Author: Annie is a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, author, and speaker in the decision-making space, as well as a Special Partner, focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. She has won >$4m in poker tournaments.
Book: In this book about decision making, Annie Duke uses examples from business, sports, politics, and poker to share tools, insights, and advice to make better decisions under uncertainty. The book aims to (i) Help determine if good/bad outcomes are a matter of luck or skill. (ii) Improve openness when having dissenting viewpoints to improve decision-making. (iii) Help embrace uncertainty in planning for future decisions.
Opinion: This book is a nice summary of the works of previous authors on behavioural finance and decision-making (i.e., Kahneman, Tversky, Taleb, Mauboussin, etc.). It is well written and may contain valuable ideas (resulting - luck vs skill, narratives, habits, etc.) for novice gamblers, investors, and even sports journalists, however, it will sound repetitive and unoriginal for those already familiar with the subject. The only point where I disagree is in her view of holding opinions about the messenger as irrational (see the last picture). It may be true in theory, however, in practice we have limited mental energy to process information, so our perception of people should impact how we consider their ideas. I strongly believe that the “who” many times adds more information than the “what”. If I assume that the chances of a person showing me something interesting are 1/20, I will rather assume everything he says is wrong, miss his good idea, but do something else with that time/mental energy. It is about opportunity cost with time & energy.
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