Alexis Rondeau

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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Cover of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
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Annie Duke

123 highlights · 16 notes · last read October 2025

Highlights I wrote a note on are shown in full. The other 108 are scrambled: the words are the author's, so here you only see where in the book I underlined something.

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 for learning.

Location 112

My note Tricky kinds of feedback

The prospect of some grizzled ranchers in Montana systematically taking my money at a poker table forced me to find practical ways to either solve this learning puzzle or go broke.

Location 117

My note Learn because your livelihood depends on it

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me 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 as possible.

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My note A bet is a decision about an uncertain future.

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 selves to make fewer emotional decisions.

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My note Thinking in bets will improve my decision making

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 between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

Location 138

My note Results in life come either from:

Quality of my decisions
Simple luck

Carroll got unlucky. He had control over the quality of the play-call decision, but not over how it turned out. It was exactly because he didn’t get a favorable result that he took the heat. He called a play that had a high percentage of ending in a game-winning touchdown or an incomplete pass (which would have allowed two more plays for the Seahawks to hand off the ball to Marshawn Lynch). He made a good-quality decision that got a bad result.

Location 167

My note Good quality decision + bad luck = The play didn't work.

But that did NOT mean he made a bad decision!

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

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My note Quality of decision != Quality of oitcome

Why are we so bad at separating luck and skill? Why are we so uncomfortable knowing that results can be beyond our control? Why do we create such a strong connection between results and the quality of the decisions preceding them? How can we avoid falling into the trap of the Monday Morning Quarterback, whether it is in analyzing someone else’s decision or in making and reviewing the decisions in our own lives?

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My note Why do we mix luck and decision qualityg

Take a moment to imagine your best decision in the last year. Now take a moment to imagine your worst decision. I’m willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result.

Location 181

My note Best decisions:

Learn Cursor
Invest into AI learning
Microdosing
Marriage
Traveling
Holmes Place

Worst decisions:

Double-down on "teaching" product

My note We think good decisions when they work out

The poker players who stand the test of time have a variety of talents, but what they share is the ability to execute in the face of these limitations.

Location 308

My note The test of time: execute In the face of limits

‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’”

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My note Chess is not a game

In chess, outcomes correlate more tightly with decision quality. In poker, it is much easier to get lucky and win, or get unlucky and lose.

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My note Chess has a tighter feedback loop on decision quality

But life is more like poker. You could make the smartest, most careful decision in firing a company president and still have it blow up in your face. You could run a red light and get through the intersection safely—or follow all the traffic rules and signals and end up in an accident. You could teach someone the rules of poker in five minutes, put them at a table with a world champion player, deal a hand (or several), and the novice could beat the champion. That could never happen in chess.

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My note Life is more like poker

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.

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My note QOL = QOD + luck

That’s chess, but life doesn’t look like that. It looks more like poker, where all that uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data.

Location 382

My note Its easy to misunderstand

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