Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter

Decisions When You Don’t Have All the

Facts by Annie Duke
Professional poker player Annie Duke explores how we can become better
decision-makers in an uncertain and challenging world. She helps us understand
how to disentangle the roles of luck and skill in determining outcomes, to make
better bets that lead to better outcomes and a better life.

Quick summary:

1. Decisions are not right or wrong

2. Bad decisions can lead to good outcomes - and the other way around

3. Motivated Reasoning is making the most desired decision rather than what is the most
logical; you make up justifications supporting your decisions; best approach is to look for
outside opinion to help with the decision.

4. Spend time in the future. We are often driven by emotions and instant gratification
when making a decision; we do that when we do not care for the long-term consequences
on how the decision will affect us in the future. The 10/10/10 strategy - think how the
decision will affect you in 10 minutes, 10 days and 10 years - can help you evaluate the
options and make the best decision

5. Learn from outcomes. Learn from your prior experience. Keeping a record of decisions
made will help you in the future.

6. Improve decision making by being part of a group. Everybody has blind spots.
Surround yourself with supportive people with similar goals to yours.

Key Takeaways
Biases
 “Resulting”: We tend to equate the quality of a decision with the quality
of its outcome. This prevents us from accurately assessing the quality of
our decisions and the role luck plays in the outcomes.
 Hindsight bias: We tend to see an outcome as inevitable once that
outcome is known. This is the enemy of probabilistic thinking because it
prevents us from seeing the many other possible outcomes that could have
occurred.
 Loss aversion: Losses hurt more than gains feel good. E.g., winning $100
at blackjack feels as good as losing $50 feels bad. The same applies to
 being right and wrong. Being wrong hurts more than being right feels
good, unless you reframe your relationship with being wrong.
 Motivated reasoning: The beliefs we hold influence how we process new
information.
 Blind-spot bias: People are better at recognizing biased reasoning in
others but are blind to bias in themselves.
 Binary bias: We tend to seek clarity and closure by simplifying complex
ideas and situations into two categories.

What is thinking in bets?

A bet is a decision about an uncertain future. Most of the decisions in your life
– switching jobs, choosing a partner, selecting your field of study, not doing
something – are bets. They’re choices that you make in the face of an uncertain
future.

Thinking in bets begins with understanding that there are two forces that
influence how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Being
able to recognize the difference between these two forces is what thinking in bets
is about. Once you can distinguish between the two, you can focus on improving
the quality of your decisions, which will help you in the long run.

Poker vs chess as a metaphor for life

“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.”

Life consists of skill, luck and hidden information. While chess is a highly
strategic game, it is unlike life because it involves very little hidden information
or luck. Poker, on the other hand, is a much better model for life. It requires skill,
luck and making decisions in the face of incomplete information. Whereas in
chess if you make all of the right decisions, you’re likely to win, in poker, that’s
not the case.

What’s a good decision?

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the
result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately
represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some
variation of ‘I’m not sure.’”

Most of us evaluate the quality of our decisions based on the outcomes we

achieve. But you can make a bad decision that turns out favourably and a good
decision that turns our poorly. Equating outcomes solely with the quality of your
decisions is one way in which we fail to improve our thinking and understand the
world.
Redefining right and wrong.
“If we aren’t wrong just because things didn’t work out, then we aren’t right just
because things worked out well.”

Being wrong is not a bad thing. It’s an opportunity to learn and grow. It requires
humility, an open mind, and a willingness to study our actions. Once you’re
comfortable not being “right” or “wrong and living in the shades of grey, you start
to learn more from your decisions and the outcomes you experience. This has an
added emotional benefit of making the highs less high and the lows less low.

Become a calibrator
Calibrators use experience and objective information to update their beliefs and
represent the world more accurately. The more accurate our beliefs, the better
the foundation of the bets we make. The better the foundation of the bets we
make, the more likely it is that we achieve favourable outcomes in the long run.

Default believers
“We form beliefs without vetting most of them, and we maintain those beliefs even after
receiving clear, corrective information about them.”

Our default setting is to believe what we hear is true.

We think we process information like this:
1. We hear something

2. We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false

3. We form our belief

But it actually is like this:

1. We hear something

2. We believe it to be true

3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think

about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false

This default believing behaviour means that we hold beliefs that we’ve never
actually validated. And because our beliefs shape how we see the world and
interpret new information, we hold heavily biased ways of thinking based on
beliefs we never tested. This is a dangerous place to be.

