Maria talks with Women’s Chess Grandmaster Jennifer Shahade about what chess and poker teach you about life; how statistics can help you think about having kids; and the time Maria lost a chess match in four moves.
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The Leap from Maria Konnikova
Silver Bulletin from Nate Silver
Pushkin. Hey everyone, I'm Maria Kanikova and welcome to a special episode of Risky Business, our podcast with Nate Silver about making better decisions. Except today it's just me and a very special guest, Jennifer Shahade. Jennifer is someone who I've known for many years, and she is a truly extraordinary individual. She is a two times Women's US Chess champ, the first woman to win the Junior Championship, a Woman's Grandmaster, and the author of multiple books, Play Like a Girl, Play Like a Champion, Chess Bitch, and Chess Queens, and the upcoming Thinking Sideways. Jennifer, thank you so so much for joining. So happy to have you here on Risky Business.
Oh I'm so excited about your podcast. Maria. It's wonderful to be here.
So I want to start with your upbringing, because you are someone who not only is in a risky business, because you and I are actually members of Poker Stars Team Pro together, so we also played poker and that's how we originally met. But you are someone who's been thinking through this lens of gaming for most of your life. So I'd like to go back to your childhood and I'd love for you to tell us about how you got introduced to the world of games.
Oh, it's honestly before I can even remember. There's a picture of me when I was two years old playing against my brother in chess, and obviously I don't think I knew the moves quite then, but it definitely really predated any memories that I have. My parents are also big lovers of card games, poker, bred Everything in our life is about games, and they were also really big into sports and sports betting, so I know that's another aspect of this podcast, so I feel much at home here.
I actually didn't know that about sports betting, so let's return to that in a second. But first, your brother is actually also someone who is well known in the world of chess, as is your father. Right, so you are someone who comes from what's known as a chess family.
Yeah, that's right, and it's really typical.
Honestly, it's a very very typical way for chess players to get into the game is via their family, especially women players. I feel like when you talk to a female player, it's very very typical that her brother plays, her father plays, her mother plays, and I think a lot of that is it just gives them that like kind of built in support network.
And what was it about the game chess that first attracted you? Was it the competitive angle or was it the fact that you're thinking about kind of decision making on a different level. Do you happen to remember because I you know, when I was a little kid, my parents tried to get me to play chess and that did not stick.
Yeah.
I think I heard about this the Scholar's Mate right before exact listen.
It happened to Beth Harmon and she recovered from it, So you know, you're good.
Yes for listeners of the podcast who don't know this story. When I was in fifth grade, I learned how to play chess and during my first ever chess competition, succumbed to scholars mate, which is a mate in three moves. And that was a move that was done by a five year old when I was in fifth grade, and I never recovered and have never played chess since then. Such, you clearly had a very different experience.
Yeah, well, I'm sure I got made it in the scholars I do remember getting made in the scholars Mate, and it's a bit of a tangent, but because it's risky business. I am going to mention a story about the scholar's mate. So a lot of kids like the like the horrible five year old who checkmated you and four, they try the scholar's mate because it works. But it's not a good opening, right, It's objectively bad because if your opponent knows to avoid it, then you know you're gonna get a bad position. So it's very much an equity calculation. So the Scholar's made at the age of like five and six, kids are thinking about that. Actually, and my son actually was sitting in on an online class with Magnus Carlson, the highest rated chess player in history.
Your son, how old is he?
He's seven now.
And he is sitting in on a class with Magnus Carlson. And what's your son's name, Fabian? And who is he named after?
Well, in a way, he was named after the world number two player, Fabiano Carojuana.
Actually in a way, in a way, all right, So back.
To your story. So Fabian is in this class with Magnus Curlson.
And one of the kids asks Magnus, like, what do you think about the form of checkmate? And you know everybody's expecting Magnus is just gonna say no, don't play the form of checkmate. It's not a good opening, but it's like, yeah, you know, it's not that bad to try it. And I really I was like everybody was shocked. And one of the coaches in the in the room tried to like actually disagree.
With Magnus on the air, and I'm like, wait a.
Second, and no, I actually thought about it later and I really loved it because I think what he was trying to say.
I mean, he didn't expand on it.
