: She has won a lot. Now when we called up Annie, we had this idea about poker that I think a lot of people have, which is that it's like this game about tells and, like, reading your opponent, watching the way their nose quivers so that you can tell when they're bluffing or when they've got a good hand.

ANNIE DUKE: Um, nope. Tells are actually a very small part of the game.

ROBERT: In fact, she says, they often backfire.

ANNIE DUKE: I remember the first tournament I played after—it was on TV. I had a hand that was kind of a close decision, and this guy moved all of his chips into the pot. And God, he was just confident. Like I could see, like, he was really confident in his hand, so I threw my hand away.

ROBERT: But then in a subsequent game, she sees the same guy doing exactly the same thing: he pushes all his chips in, looking super confident.

ANNIE DUKE: I was like, "Wow, he must have, like, a crazy hand. Like two aces." And he turns his hand over face up, and he's super confident in it. And it was a really bad hand. It was just a hand that he thought was good. So the problem for me was that I read him totally correctly, but what I didn't understand was that he ...

ROBERT: This is a dunce. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ANNIE DUKE: Let's call him inexperienced.

ROBERT: Okay.

ANNIE DUKE: He didn't know what a good hand or a bad was.

ROBERT: But then you get players who are a little bit more experienced, and sometimes they ...

ANNIE DUKE: Would do what's called a reverse tell.

JAD: Is that like a double fake?

ANNIE DUKE: Right.

JAD: They'd basically pretend to be overconfident so she'd think they're dumb.

ANNIE DUKE: And in the biz we call that "Hollywooding."

JAD: So, she says, unless you've played someone a million times, it's really hard to know how to read them. And what's worse? The good players, they do nothing.

ANNIE DUKE: Doing nothing is the best choice.

ROBERT: So you try to disappear.

ANNIE DUKE: You pick a spot on the table, stare at it.

ROBERT: So what do you do in the case where there aren't any signals to read, and the only thing you really know is that you know nothing?

ANNIE DUKE: Well actually, what you sort of figure out is that you don't need to know. The real breakthrough moment for me was when I stopped trying to figure out anything with certainty.

JAD: And here, Annie laid out a way of thinking, a way of taming doubt, that we find completely fascinating. And that has paid off for her, to the tune of about $4-million.

ANNIE DUKE: Well, you know, I think that ...

JAD: Do you mind if we just back up?

ANNIE DUKE: Okay.

JAD: Like, how did you get to be Annie Duke?

ANNIE DUKE: Well, I was born Annie Lederer, and then I married someone with the last name Duke, and thought ...

JAD: [laughs] No, I mean—I mean, the Annie Duke.

ANNIE DUKE: Well, I went to Columbia undergrad. Double major in English literature and psychology.

JAD: Ah, psychology!

ANNIE DUKE: Then I went to UPenn, studied cognitive psychology there. I had a National Science Foundation fellowship. And then right at the end, just really had this realization that I didn't really want to be an academic. Holy hell, like, what am I gonna do now?

JAD: Uh-huh.

ANNIE DUKE: Okay, well I need some money. I'll play some poker while I'm figuring it out.

JAD: And had you played a lot of poker to that point?

ANNIE DUKE: No, but I'd watched my brother a lot.

HOWARD LEDERER: Well, she—she would come out and she would sit behind and watch.

JAD: That's Annie's brother.

HOWARD LEDERER: This is Howard. Howard Lederer.

ROBERT: Sounds exactly like your sister but with a deeper voice.

HOWARD LEDERER: [laughs]

ANNIE DUKE: He started mentoring me.

HOWARD LEDERER: A little bit.

ANNIE DUKE: And I started making money right away.

HOWARD LEDERER: She was very competitive.

ROBERT: Was your mother tearing out her hair at this point, or was she agreeing with him?

ANNIE DUKE: Well, at that point my parents had just given up hope.

HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah.

ANNIE DUKE: My brother when he was 18, he—my grandfather ...

HOWARD LEDERER: Grandfather cut the family a $2,000 check.

