Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

I finished this book in February 2026. I recommend this book 5/10.

Why you should read this book:

In Texas Hold 'em, we understand that two aces is the best possible winning hand at the start; things might change. In this book, Annie Duke, who was a very successful poker player herself, breaks down how the principles of keeping an open mind through decisions, by thinking in bets, instead of going all in on all your ideas.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. Making a decision about the future can't be "right" or "wrong." It's the best plan at the moment, like playing two aces.

2. Thinking in bets helps the 80/20 rule.

3. Pre-mortems give you a picture of what could go wrong.

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P29. There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug can help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, "I'm not sure" is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can't be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

• P33. Decisions are bets on the future, and they aren't "right" or "wrong" based on whether they turn out well on any particular iteration. An unwanted result doesn't make our decision wrong if we thought about the alternatives and probabilities in advance and allocated our resources accordingly, as my client, the CEO, and Pete Carroll both did. It would be absurd for me, after making a big bet on the best possible starting hand (a pair of aces) and losing, to spend a lot of time thinking that I was wrong to make the decision to play the hand in the first place. That would be resulting.

• P108. There are people who, like Phil Ivey, have substituted the routine of truth-seeking for the outcome-oriented instinct to focus on seeking credit and avoiding blame. When we look at the people performing at the highest level of their chosen field, we find that the self-serving bias that interferes with learning often recedes and even disappears. The people with the most legitimate claim to a bulletproof self-narrative have developed habits around accurate self-critique. In sports, the athletes at the top of the game look at outcomes to spur further improvement. American soccer great Mia Hamm said, "Many people say I'm the best women's soccer player in the world. I don't think so. And because of that, someday I just might be."

• P111. We need a mindset shift. We need a plan to develop a more productive habit of mind. That starts in the deliberative mind and requires foresight and practice, but if it takes hold, it can become an established habit, running automatically and changing the way we reflectively think. We can get to this mindset shift by behaving as if we have something at risk when we sort outcomes into the luck and skill buckets, because we do have a lot at risk on that fielding decision. Thinking in bets is a smart way to start building habits that achieve our long-term goals.

• P130. We don't win bets by being in love with our own ideas. We win bets by relentlessly striving to calibrate our beliefs and predictions about the future to more accurately represent the world. In the long run, the more objective person will win against the more biased person. In that way, betting is a form of accountability to accuracy. Calibration requires an open-minded consideration of diverse points of view and alternative hypotheses.

• P170. Less formally, look for opportunities to recruit a devil's advocate on an ad hoc basis. When seeking advice, we can ask specific questions to encourage the other person to figure out reasons why we might be wrong. That way, they won't be as reticent to challenge the action we want to pursue; we're asking for it, so it's not oppositional for them to disagree or give us advice contrary to what they think we want to hear. Make no mistake: the process of seeing ourselves and the world more accurately and objectively is hard and makes us think about things we generally avoid. The group needs rules of engagement that don't make this harder by letting members get away with being nasty or dismissive. And we need to be aware that even a softer serve of dissent to those who have not agreed to the truth-seeking charter can be perceived as confrontational.

• P188. Business journalist and author Suzy Welch developed a popular tool known as 10-10-10 that has the effect of bringing future-us into more of our in-the-moment decisions. "Every 10-10-10 process starts with a question ... [W]hat are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years? This set of questions triggers mental time travel that cues that accountability conversation (also encouraged by a truth-seeking decision group). We can build on Welch's tool by asking the questions through the frame of the past: "How would I feel today if I had made this decision ten minutes ago? Ten months ago? Ten years ago? Whichever frame we choose, we draw on our past experiences (including similar decisions we may have regretted) in answering the questions, recruiting into the decision those less-reactive brain pathways that control executive functioning.

• P210. In early February 2017, he described the merits of scenario planning: "When faced with highly uncertain conditions, military units and major corporations sometimes use an exercise called scenario planning. The idea is to consider a broad range of possibilities for how the future might unfold to help guide long-term planning and preparation." After identifying as many of the possible outcomes as we can, we want to make our best guess at the probability of each of those futures occurring. When I consult with enterprises on building decision trees and determining probabilities of different futures, people frequently resist having to make a guess at the probability of future events, mainly because they feel like they can't be certain of what the likelihood of any scenario is. But that's the point. The reason why we do reconnaissance is because we are uncertain. We don't (and likely can't ) know how often things will turn out a certain way with exact precision. It's not about approaching our future predictions from a point of perfection. It's about acknowledging that we're already making a prediction about the future every time we make a decision, so we're better off if we make that explicit. If we're worried about guessing, we're already guessing. We are already guessing that the decision we execute will result in the highest likelihood of a good outcome, given the options we have available to us. By at least trying to assign probabilities, we will naturally move away from the default of 0% or 100%, away from being sure it will turn out one way and not another. Anything that moves us off those extremes is going to be a more reasonable assessment than not trying at all. Even if our assessment results in a wide range, like the chances of a particular scenario occurring being between 20% and 80%, that is still better than not guessing at all.

• P211. "What are the possible futures? What are the probabilities of those possible futures?" And they get very comfortable with the fact that they don't know exactly because they can't see their opponent's cards. This is true of most strategic thinking. Whether it involves sales strategies, business strategies, or courtroom strategies, the best strategies are considering a fuller range of possible scenarios, anticipating and considering the strategic a responses to each, and so on deep into the decision tree. This kind of scenario planning is a form of mental time travel we can do on our own. It works even better when we do it as part of a scenario-planning group, particularly one that is open-minded to dissent and diverse points of view. Diverse viewpoints allow for the identification of a wider variety of scenarios deeper into the tree, and for better estimates of their probability.

• P222. Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a pre-mortem imagines a negative future. We can't create a complete picture without representing both positive and negative space. Pre-mortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience. Imagining a headline that reads "We Failed to Reach Our Goal" challenges us to think about ways in which things could go wrong that we otherwise wouldn't if left to our own (optimistic, team-player) devices. For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is "Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls." Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.