But as many people might know, Magnus also really likes poker, and he also really likes sportsbetting. Is that, you know, why try to take away this instinct of children to go for equity, Like I actually it's a good instinct, you know, like, yeah, you're gonna look, you're not gonna get that check made every time, but the ten or twenty percent of the time that you do, you're gonna win in foremos. So you know, it was the first time I'd ever since heard a grandmaster say that, and it stuck with me.
So that's actually a really interesting story. And I love how you mentioned the idea of equity and how we think about equity. And now in poker, when you're talking about equity, you're talking about something very specific, right, the equity of your hand, the future value of your hand, how many chips you can imagine getting in the future, And it's kind of this calculation that you're constantly trying to make. So when you're talking about equity in chess, are you thinking about it in the same way or is it slightly different?
Well, that's a great question when it comes to talking about somebody like Magnus Carlson, because I really think that it used to be very different. When I was a kid playing chess, we didn't really think about equity or probability. It was more like we were looking for the best move, and that is the way that most chess computers taught us as well. But nowadays I think that chess players are thinking more like poker players.
They are thinking about equity even more.
They're thinking not just about what the best move is, but more about what move is likely to destabilize.
Your opponent and make them potentially.
Fall for the form of checkmate so that you can win that ten percent of the times. Right now, so it's become really a ruthless equity hunting game, just like poker.
So you're really thinking about not just kind of the present moment, but the future, and you're trying to make this probabilistic calculation, not just what does this move mean right now, but what does this move mean for my future ability to win? Given that it might there's an ex probability that it's going to make my opponent get really nervous, there's a why probability that it's going to make my opponent blunder. So is that kind of how we're thinking about it now exactly?
Of course, in chess, we're always trying to think about what our opponent will play. But usually when I was taught, I was always told always assume your opponent's going to play the best move, because if they play a weaker move, you'll win anyway. But if they play the best move, you need to really prepare for that. Nowadays, I think there's.
A little bit more nuanced.
Well, people will really think about the psychological aspect of the game of chess more, and in that way, I think the games of chess and poker are really starting to converge a little bit. Chess players are playing a little bit more like poker players, and well, we definitely know that poker players are a little bit more chess like these days in the way they study and approach the game.
Yeah, that's that's a really interesting point because one of the things that you said really jumped out at me. You said, in chess, we no longer kind of assume that that your opponent is going to make the best move, and in poker, you actually are now assuming that your opponent is going to play game theory optimal is going to make the best move every time, and you're trying to counter that because you know, in an interesting way, I think poker is at a stage of its evolution where chess has been for a while, where there are now solvers and kind of ways that try to approximate ideal behavior quote unquote, even though in poker it's it's different than in chess because it is an imperfect information game, but I do think it's this really interesting overlap in terms of decisions and in terms of what we consider to be optimal decision making.
I think that's like the reason why honestly poker is so tantalizing, why it stood the test of time, that you kind of have to balance the two polls. To me, like the word poker itself, Like playing poker means adjusting, like being present, right, it's paying attention and like actually thinking about what your opponent is doing. And the other stuff is like the theory that you fall back on if you don't really pick up on anything, if your ability to try to pay attention and see what your opponents doesn't give you much of a read, and then you're just like, well, I guess this is what I have to do. And that to me is that like everlasting tension between like what you think and what you feel and having to choose between them in every situation.
So it seems like what you're saying, and this is also me being biased as someone who plays poker and doesn't play chess, but it seems like poker is a better if we're trying. If we then go from the world of games to the world of real life, it seems like poker might be a better way of thinking about risk and decision making as we interact with people and make decisions away from the game table.
Yeah, I think poker does mirror life more than chess does, partly because it's not fair. You know, there's some people who get lucky. There's people who get lucky three or four times in a row. There are people who start out with the ability to rebuy, you know, over and over again and keep buying into the game even if they play badly or bust. So there's just a lot of more similarities with life. And then the fact that the currency of poker is money is chips, which stand for money, and so much about life is what power you have based on how much money you have and how much capital you have. So for sure, I think there are more like day to day decisions that you can make from poker. That said, as a lifel chess player, I have to give some shout outs to chests too, because one of the beautiful things about chess is that it does.