ANNIE DUKE: For the two of us to help with college, and my brother gambled it away in a little poker room in the back room.

ROBERT: [laughs]

HOWARD LEDERER: Well, that might've been the very early phase. I was a terrible poker player.

JAD: Howard has since become a very decorated poker player.

ROBERT: And he's also been in the news recently because an online poker company he was associated with called Full Tilt has gotten into some legal difficulties.

JAD: But back when he was starting, he says he would play in these tiny little games ...

HOWARD LEDERER: 36 hours straight, which was not atypical for me back then.

JAD: And it was all very seat of the pants.

HOWARD LEDERER: But I—but I arrived in this wonderful situation.

JAD: He was fortunate. He happened to be learning the game—which he would later teach to his sister—at a time, you know, 1993, 1994, when the game ...

ROBERT: Was changing radically.

HOWARD LEDERER: Look, poker—poker was this Texas gambler thing happening in Vegas.

ROBERT: Like the cliché we just talked about. You know, you play with your gut.

HOWARD LEDERER: With Texas Dolly and Amarillo Slim, and who knows what's going on over there.

ROBERT: But then like in so many other things, the geeks took over.

HOWARD LEDERER: Well, you know, there were these games I was playing in. And I was ...

ROBERT: People will peg the change to different times, different places, but for Howard it began in New York.

HOWARD LEDERER: Yep.

JAD: When he joined this regular game.

HOWARD LEDERER: A huge game. These are Wall Street traders, world champion bridge players. Brilliant people.

JAD: They'd get together after Wall Street closed, play for about eight hours, then go to a bar and carefully deconstruct the eight hours they just played.

HOWARD LEDERER: You know, "What were you thinking in that? Why did you do that? Why—you weren't really bluffing, but you made this big bet."

ROBERT: And out of those conversations came a style of play that you now find everywhere.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. Hold on. Okay, look, listen, if you Google the phrase right now "hold 'em odds chart," you're gonna be able to ...

ROBERT: Hold 'em odds ...

MIKE PESCA: Hold 'em odds chart.

ROBERT: We ended up talking to our friend Mike about all this.

MIKE PESCA: My name's Mike Pesca. I cover sports for NPR.

JAD: And he's also spent a fair amount of time in underground poker clubs.

MIKE PESCA: By the way, it's always a misnomer because in New York City they're always on the ninth floor of an office building or something like that.

ROBERT: [laughs] Really?

ROBERT: Anyway, he showed us these—these charts.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, okay.

ROBERT: Oh my God! Look at this thing. What is it?

JAD: It's like my nightmare. It's like ...

JAD: A spreadsheet with tons and tons of numbers.

MIKE PESCA: Well, first I'll say this ...

JAD: But Mike says don't be afraid. These charts? This is how you achieve zen.

ROBERT: In an uncertain world.

MIKE PESCA: Okay, let's say—let me give you a situation. Let me give you a situation. You're playing the game of hold 'em, and there's only one card to come, the river card. That is the last card in hold 'em. And you figure ...

JAD: Just to explain: in Texas hold 'em, each player gets two secret cards that they can see, and the dealer puts down a bunch of community cards one by one that everyone can see. And the game is who can combine their secret cards with the community cards to make the best hand?

MIKE PESCA: Exactly.

JAD: Now say one of your secret cards is a heart.

MIKE PESCA: And on the board, the community cards include three—three hearts.

JAD: Okay. I've got one in my hand. That's four. The dealer's about to deal another card ...

MIKE PESCA: And if the last card is a heart ...

JAD: Well damn, I would have a flush! So I want to know ...

MIKE PESCA: What are the odds ...

JAD: Of me getting that last heart?

MIKE PESCA: Every decent poker player will know how to calculate this automatically.

ROBERT: And for the non-decent ones? Well, then there's the chart.

MIKE PESCA: You know there are 13 of every suit in the deck. You know there are 13 hearts in the deck.

JAD: Okay.

MIKE PESCA: And there are three hearts on the board.