Fake news amplifies our beliefs

Fake news does not convince the other side that the world is one way. It takes
people on one side and entrenches their beliefs even further. It plays to the views
of our filter bubbles, and in doing so, it amplifies and makes our pre-existing
beliefs.
Being smart makes it worse
“It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those
numbers to conform to your beliefs.”

Smart people are not more rational thinkers. In fact, they’re more prone to
letting biases cloud their vision of the world. Because smart people are better at
taking in constructing narratives that support their beliefs, they find more
creative ways to rationalize and frame data to fit their pre-existing points of
view.

It’s helps to admit you might be wrong

“The more we recognize that we are betting based on our beliefs (with our happiness,
attention, health, money, time, or some other limited resource), the more we are likely
to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk
inherent in what we believe.”

When we admit that we aren’t sure of something, we’re more open to updating
our beliefs. When we’re more open to update our beliefs, we develop a more
accurate view of the world over time. This allows us to improve the quality of our
decisions, and in the long run, the outcomes we achieve.

Luck vs. skill in outcomes

In life we make bets that lead to outcomes. Ideally those outcomes teach us
something about how we can make better bets.

When we analyse outcomes, we ask ourselves: “why did something happen the
way it did?” To learn from these inquiries, we have to figure out the role of both
luck and skill.

Luck is everything that we can’t control – the actions of others, the weather, our
genes. Skill is related to how clear our understanding of the world is and the
quality of the decision we made based on that understanding.

We often fail in analysing outcomes because of the self-serving bias. When

something good happens, we attribute it to our skills. We something bad
happens, we attribute it to back luck. Basically, we take credit for the good and
deflect blame for the bad.

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t
like.” – Jean Cocteau

The opposite is true when we analyse the outcomes of others. We often attribute
their good fortune to luck and their bad fortune to their decisions.
These tendencies make us less likely to form an accurate understanding of why
things happen in our lives, and so we often learn very little. But if we fight the
self-serving bias and learn to better disentangle the role of skill and luck, we can
slowly improve our decision over time.

Comparing ourselves to others

Our happiness is not always related to our objective conditions. In fact, it’s often
driven by how we’re doing comparatively to the peer group that we choose. So
even when we climb the ladder and improve our circumstances, we often end up
unhappy as we continue to see other people doing better than us in certain
domains.

This comparative frame makes us more likely to be less giving, to be zero-sum

thinkers, and to cloud our vision about what drives both our outcomes and the
outcomes of others.

Why you should improve your decision-making

“The cumulative effects of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding
interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do.”
Just like how good habits or good investments compound, so do improvements in
our decision-making. The earlier you learn to improve your decisions, the better
the results.

“Improving decision quality is about increasing our changes of good outcomes, not
guaranteeing them.”
No matter how good your decisions are, you can’t guarantee good outcomes. You
can only improve the odds that you get a better outcome.

The Rashomon Effect

Even when people experience the same event at the same time, if you ask them
about it, you will often get two very different accounts about what happened.
That’s because the way we interpret the world is not only a function of the
objective experience, but includes how we see and choose to understand the
world.

Overweighting opinions based on feelings

“When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our
minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise,
when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without
much vetting. Both are bad.”

Your relationship with “the messenger” clouds how you see “the message.” If you
like them, you see it more favourably. If you don’t like them, you see it less
favourably. It’s important to pay attention to this and be honest with yourself to
continue being open to good ideas and to not be persuaded by bad ideas.

Temporal discounting
“The tendency we all have to favour our present-self at the expense of our future-self is
called temporal discounting.”
When we’re out drinking late at night or thinking about how to invest our
money, we tend to overweight our present selves, often at the expense of our
future selves. This “present self-bias” often leads to pain for us down the road and
is mostly avoidable.

Don’t watch the ticker

“We make a long-term stock investment because we want it to appreciate over years or
decades. Yet there we are, watching a downward tick over a few minutes, consumed by
imagining the worst. What’s the volume? Is it heavier than usual? Better check the news
stories. Better check the message boards to find out what rumours are circulating.”

Stop watching the ticker. Don’t get lost in the trees and miss the forest.
Sometimes we need to zoom out of the noise of the present to make good
decisions about an uncertain future. If you can learn to do this well, you’ll be less
anxious about the problems of today and be able to make less emotional
decisions.

Reactive decision-making is worth avoiding because it often leads us to try to get

rid of negative emotions [i.e. fear] in favour of sustaining positive emotions [i.e.
optimism]. This can [mix-up our emotions, breaking the balance we have] keep us
off track from our longer-term goals.