Bring you into this like beautiful flow state.
And that's really why I love chess for children too, because you can see them kind of achieve that state even at like six, seven, eight years old. And maybe they're not going to be professional chess players, I mean, very few of them will, but my hope is always that they'll remember that flow state and be able to kind of, you know, jump into that in other parts of their lives and just like forget about everything else that is going on and just, you know, enjoy the moment.
So I think that that's an interesting thing about about chess versus poker that I hadn't really thought about, because for me, you know, poker is a way that I've actually been able to achieve flow states quite often because when you're really in the zone. Since it's the only game I play, it's the only time that kind of I've found myself in that sort of situation. When did you make the switch from chess to poker. Obviously you've never switched entirely, you still play chess, but in terms of kind of your interest, when did you start migrating in that direction?
You know, it was kind of gradual.
My brother got into poker, and I was dabbling in it via him and some of my other chess friends, because at the time of the poker boom, a lot of chess players, backgammon players, anyone who really had an interest in any kind of game were flocking to poker because they thought, honestly, it was easy money. And it's funny because I was a little slow to the game compared to them, And I remember my mother, who was the stone opposite of all my other poker friends' moms, because she she called me once and she.
Was like, Jen, why aren't you playing more poker like your friends? What's going on?
I love that?
And so yeah, but I finally did take her advice and I got a bit more into it.
But you know, I always have.
I think one of the issues that it's a little underestimated and poker is that it's really important to have, especially if you want to play live poker, and in the United States right now, unfortunately, there's not a lot of regulated places that you can play online. You really need a decent chunk of money. It's not that easy to get in there. I mean, it's it's probably better than most games because you can kind of hang out and you know, spend go to like the UH one two or one three tables, like the lower poker table, the lowest buy in that you can find in Vegas or Atlantic City, and you can maybe have a few hours of entertainment for a couple hundred bucks.
But overall, like it's an expensive hobby.
I would say, so that that's probably why it took me a little while to get more into it.
So your son plays chess, right now, but not poker, correct.
Right, that's right. But he loves he loves watching poker. You're you're one of his favorite players. He likes, he likes you, Maria Hoe and chuannlu and well, of course me. So it's all about the top of women buyers. I love.
I love that it's so female centric because that's actually that's so important, and you know, that's it's a really wonderful thing to see that women can also excel in a game that is so incredibly male dominated. When he watches poker, is he interested in the strategic elements? Is he thinking of it kind of in the same terms that you've taught him to think about chess.
Yeah, but I find that kids it's harder for them to understand poker than chess, even though you know, technically it probably is easier to teach an adult the roles of poker than the roles of chess, partly because kids don't usually know that much about about money, and I think also the probabilistic thinking is pretty tricky for them as well. So, yeah, he's definitely looking to see what people have and whether they're going to make their hand.
But I wouldn't say it comes supernaturally to kids.
And I think that that's a really crucial point because one of the things that I love about pokers that it does each probabilistic thinking, which is something that does not come naturally to the human brain at all. Right, we are so bad at calculating risk, at calculating probabilities, at thinking in that way. It's just not something that comes naturally at all to the human mind. We'll be back in a minute now, switching away from kind of you as gamer, and you now kind of in your professional life, so you are a writer as well. You're someone who's been involved professionally in chess organizations, in teaching and mentoring women in all of these things. How has your thinking about risk, about risk taking migrated over from the fact that you you up kind of trained in this game's way of thinking, and how has it not? Because I think that you obviously hear both perspectives, right. You hear the people who say, oh, you know, chess, poker, et cetera. They really helped me and they helped me make decisions. And then there are some people and maybe they wouldn't say it, but I know some poker players who are really good at poker and then just so so dumb away from the poker table. So I I'd love to hear how you think about it and kind of how your non poker life, non chess life has evolved.
Oh, poker, absolutely, I'll start with poker because it's like more forefront of my mind. Poker absolutely helped me because I never took a finance class or an econ class, and I really feel like poker is just like a miniature lesson in finance, and just even the idea that if you just put your money in a checking account and don't do anything to it, you're technically losing money because of inflation. I mean, poker teaches you that very quickly, because you got annie and so the annies go up as the turn of it progresses, So you will lose money if you.