JAD: One in my hand.

MIKE PESCA: That means that you can figure that there are ...

JAD: 13 minus three minus one ...

MIKE PESCA: Nine cards in the deck out of the 46 that we don't know about.

JAD: That can complete my flush.

MIKE PESCA: Now look at this chart.

JAD: All right. I'm looking at nine.

MIKE PESCA: You see number nine?

JAD: Yeah, yeah.

MIKE PESCA: All the way to the right.

JAD: Uh-huh. Nine, flush, draw ...

MIKE PESCA: So when you do the odds, you wind up having about a 20 percent chance of victory.

JAD: Of getting that last heart.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, so what do you do in this circumstance?

ROBERT: My—one more time, my odds are ...?

JAD: Your odds are 20 percent.

ROBERT: 20 percent.

JAD: Do you bet? Do you go for it? Do you stay in? Be bold? Or do you fold?

ROBERT: I—20 percent. I fold.

JAD: Totally.

ROBERT: I fold.

JAD: Of course you fold.

ROBERT: I walk away.

JAD: Get outta there.

ROBERT: I quit the game!

JAD: Live to fight another day!

ROBERT: Exactly.

HOWARD LEDERER: No.

MIKE PESCA: No. No, no, no.

ANNIE DUKE: Nope.

HOWARD LEDERER: No.

JAD: Not necessarily.

ANNIE DUKE: Every poker player ...

JAD: Annie says there are times when 20, 25 percent sure means bet bet bet.

ANNIE DUKE: I know that sounds counterintuitive, so let me explain what I mean.

JAD: And this is the nut of it right here.

ANNIE DUKE: Let's say that someone bets $100, and there's already $200 in the pot, okay? That means that for you to continue with your hand, you have to put in $100. So if you win the pot, you'll win $300, and if you lose the pot, you'll lose $100, right?

ROBERT: Okay.

ANNIE DUKE: In order to break even, you could lose the pot three times, because you'd lose $100 three times, so that would be -$300. And you could win the pot once.

JAD: That makes sense, yeah.

ANNIE DUKE: Right? Because you're gonna get $300 and then you would break even.

ROBERT: So you could lose $100 on Monday, $100 on Tuesday. You could lose another $100 on Wednesday, but if you win the $300 back on Thursday, yeah, you're good.

JAD: You just need to win one out of every four times.

ANNIE DUKE: So that means that you have to win the pot 25 percent of the time.

ROBERT: Those are your pot odds.

MIKE PESCA: Pot odds are what dictates good bets.

ANNIE DUKE: The amount that's in the pot determines how certain you have to be that your hand is good.

JAD: Which is a really cool concept, I think. Because if your pot odds are 25 percent, then all you really need to be is 25 percent sure that you have a good hand.

ROBERT: Which you are, in the hearts case.

ANNIE DUKE: Sometimes you have to be 40 percent sure. Sometimes you have to be 30 percent sure. You know, if there's $70 in the pot and you only have to call $10, you know, now you're in the 15 percent range in terms of how certain you have to be that your hand is good.

JAD: In that case, you can bet this hand that you're really not sure about knowing that while you might lose this time ...

MIKE PESCA: If I do that a million times in my poker life, the law of high numbers indicates that I'm going to be very much a winner in the long run. It might be the very long run, but you should be ahead in the long run.

ANNIE DUKE: Because it's not—it's not about winning the hand all the time, it's about winning the hand enough of the time.

JAD: That is what she got watching her brother.

ANNIE DUKE: I'm sure that I'm just quoting him.

ROBERT: And that's warm comfort? I mean, that's weird! So the math—the probabilities are what you care about most.

ANNIE DUKE: Yeah, because that sort of embracing of uncertainty does some really wonderful things for you. If you're in a situation where you only have to have the best hand 25 percent of the time, if you're playing well you're gonna have a bad hand a lot of the time. It's okay. It's actually irrelevant.

JAD: And that's really the big bonus of this way of thinking. You begin to learn how to avoid that very human tendency to feel ...