Feelings are path dependent

Image you’re playing blackjack in a casino. You start the night with $1,000 and
one of two scenarios happens:

1. You lose $900 in the first hour, going on to win it back and end the night
even.

2. You win $1,000 in the first hour, going on to lose those gains and end the
night even.

All of us feel better in the first scenario, despite ending up in the same place.
That’s because in the first scenario we end up making our way back from down,
and in the second we feel the pain of having been up and not quitting. What’s
silly is that both outcomes are the same.
The takeaway is that how we feel about something depends heavily on how we
got to that outcome. So even when we end up with better outcomes, we can end
up feeling worse than if we had worse outcomes. The path of how you got to some
outcome matters more than you think.

Build Ulysses contracts

A Ulysses Contract is when our past-selves prevent our present-selves from
doing something stupid. There are two types of Ulysses Contracts:

1. Barrier-inducing: If you want to eat healthy and are meeting a friend at

the mall where there is a food court with unhealthy food, you can eat
something beforehand or not leave enough time to be able to even visit the
food court. You’ve created a barrier (suppressing your hunger or not
leaving time) so you can better live by the actions you’ve decided to take.
2. Barrier-reducing: If you want to eat healthy and have a penchant for
potato chips, you could choose not to ever have potato chips in the house.
That way, when you’re feeling hungry and impulsive late at night, you
won’t have them available to you. You could always go to the store, but
this requires much more effort, and you’re less likely to do it.
Other examples include things like setting automatic contributions to your
retirement account. You can meet your investing goals without having to think
about timing the market or even making the decision.

Scenario planning
Scenario planning can help us make better decisions and plans, anticipating how
things may or may not work out and improving the quality of our plans along the
way. There are two types of scenario planning:

1. Backcasting – If you backcast, you imagine that you’ve achieve your

goal. Then you work backward to think about how you got there. This is a
positive frame that helps you imagine the outcome you want.
2. Premortems – When you do a premortem, you imagine a world in which
you don’t achieve your goal – aka your plan failed. You then think about
all of the reasons the plan might fail, and this helps you create a plan that
reduces the probability of these things from happening.
Both backcasting and premortems are useful, but premortems are more effective
in helping you get good outcomes. In imagining a world in which you don’t
succeed, you reduce the likelihood that your plans are overly optimistic, help
tackle roadblocks in advance, and feel better if you don’t succeed on your path.

You won’t win every time

“Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after
making the best possible bets.”
You won’t win or get good outcomes with everything you do. The important thing
is to continue to learn, evaluate, and improve over time. But don’t expect to
always win, even if you make a great decision.

Notes on Thinking in Bets

By Annie Duke
Aidan Hornsby, Jul 1, 2018·9 min read

These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the
book.

Why thinking in bets can help us make

better decisions
Life is Poker, not Chess

The decisions we make in our lives (business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle,
relationships, parenting, etc) involve luck, uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception —
prominent elements in poker.

Unlike poker, chess contains no hidden information and very little luck.

We get into trouble when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions instead of
poker decisions.

Everything is a bet

Jobs and relocation decisions are bets. Sales negotiations and contracts are bets. Buying
a house is a bet. Ordering chicken over steak is a bet, etc.

In most of our decisions, we’re not betting against another person —we’re betting
against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short
run, but the cost to the quality of our decision making can be immense. If we can find
ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more
accurately and be better for it.

The quality of our lives = the sum of decision quality (bets)+ luck.

In the long run, the cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making is like
compounding interest— can have huge effects on everything that we do.

We don’t win bets by being in love with our own ideas. We win bets by 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.

Our brains weren’t built for rationality

Our brains evolved to create certainty and order, so we are uncomfortable with the idea
that luck plays a significant role in our lives.

We recognize the existence of luck, but resist the idea that, despite our best efforts,
things might not work out the way we want.

It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does
not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable. We evolved to see the world that
way. Creating order out of chaos has been necessary for our survival.

When we work backwards from results to figure out why those things happened, we are
susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only
correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer.

We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight
relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.

How to apply bet-thinking to your decision-making

“I’m not sure” — Acknowledging uncertainty

Making better decisions starts with understanding that uncertainty can work a lot
of mischief.

We are generally discouraged from saying “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”. People regard those
expressions as vague, unhelpful, and even evasive. But getting comfortable with “I’m not sure” is
a vital step to being a better decision maker. We have to make peace with not knowing.

There are many reasons why embracing uncertainty makes us better decision makers. Here‘s a
couple:

1. “I’m not sure” is simply a more accurate representation of the world.

2. Related: When we accept that we can’t be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap
of black-and-white thinking.

The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not
sure, and that’s okay.