Don't do anything.
And I just love that analogy because I feel that you feel it very viscerally. If you play poker in a few tournaments and you don't play enough hands, you lose your money slowly. You play too many hands, you lose your money quickly. I mean, what better metaphor there is there for like investing wisely? I can't think of one.
Did do you feel like you have a higher risk tolerance, because obviously you know, as a fellow writer, I know that writing books has a huge risk, both financially and personally, because you're putting yourself out there. Do you think that you were prepared more prepared to do that because you understand the way that risk works.
Yeah, definitely.
I also started to understand, especially with bluffing, that if you in poker are never getting called and realizing that you know, hey, you've got it high, that you're actually not bluffing enough. And so I started to realize that maybe in life I wasn't taking enough risks because I wasn't getting told no enough. That people were too happy with me all the time. If people are always happy with you, it means that maybe you're not asking for enough, You're not putting enough pressure on them, You're not asking for enough money, you're not getting told no that is too high. And so I definitely figure that out from poker, and I think that that's a lesson that a lot of women have to learn from poker.
I'd love to actually talk about that a little bit. Obviously, poker is an incredibly male dominated area, and chess is also an incredibly male dominated area. Now, when you start negotiating while female, right, it's like driving well drunk negotiating well female. I'm using that. I'm using that language on purpose because it's a very very different beast and I found that. You know, I was horrible at negotiating pre poker, and I am much better at negotiating now than I ever was before. But you still get penalized for trying to ask for more, for trying to actually get what you're worth as a woman, because the exact same tactics and this is true at the poker table too, that work for men don't work for women. You know, if I try to be as aggressive as you know some of the best male players, that might not work for me in the same way that it works for them. These are all things that you have to consider because decision making here isn't existing in a vacuum. You know, when you're making decisions and you're female and you're perceived as female, that's very different than when you're making decisions as a man and being perceived as a man.
Absolutely, And I mean I think that's the reality, is that it's logical a lot of times for women to be less risky, and that's what we need to change. We need to change the circumstances so that they can take more risks wisely, because if you're going to be penalized if you take risk, if there's no childcare, if there's no you know, policies for women who leave the workplace, if they don't have as much capital, if their wages are lower, then actually it's really small art for them to be risk of ours, right, And so I do think it's not about telling women you should.
Take more risks. That's only part of it.
The other part of it is how do we create a circumstance where they can take more risk.
I think that's a really really important point. And Nate and I, on actually the first ever episode of Risky Business, talked about the gender paid gap and how a lot of that is because women have to make different decisions, different choices, because women are penalized for having children, that there are a lot of things that society just isn't equipped for when it comes to negotiating well, female, deciding well, female, working well female.
Absolutely, and I did listen to that episode, and I also really like the part in your book the Biggest Bluff where you talk about how you raised your speaker rate, and I believe you got an immediate yes. So it turned out that risk was one that worked out very much in your favor. But I'm sure occasionally you asked for so much they said they said no, and you had to enjoy that experience because it was part of you raising your rates for that Occasionally you get.
To know, right, that's absolutely right. I think you have to become more comfortable with hearing no and with saying you know what, that's fine because this is what I'm worth and if you don't want to pay me that then then that's okay. And learning how to walk away as I think a skill that I learned from the poker table as.
Well, absolutely super important. And I think even so through all that, I think I am still pretty risk averse in a few things like I am going to show off at the airport two and a half hours and if I'm only two hours early, I get a little bit stressed out.
So you know.
That is funny. I'm planning a trip to the airport and it's an international trip, and I'm trying to figure out, if you know, if I'm going to be pushing it if I arrive with an hour to spare, if that's going to be okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, And there's that saying that if you're always if you're always on time for flights and you're not missing it off flights.
I'm not sure I really buy that.
No, it took me missing one very important flight for me to never never take that saying seriously. But I probably have a slightly higher risk tolerance in flights than you, so that'll be an individual difference. I do want to talk about since we are now talking about kind of being female in a world of men and the decisions that that women make in light of recent remarks by Andrew Huberman about women's pregnancies and some pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how probabilities work. I you know, I'd love for you to just kind of recount that a little bit. But it also reminded me of an abed that you wrote for The Wall Street Journal where you were correctly calculating similar probabilities about childbirth.
