This is a book review for Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke.

This book sounded interesting to me since Annie Duke was a professional poker player and she brought a unique perspective to the subject.

The book starts with the premise that we are not good at understanding outcomes. We often attribute a good outcome to our own skills and a negative outcome to bad luck. In fact, Annie goes on to explain to us that both skill and luck play a major factor in any outcome and since we have strong biases, it is important to understand that either of time could have contributed to a positive or negative outcome and to become a better judge at studying the outcomes. It then goes on to build out a mental model at how we could overcome these biases and think in terms of bets to make ourselves more accountable to the results.

One chapter that I think was worth its weight in gold was titled “Dissent to Win” in which, she introduced the CUDOS norms, which is work done by one of the renowned sociologists Robert Merton. The Mertonian norms, namely Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness and Organized Skepticism were brilliantly explained in the chapter with examples and I believe it can form a great foundation for any community group to be successful.

I found the book extremely repetitive especially towards the middle of the book. I understand that one needs to repeat a concept in multiple ways to drive the point home but I did think that it went a little too much at times. The author is a professional Poker player and she gave multiple examples from her poker experience to explain the points but I found that a bit difficult to understand at times. As I was reading the book, I started to skim over the Poker examples and get to the point quickly.

This book is more of helping to build a mental model. It has good discussions of multiple biases that we as humans harbor in our decision making and outcomes, it helps to identify them and how we could correct them. I found it very useful from that angle.

I would give the book 3.5/5 stars.