Successful poker pro Maria Ho has proven again and again over the years that she’s capable of making good decisions. And with over $5.5M in lifetime tournament winnings and decades spent earning a living as a cash game player, many of those good decisions have clearly been made at the poker table.
A decision made last year — to take part in the TEDx UC San Diego Main Conference — is now bearing fruit for all of us, with the recent release of Ho’s TED talk on YouTube.
You can watch the full 15-minute talk above, now.
Optimizing the decision-making process
Ho’s talk is not limited to poker, though she uses her experiences in the game to inform and illustrate her theme: how to make better choices.
From getting dressed to choosing what to eat, selecting a route through traffic or debating an all-in call in a high stakes game, Ho quotes an article in Psychology Today that claims we all make around 35,000 decisions every day. How can we do our best to make more good ones than bad?
She boils down her thinking to four essential points:
- More time to think doesn’t always result in better decisions
- There is no such thing as ‘perfect conditions’
- Even a good decision can produce a bad outcome
- You can recover from a bad decision
As discussed in a recent PokerOrg interview with Maria Konnikova, one of the lessons good poker players are qualified to teach the rest of the world is how to approach risk.
Thinking in absolutes, of purely good decisions and good outcomes, and their bad equivalents, is not helpful when it comes to making any decision — whether at the table or in one’s daily life. A more productive way to think, Ho argues, is to weigh probabilities as best one can, calculating risk versus reward, and understanding that, even when taking the best of it, anyone can get outdrawn.
Leaning on her poker experience, Ho recounts in detail her first time playing the World Series of Poker Main Event, and one particular hand in which she was put all-in by her opponent.
She outlines every thought that ran through her mind, the step-by-step analysis of the hand and her opponent, the reasoning that helped her reach her decision… and the methods she used to recover once she realized she made the wrong choice.
Life, like poker, is a series of choices, made with incomplete information. A little help on how best to navigate the waters of risk and uncertainty is always welcome, whichever game you play.
Follow Maria Ho on X.