Yeah.
So I think it was a few weeks ago that Uberman put out Its actually was on his podcast, so it went viral on Twitter. But doctor Kuberman had podcast where he was talking about the chances of a woman getting pregnant after six cycles, and well, he said, well, it should be twenty percent the first time, right, and then twenty percent the second time, So then forty percent that you'd be pregnant by month two, and then sixty percent that you'd be pregnant by month three, eighty percent by month four, and then one hundred percent chances that she will be pregnant by month five. Right, And I think, then I don't know what happens on month six. I guess the incident. Okay, oh yes, because of course there's like a chance that you'd have twins.
So that's where the twenty percent consent.
And well, he got like, predictably, you know, a crush for this tweet, Like it must have had like thousands and thousands of quote tweets making fun of his incorrect math, and some people would would correctly state it, and to his credit, he did. He retracted it and explained what he got wrong, and he did it in a nice way. And I was actually really happy to see it because I was like, oh, this is a great learning opportunity because this has gone viral that this is not the way to calculate probability, because I have to tell you, before I played poker and before I tried to get pregnant, I don't think I knew exactly the correct way to set this up either. I mean, I've probably learned it in like middle school or high school math, but I don't know if I remembered it until a little later, until college, or even when I learned poker. So I think there's a lot of people out there who also didn't know, because it seems like, yeah.
Why wouldn't you just add up the probabilities.
Right, But what you really need to do is multiply the chance of me not pregnant a month one that's eighty percent, and then the second month is also eighty percent, and then you get sixty four and then minus that from one and.
You get thirty six percent.
Right, so that's my actual chance of pregnancy, and then it gets it continues on, and yeah, it's a bit frustrating because it means that your chances are actually lower than it would seem because you aren't more likely to get lucky just because you got unlucky the first time. It's basically a version of the gambler's fallacy, right that if you are healthy and there's no like medical reason for you not to be able to get pregnant. If you've got an unlucky the first four cycles and tough luck, you know you're still only got a twenty percent chance. Sorry, And we know that from poker, right, Like you could lose your hand where you're a fifty to fifty chance to win five times in a row and you're still fifty to fifty on that six chance. And it's very frustrating if you're getting unlucky, and it's super awesome if you're getting lucky, right. And I had personal experience on this in both sides. So with my son Fabian, who I mentioned earlier, I got lucky on the second try. So my husband and I we got pregnant almost immediately and it was a healthy pregnancy. It was an awesome pregnancy. Everything went perfectly. And so I'm like the person who just starts playing poker and wins their first tournament, I'm like, and I know this is very sensitive subject. So you know, to anybody who finds this very sensitive, you know, to feel free to pause and come back to the next section. But I, as a poker player and somebody who struggles with this. It actually helped me to think about in these terms. It could seem craven to other people, but I got super lucky, and then I had, of course an inflated sense of confidence that when I tried a couple years later, I would probably get lucky again, and unfortunately that was not the case.
And this is more common than people think.
It's called secondary infertility, where you have an easy time the first time, but then the second time you don't. You don't get there to use a poker expression, And when I finally did get pregnant, unfortunately, I had a pretty pretty late miscarriage.
So yeah, it was, it was. It was a real nightmare.
And I think that the experience of poker did help me because it taught me that I still had made some really good logical decisions.
And like my husband and.
I trying to get pregnant, and in most universes we would have had our two kids, but it just didn't work out in the one that we live because of the math going against us and us being in that kind of like unlucky category.
Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and you know, I'm so I'm really sorry that you had to go through that experience. It's obviously, you know, a very emotional experience to have, and I really appreciate you sharing that because I do think that you know, it's important for people to hear it, but it's also important to just viscerally understand how probabilities work, and that's the world right. Probabilities are not correctly quote unquote distributed. They're not as pretty as you think they're going to be. And you know, nothing ever adds up to one hundred percent somehow, you always have those missing percents somewhere that go into another universe where something else happened.