Redefining “Wrong”

Decisions are bets on the future. They aren’t “right” or “wrong” based on whether they turn out
well or not.

When we move away from a world where there are only two opposing and discrete boxes that
decisions can be put in — right or wrong — we start living in a continuum between the
extremes. Making better decisions [is not] stops being about wrong or right but
about calibrating among all the shades of grey.
Should we be willing to give up the good feeling of ‘right’ to get rid of the anguish of ‘wrong’? Yes.

First, the world is a pretty random place. The influence of luck makes it impossible to predict
exactly how things will turn out, and all of the hidden information makes it even worse. If we
don’t change our mindset, we’re going to have to deal with being wrong a lot.

Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good. We know that losses in
general feel about twice as bad as wins feel good.

Redefining confidence

We would be better served as communicators and decision-makers if we thought less about

whether we are confident in our beliefs and more about how confident we are.

Instead of thinking of confidence as all-or-nothing, our expression of our

confidence would then capture all the shades of grey in between.

Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits:

 We’re less likely to succumb to motivated reasoning since it feels better to make
small adjustments in degrees of certainty instead of having to grossly downgrade
from “right” to “wrong”.

 When we work toward belief calibration, we become less judgmental of ourselves.

 We assume that if we don’t come off as 100% confident, others will value our
opinion less. The opposite is usually true.

 Expressing our level of confidence invites people to be our collaborators. When we

declare something as 100% correct, others may be reluctant to offer up new and
relevant information that could inform our beliefs.

 Expressing our beliefs this way also serves listeners. We know that our default is to
believe what we hear, without vetting the information too carefully. If we
communicate to our listeners that we are not 100% on what we are saying, they are
less likely to walk away having been infected by our beliefs.

Belief

The more accurate our beliefs, the better the foundation of the bets we make. Unfortunately, our
beliefs can be way, way off.

People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact,
believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary
comprehension than it is like rational assessment.

This is how we think we form abstract beliefs:

1. We hear something.

2. We think something about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false;
only after that:

3. We form the belief.

Unfortunately,this is how we actually form abstract beliefs:

 1. We hear something.

2. We believe it to be true.

3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or inclination, we think about it and vet
it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.

This suggests our default setting is to believe what we hear is true.

Even though our default is “true”, if we were good at updating our beliefs based on new
information, our haphazard belief formation process might cause relatively few problems.

Sadly, this isn’t how it works. We form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them
even after receiving clear, corrective information.

The stubbornness of beliefs

Once a belief is lodged in, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us
to notice and seek out confirming evidence, rarely challenging the validity of that evidence, and
ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational,
circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning.

Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the
way.

We want to think well of ourselves and feel that the narrative of our life story is
positive. Being wrong doesn’t fit that narrative.

If we think of beliefs as only 100% right or 100% wrong, when confronting new information that
might contradict our belief, we have only two options:

1. Make the massive shift in our opinion of ourselves from 100% right to 100%
wrong, or:

2. Ignore or discredit the new information.

It feels bad to be wrong, so most of the time, most of us choose (2).

Information that disagrees with us is an assault on our self-narrative. On the flip side, when new
information agrees with us, we effortlessly embrace it.

Evolutionarily, we’re wired to protect our beliefs even when our goal is to seek
truth.

Wanna bet? Using bets to vet your beliefs and check your decisions

Being asked if we’re willing to bet money on a belief makes it much more likely that we will:

 Examine our information in a less biased way.

 Be more honest with ourselves about how sure we are of beliefs.

 Be more open to updating and calibrating our beliefs.

When we are challenged to bet on a belief it triggers us to vet that belief, taking
inventory of the evidence that informed us. How do I know this? Where did I get this
information? Who did I get it from? What is the quality of my sources?
The person who wins bets over the long run is the one with the most accurate beliefs. The more
objective we are, the more accurate our beliefs become.

Offering a wager brings the risk out into the open, making explicit what is already implicit (and
frequently overlooked).

Advice on Communicating truthfully

Express uncertainty. Uncertainty improves truth-seeking within groups; it also invites

everyone around us to share helpful information and dissenting opinions.

Lead with assent. E.g. Listen for things you agree with, state those and be specific, and then
follow with “and” instead of “but”. If there is one thing we have learned so far it’s that we like
having our ideas affirmed.

If you want to engage someone with whom you have some disagreement, they’ll be more open
and less defensive if we start with those ideas we agree with, which there surely will be.

Say “Yes, and…” If someone expresses a belief or prediction that doesn’t sound well calibrated
and we have relevant information, try to say “and”, as in: “I agree with you on that [specific idea
or concept], AND…”

“Yes” means you are accepting the construct of the situation. “And” means you are adding to it.

