INTRODUCTION Why This Isn’t a PokerBook

为什么这不是一本扑克书

When I was twenty-six, I thought I had my future mapped out. I had grown up on the grounds of a famous New Hampshireprep school, where my father chaired the English department. I had graduated from Columbia University with degrees in English and psychology. I had attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where I won a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, earning a master’s and completing my doctoralcourse work in cognitivepsychology.

当我26岁的时候，我以为我已经规划好了我的未来。我在一个著名的大学预科学校长大的，我父亲在那里担任英语系主任。我毕业于哥伦比亚大学，获得了英语和心理学学位。之后我就读于宾夕法尼亚大学的研究生学院，在那里我获得了国家科学基金会的奖学金，获得了硕士学位，并完成了认知心理学博士课程。

But I got sick right before finishing my dissertation. I took a leave of absence, left Penn, got married, and moved to a small town in Montana. Not surprisingly, my NSF fellowship didn’t cover my cross- country experiment in adulting, so I needed money. My brother Howard, a professional poker player who had already made the final table of the World Series of Poker by this time, suggested I check out the legal poker games in Billings. This suggestion wasn’t as randomas it might sound. I grew up in a competitive, games-playing family, and Howard had brought me out to Las Vegas a few times for vacations I couldn’t otherwise afford on my stipend. I had watched him play, and played in a few low-stakes gamesmyself.

但是我在完成论文前生病了。我休了假，离开了宾夕法尼亚大学，后来结了婚，并搬到蒙大拿州的一个小镇。我当时需要钱。我的哥哥霍华德（Howard）是一名职业扑克玩家，当时已经进入了世界扑克系列赛的决赛，他建议我去看看比林斯的合法扑克游戏。这个建议也是有一定原因的。我在一个竞争激烈、玩游戏的家庭中长大，霍华德曾带我去过几次拉斯维加斯度假，否则我是付不起费用的。我看着他打牌，自己也参加了一些低赌注的比赛。

I fell in love with poker right away. It wasn’t the bright lights of Vegas that lured me in, but the thrill of playing and testing my skillsin the basement of a Billings bar named the Crystal Lounge. I had a lotto learn, but I was excited to learn it. My plan was to earn some money during this break from school, stay on the academic path, and continue playing poker as ahobby.

我立刻爱上了扑克。吸引我加入的不是拉斯维加斯的明亮灯光，而是一家名叫水晶酒廊的比林斯酒吧地下室里玩牌让我很兴奋。我有很多东西要学，但是我很愿意去学习它。我的计划是在学校休假期间赚些钱，坚持学业，将扑克继续作为一种爱好。

My temporary break turned into a twenty-year career as a professional poker player. When I retired from playing in 2012, I had won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet, the WSOP Tournament of Champions, and the NBC National Heads-Up Championship, and earned more than $4 million in poker tournaments. Howard, meanwhile, went on to win two World Series bracelets, a pair oftitles at the Hall of Fame Poker Classic, two World Poker Tour championships, and over $6.4 million in tournament prizemoney.

我的临时休假变成了20年的职业扑克玩家生涯。当我在2012年退出扑克游戏时，我赢得了世界扑克系列赛金手镯、世界扑克锦标赛和NBC全国扑克锦标赛的冠军，并在扑克锦标赛中赢得了400多万美元。与此同时，霍华德继续赢得了两个世界系列赛的金手镯，扑克名人堂经典赛的两个冠军，世界扑克巡回锦标赛的两个冠军，以及超过640万美元的锦标赛奖金。

To say that I had strayed from the academic path might seem like an understatement. But I realized pretty quickly that I hadn’t really left academics so much as moved to a new kind of lab for studying how people learn and make decisions. A hand of poker takes about two minutes. Over the course of that hand, I could be involved in up to twenty decisions. And each hand ends with a concrete result: I win money or I lose money. The result of each hand provides immediate feedback on how your decisions are faring. But it’s a tricky kind of feedback because winning and losing are only loose signals of decision quality. You can win lucky hands and lose unlucky ones.Consequently, it’s hard to leverage all that feedback forlearning.