Absolutely, and I think it's really important for people to be aware of that, because I don't think I was fully aware of that. Like I certainly glanced at some of these charts earlier in life, but I don't think I was appreciated the odds of miscarriage, and being that I'm somebody who likes to show up at the airport three hours early. I do think that I probably would have started a family a little bit earlier if I had been as aware. So I like that people are being educated at it now. I'm very much a feminist, and so I think it's a completely awesome choice for people to have one child, to have no children. But what bothers me is the idea that there's somebody who wants children's but isn't really acquainted with the math, and then you know, has to struggle financially and emotionally through this kind of you know, turmoil.
And if doctor Humerman is getting it wrong them, I can.
Tell you there's a lot of women's in their twenties thirties who are men too, who were married to women and they want to have kids with like that don't know this math and you know, get hit by it and are a little bit disappointed and strung.
And so, yeah, I was happy to see that. Fee.
Yeah. Well, so PSA for people who like me have always said I hate math and math is not important. Math is really important and plays out in unexpected ways in life decisions, throughout your life. And I took statistics classes in grad school because I needed to, you know, have statistical analysis when I was working on my dissertation, et cetera, et cetera. But it never hit home in kind of an actual practical way until I sat down at a poker table and actually saw these probabilities at play, actually experienced what it felt like to be, you know, a seventy percent favorite ten times in a row and lose every single time, and say, wait, how is that happening? Right now you understand why all of these psychological fallacies exist.
And then also just being grateful for the times that you're eighty percent hits. I think there's this feeling like, ah, yeah, well I was supposed to win, so I won. But no, I actually feel like gratitude when I, you know, have like a pleasant trip to wherever I'm going to, I'm.
Like, wow, nothing went wrong, like ninety percent I got there.
Yeah, and it's it's good, right, It's a good feeling to appreciate that.
Yeah, it's funny that you say that. I'm so glad you think about that as well, because whenever you know, I'm all in and I have aces, I always and this is totally irrational, but I give, like the poker gods a little prayer, and so you know, I hope it holds, right. I hope my ace is hold I hope that my chance of winning actually ends up turning into the outcome of winning. Because those two things are not one and the same.
Absolutely. Yeah, appreciate every day that nothing goes horribly wrong. I mean, that's that's a good way that you can kind of become happier from poker.
Absolutely, it has made me a happier person because it's made me able to let go of negative outcomes in real life much more easily, because you know, it's just a mindset of I can't control it. Did I make the right decision?
Right?
Was I in eighty percent face? And then if it didn't go my way, I didn't hold but but I did the right thing. And sometimes that can be hard in practice, but it's it's definitely become much easier for me over time.
Yeah, I've noticed that about you.
You're very positive and like the things that you surround yourself with and the things you talk about and the people that.
You surround yourself with.
And I think that's like, you know that conscious choice is so important because obviously you have to be aware of negativity and bad outcomes, but you can control some parts of it. And it seems like you've done like a conscious job of that, Am I right?
Ah?
Yeah? Yeah, I mean it has been a conscious choice and I have called kind of the people that I associate with, so that I only really try to spend time with people who bring me joy and who put me in a positive space, and I try to focus on the positive elements because you know, the way that I think about it is life's too short to dwell on bad beats, and bad beats are going to happen.
Yeah, you're your first rule from Eric's sidel right, absolutely bad beat stories.
Yes, that is correct, And for people who haven't read the Biggest blow off Eric's Sidell is a poker legend and was my coach and mentor from the movie Rounders.
But I feel like there's a life corollary for that for people who don't play poker, Like I think a really good one would be like a story about how you mister flight, or you miss your train or your travel was really unpleasant.
I feel like that's a kind of like a bad beat story in a way.
Sometimes they're interesting, and occasionally bad beat stories are interesting too, but I guess it's like the exception, not the rule.