Adventures in mental time travel

A visit from past or future versions of us helps present-us make better bets.

In our decision-making lives, we aren’t that good at taking a wider perspective — at accessing the
past and future to get a better view of how any given moment might fit into the scope of time. It
just feels how it feels in the moment and we react to it.

The over-estimation of the impact of any individual moment on our overall happiness is the
emotional equivalent of watching the ticker tape in the financial world.

Our problem is that we’re ticker watchers of our entire lives. Happiness is not best measured by
looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements.

How we field outcomes is path dependant. It doesn’t so much matter where we end up as how we
got there. What happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much
more than how we are doing overall.

Our feelings are not a reaction to the average of how things are going. We feel sad if
we are breaking even (or winning) on an investment that used to be valued much higher. In
relationships, even small disagreements seem big in the moment.

The problem in all these situations is that our in-the-moment emotions affect the quality of the
decisions we make in those moments, and we are very willing to make decisions when we are
not emotionally fit to do so.

Moving regret in front of our decisions

Regret is one of the most intense emotions we feel. The problem is, it occurs after the fact — not
before. But, if regret occurred before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get
us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.
Use the 10–10–10 process
Before a decision, ask yourself “What are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes?
Ten months? Ten years?”

These questions trigger mental time travel.

Backcasting: Working backward from a positive future

When we identify the goal and work backward from there to “remember” how we got there, the
research shows that we do better.

Backcasting makes it possible to identify the low-probability events that must occur to reach the
goal. That could lead to developing strategies to increase the chances those events occur or to
recognizing the goal as too ambitious.

Imagining a successful future and backcasting from there is a useful time-travel

exercise for identifying necessary steps for reaching our goals. Working backward
helps even more when we give ourselves the freedom to imagine unfavourable futures.

Pre-mortems

Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out
that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.

While backcasting imagines a positive future, a pre-mortem imagines a negative one.

It may not feel so good during the planning process to include this focus on the negative
space. Over the long run, however, seeing the world more objectively and making better
decisions will feel better than turning a blind eye to negative scenarios.

Game & obsessing over small mistakes Daniel Negreanu @RealKidPoker Poker

Just speaking for myself here, but I know my poker game is in a good place when I obsess over
relatively small mistakes and they are few and far between. Poker is a game of mistakes. Like
golf, when pros attack the pin from 100 yards out, they are trying to make it, but rarely do. Their
misses or “mistakes”, still leave them close to the hole. The goal in both games is IMO to
minimize inevitable mistakes and avoid the big ones. The better you get, the mistakes
become more subtle and intricate.

Re: And if the pin is 8 yards from water, they will aim a bit to the other side and a perfect shot
would give them a 12-foot putt. Then they are actually hoping to miss a little in the right
direction. There may be poker analogies for that spot as well.

Daniel Negreanu: Yup. Folding a marginally +EV [Positive Expected Value] spot to avoid
increased risk

My entire “small ball” strategy was built on this concept. Give up marginal +EV spots to avoid
ruin
Q: What constitutes marginal? Would think 55/45 is marginal, but is 60/40? What's your cut off?
Do we take those 60/40's in earlier stages and limit those spots when ICM is relevant? So many
intricacies, styles, strategies... gotta love it.

Daniel Negreanu, Extreme example: Say you are the best player in the field early in a tourney.
The small blind goes all in and you know can see he has AK.

If you have TT you are the favorite in the coinflip, but it’s a small edge and likely not the optimal
play to call

A: Sacrificing small edges in spots completely in my control offer more EV & provide a cushion
for spots which I have 0 control & in tournaments there are MANY! A flip to bust doesn’t
summarize my tournament when many spots earlier I had controlled decisions where I made
mistakes.

Re: That's also a good way to know when someone not only sucks at poker but will never get
any better. After a full day of poker they say absurd stuff like "I made absolutely zero mistakes";
and forget to add "That I was aware of"

Re: poker [and trading] is really hard for people who think they are always right about
everything all the time, as well as people who can’t differentiate making a good decision even if
the outcome is poor

Re: The game evolves and changes over time; you need to constantly evaluate and adapt your
strategy; always look at the bigger picture; sometimes it’s OK to lose small battles to win the
war!

Re: I’ve often felt the draw to poker and golf were similar. You can get good but never master
either.

Re: Minimizing unforced errors is the most important aspect of any individual competition.
Poker, tennis, golf, boxing. It's one thing for you to fall into a trap and be outplayed. But playing
yourself into a corner, that's what separates the greats.