ANNIE DUKE: Shamed, embarrassed ...

JAD: ... when you lose. You just float right above it.

HOWARD LEDERER: If you're making good decisions then you're making good decisions.

ANNIE DUKE: You have to be somewhat outcome blind.

HOWARD LEDERER: But ...

JAD: Sometimes that's not so easy.

HOWARD LEDERER: Yeah.

JAD: Case in point ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There is no event on the planet like it.]

JAD: 2004.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The World Series of Poker!]

JAD: Biggest tournament in all of poker.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: What a tournament this is to handle emotionally.]

ROBERT: Three people left at the table.

JAD: Annie Duke. This guy Phil Hellmuth, who's a big player, and ... Annie's brother Howard.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They've played together for so long, but never for $2-million, never been in this type of position.]

JAD: $2-million is on the line.

ROBERT: They get their cards ...

ANNIE DUKE: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Annie Duke with sixes.]

ANNIE DUKE: ... I had two sixes.

ROBERT: Pretty good hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And she'll open with $70,000.]

JAD: Big fat opening bet.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Over to Phil.]

JAD: Phil thinks, "No."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Phil Hellmuth immediately gets out of the way again.]

JAD: He folds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Over to Howard Lederer.]

JAD: And here's where things get interesting: instead of folding like that guy Phil ...

ANNIE DUKE: My brother moved in on me.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Howard goes all in against his sister.]

JAD: Uh oh!

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The decision now to Annie with the pocket sixes.]

JAD: Annie thinks, "Should I stay in? Should I bail?"

ANNIE DUKE: Well mathematically, two sixes actually rates to be the best hand there, so ...

JAD: "Brother, it's on."

ANNIE DUKE: Yep.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: I call.]

JAD: However, when they turn over their cards—and remember she has two sixes ...

ANNIE DUKE: Actually ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: She's got a seven and ...]

ANNIE DUKE: ... it turned out he had two sevens.

HOWARD LEDERER: Yep.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: He gets what he wants: a four-to-one favorite. And Annie knows she's in trouble. Her brother in a commanding position.]

ANNIE DUKE: And he was 82 percent to win the hand.

JAD: They both knew that if they play this hand a hundred times, he's gonna win about 82 of them.

ROBERT: The only thing that can save her is if the dealer now turns over a six. There's an 18 percent chance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And here comes the flop.]

ROBERT: Dealer turns over the cards.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Annie gets her six and a full house!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: Oh God!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And she immediately feels horrendous for her brother.]

ANNIE DUKE: And I won the hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And that's the end of the line for Howard Lederer. Annie Duke knocks her big brother out.]

ROBERT: In the video you see her getting up from the table ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Annie Duke: I'm sorry, Howard.]

ROBERT: ... and she hugs her brother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh, this is very difficult for Annie.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Lederer: Wow, what a six, Annie.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You see her emotions.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Lederer: I mean, you must have mixed feelings about, maybe.]

HOWARD LEDERER: Look, I was 82 percent to win that pot. That was an incredibly unlucky hand for me.

JAD: Yeah, and to lose to your sister, too.

HOWARD LEDERER: But ...

ROBERT: [laughs] "I taught her how to do that!"

HOWARD LEDERER: [laughs] Yeah. No, I wanted to win that hand, that's for sure. I—I was upset.

ANNIE DUKE: When my mom watched that, she called me up and she was, like, in tears. She was like, "How could you knock your brother out of the tournament?" And I was like, "Now I know who your favorite is."

ROBERT: [laughs]

MIKE PESCA: No, here's the thing: if you—if your superior cards do not win the day, you know, we have vocabulary to deal with that. It's called a bad beat.

JAD: A bad beat.

MIKE PESCA: A bad beat is when you had the cards that should've won, and you got beat.

JAD: Wow, there's a term that should catch on right there.

MIKE PESCA: If, say, in stock investing you were to say, "Look, you invested for all the right reasons, but the stock went down because someone you never heard of shorted it," that was a bad beat.