说我偏离了学术道路似乎是轻描淡写。但是我很快意识到，我并没有真正离开学术界，而是转移到了一个新的实验室，在此研究人们如何学习和做出决策的。一局扑克牌游戏大约需要两分钟。在这一过程中，可能会涉及到多达20项决策。每一局牌都以一个具体的结果结束:我赢了钱，或者我输了钱。每一局牌的结果都会提供即时反馈，说明你的决定如何进行的。但是这是一种棘手的反馈，因为输赢只是决策质量的模糊信号。你可以赢得幸运之牌，也可以输掉不幸之牌。因此，很难利用这些反馈来学习。

The prospect of some grizzled ranchers in Montanasystematically taking my money at a poker table forced me to find practical ways to either solve this learning puzzle or go broke. I was lucky, early in my career, to meet some exceptional poker players and learn from them how they handled not only luck and uncertainty but also the relationship between learning anddecision-making.

蒙大拿州一些头发斑白的牧场主在扑克桌上不知不觉中赢走了我的钱，这迫使我找到解决这个学习难题的切实可行的方法，否则就破产了。在我职业生涯的早期，我很幸运地遇到了一些杰出的扑克玩家，并向他们学习了他们如何处理运气和不确定性，以及学习和决策之间的关系。

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me tounderstand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible forme to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much aspossible.

随着时间的推移，这些世界级的扑克玩家使我明白了下注含义的理解:一个关于不确定未来的决定。将决策视为下注使我有可能在不确定的环境中找到学习机会。我发现，将决策视为下注有助于我避免常见的决策陷阱，从而以更理性的方式从结果中学习，并尽可能将情绪排除在过程之外。

In 2002, thanks to my friend and super-successful pokerplayer Erik Seidel turning down a speaking engagement, a hedge-fund manager asked me to speak to a group of traders and share some poker tips that might apply to securities trading. Since then, Ihavespoken to professional groups across many industries, looking inward at the approach I learned in poker, continually refining it, andhelping others apply it to decisions in financial markets, strategic planning, human resources, law, andentrepreneurship.

2002年，一位对冲基金经理让我和一群交易员交流，分享一些可能适用于证券交易的扑克技巧。从那以后，我与许多行业的专业团体进行了交谈，从内部审视我在扑克中学到的方法，不断完善它，并帮助其他人将它应用于金融市场、战略规划、人力资源、法律和创业方面的决策。

The good news is that we can find practical work-arounds and strategies to keep us out of the traps that lie between the decisions we’d like to be making and the execution of those decisions. The promise of this book is that thinking in bets will improve decision- making throughout our lives. We can get better at separating outcome quality from decision quality, discover the power of saying, “I’m not sure,” learn strategies to map out the future, become less reactive decision-makers, build and sustain pods of fellow truthseekers to improve our decision process, and recruit our past and future selvesto make fewer emotionaldecisions.

好消息是，我们可以找到切实可行的解决办法和策略，让我们远离我们想做的决定和执行这些决定之间的陷阱。这本书的承诺是，下注思考会改善我们一生中的决策。我们可以更好地区分结果质量和决策质量，发现说“我不确定”的力量，学会策略以规划未来，成为不那么被动的决策者，建立和维持一个寻求真理的同伴群体来改进我们的决策过程，并招募我们过去和未来的自我来做出更少的情绪决策。

I didn’t become an always-rational, emotion-freedecision-maker from thinking in bets. I still made (and make) plenty ofmistakes.

我在下注思考中并不总是一个理性的、无情绪的决策者。我仍然犯了很多错误。

Mistakes, emotions, losing—those things are all inevitable becausewe are human. The approach of thinking in bets moved me toward objectivity, accuracy, and open-mindedness. That movement compounds over time to create significant changes in ourlives.

错误、情绪、失败——这些都是不可避免的，因为我们是人。下注思考方式使我倾向于客观、准确和开明的思维方式。随着时间的推移，这种举动会增强，从而使我们的生活发生重大变化。

So this is not a book about poker strategy or gambling. It is, however, about things poker taught me about learning and decision- making. The practical solutions I learned in those smoky pokerrooms turned out to be pretty good strategies for anyone trying to be a better decision-maker.

所以这不是一本关于扑克策略或赌博的书，而是关于扑克教会我学习和决策事情的书。我在那些烟雾缭绕的扑克室里学到的实用解决方案对任何试图成为更好决策者的人来说都是非常好的策略。

• • •

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference betweenthe two is what thinking in bets is allabout.

下注思考首先要认识到，决定我们生活结果的有两件事:我们决策的质量和运气。学习认识两者之间的区别是下注思考的意义所在。

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