JAD: You know what I wonder?

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Like, you know, this whole ...

HOWARD LEDERER: Rigorous, probabilistic way of thinking ...

JAD: ... is that something you just acquire once you know the math? Or do you have to first be of a certain cast of mind in order to kind of get into it? Because I'm not sure it would work for me.

ROBERT: You have to be from a pretty unusual family, you know, to get consolation from that.

ANNIE DUKE: All right, I'll tell you what our family is like. So my brother and my brother-in-law both knew my boyfriend before we—me and my boyfriend started, okay?

ROBERT: Right.

ANNIE DUKE: And they—when they found out we were going on a date, they made a market for what the probability was that we would actually end up together-together.

HOWARD LEDERER: There is a—there is a bet. He was willing to give me $27. If they get married, I have to give him $100. I was offering him 73 to 27.

ROBERT: What is wrong with you?

JAD: [laughs]

ANNIE DUKE: And I was like, "Are you insane? We haven't gone on a date together yet!"

HOWARD LEDERER: Exactly. They've never gone on a date yet.

JAD: [laughs]

HOWARD LEDERER: I made one of the best bets ever.

JAD: I assume you'd be happy to lose that bet.

HOWARD LEDERER: I'm gonna be thrilled. But that's how gamblers think. I mean, it's not a bad way or it taints anything, it's just that's the way that we memorialize the fact that we had a fundamental difference of opinion.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: Well, okay. So that works. You know, if you're betting on your sister's marital status, I suppose. But if it's—if it's bigger stakes, like going back to the beginning of the program where we were concerned with the presence or unpresence of God, that's not a mathematical thing.

SOREN WHEELER: Oh, well!

JAD: [laughs]

SOREN: I'm not so sure that's true.

JAD: Soren, would you like to say something?

SOREN: Well, there—there—you know, there was a guy named Pascal. I don't know if you've ever heard of him.

ROBERT: I have.

SOREN: Who thought that you could do exactly that. So he was one of the first thinkers of probability—so all this stuff we've been talking about. But he, at some point, was also struggling with the question of God, and he couldn't decide for sure. He always thought there was a chance that he did exist, a chance he didn't, so he didn't know what to do. So he came up with an idea. He said, "If I decide to believe in him ..."

JAD: Uh-huh.

SOREN: All right? "In that scenario, if he exists, eternal forever happy happy."

JAD: If you believe in him and he happens to be there, then you win—you win the pot.

ROBERT: Big time.

SOREN: Forever. Like, infinite. Now if I decide to not believe in God—that's my other option ...

JAD: Uh-huh.

SOREN: And now I'm a not-believer. If he does exist ...

JAD: And you don't believe ...

SOREN: Very very very infinite bad. Eternal damnation forever and ever.

JAD: Then you go to hell, yeah.

SOREN: Then you go to hell. So there's a huge, infinite payoff to believing in God, and there's an infinite downside to not believing in God.

JAD: So the pot odds, so to speak ...

SOREN: So no matter how—yeah, because no matter how unlikely it is that God actually exists, this is like Annie having an infinite amount of money on the table.

JAD: Yeah.

SOREN: No matter how bad her cards are, how unlikely it is she thinks she'll win, you gotta bet. You have to bet.

JAD: The pot odds are saying that you must believe in God, is what you're ...

SOREN: That's what Pascal said. Pascal said if you do the math the way Annie does the math, believe in God. What are the pot odds on God?

ROBERT: See, but that's ridiculous, by the way. That's ridiculous.

SOREN: Wait, wait. Why? Because you feel like Pascal's faith is lesser? His—his belief in God, because he got to it through math is somehow lesser than, I don't know, say, St. Augustine or someone you respect?

ROBERT: Yes, because—because we're talking here about grace and love and being connected, and it's—it is a daredevil-y, heart of your hearts full of emotion, that's what rules here and that's what guides you. It is not calculating the odds.

JAD: I don't know. The odds are looking pretty divine right now.

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.