I think you're absolutely right, and I think that something that I actually learned from my mom that I've tried to internalize and that you know, Eric, the no bad beat stories for my whole life. She said, you know, don't complain, right, don't try to blame other people when things go wrong. Don't say, oh, well, you know, I can't believe this person scheduled this year. I can't believe this happened. I can't believe. Oh it's so unfair. She so, don't do that, because you can't control it. You can't control other people. So instead of blaming other people, just take the blame on yourself and try to figure out what can I do, what can I do differently next time, and what can I do right now to mitigate the situation. And that's just I think, a much more positive way of thinking about risk and of thinking about how you deal with it in the moment when those percentages, when that variance does not go in your direction, especially when you knew you were taking a gamble. Right, If I'm as a flight and I cut it close, that is on me. I should not blame the traffic. I should not blame the cab driver for taking the wrong route. You know, it is on me. It is not on any of those things. We'll be right back after the break. So now I want to actually just pause for a second. You're talking about you know, who you surround yourself with and life circumstances and all of these things, and your life circumstances have changed a little bit over the last few years because you know, you were incredibly brave and took a huge, huge personal risk when you exposed someone very well known in the chess community. And when you did that, multiple other women came forward as well. But you were reprimanded for it, you were blamed for it, and you ended up leaving your role in a lot of very prominent chess organizations which were a huge part of how you made a living.
Yeah. Yeah, that has been a very big part of my life. And I should say that the abuser also was banned from these chess institutions, and so I am very proud of kind of the awareness that it's caused in the TESS community.
And I can't speak in.
More detail about it right now, but yeah, I really appreciate you know, your support on that, Marie as well, because I must say that having community in poker and in chass has been really beneficial to me because I found that the poker world has been so supportive, which you know, I wasn't honestly completely expecting. But you know, one of the things I think people do go to poker a lot of the time because they want to have their own, you know, their own careers, and sometimes that ends up being a secondary career as well, where they do poker and something else. And that always gives you more power, doesn't it.
It absolutely does. And we won't talk about this more, but I do want to say that I'm very proud of you, and you clearly have taken kind of this risk taking from from the world of games to a very personal place in your life. You made the calculation, you knew what the costs could be, and you did it anyway. And being able to act like that and to do that in real life and not just to go all in at the poker table, because this is effectively what you were doing, right. You went all in and it was not a bluff, and that is something that takes a lot of guts and a lot of courage because it did upend your life. So I just want to I want to say that I think you should be incredibly proud of your ability to, you know, take risky decision making to an extreme that a lot of people would not be able to do.
Thank you.
I would love to hear kind of what you have next in store. I know you have a new book coming out, Thinking Sideways, which is also about you know, risk and that kind of thinking, So i'd love to hear a little bit more about it. But i'd also just love to hear about how you're thinking about your life kind of moving forward, how your equity calculation. To bring it back to the beginning of our conversation, how that's looking right now.
Well, you know, it's really an interesting time for me.
Is I kind of like diving more into writing and to poker as well, And I feel like it's a very intellectually rich time for me, and it's just like so fun. I know that you're working on a book on cheating, and one thing that came up a lot in my recent book, Thinking Sideways, is also kind of the cheating and chess scandals that have erupted, and that's something I've really been thinking a lot, because it's just a story that doesn't die.
What's kind of the basic idea of the book, what can we expect?
Well, really, the basic idea of the book is ways you can learn about life from chess, and I add a lot of poker in there as well, And I think that the title will be quite interesting to people because when you ask a chess player how many moves you think ahead, you're often expecting that to be the secret of success, that they think ten moves ahead, whereas a weaker player would only think eight moves ahead. And now, whether there's some truth in that really good to chess players can think many moves ahead, like Beth Harmon staring at the ceiling. The truth is really more that great chess players think sideways, and that just means that they see an option that their opponent did not see, sometimes on move one, sometimes unmoved two. And it's much more likely that a chess player will see one of those options that you didn't see and that's why they beat you, than that they'll like out calculate you twenty moves ahead. This is really important for life right now too, because it's just like we were talking about with my own life and probably so many other listeners' lives as well, that you might not be able to plan for five years ahead right now, and that can be scary, but honestly, that's kind of the way of a chess player. It's unlikely that you're going to predict what five moves ahead looks like, but you can predict two or three better than your opponent. That's going to give you a really good chance to win.
That's great, and I think that that's such a great metaphor for how we should be thinking in ways that are not necessarily the expected way of thinking. I love that idea of thinking sideways.
Thank you.
I'm getting very much more into writing and speaking and also kind of diving back into poker and yes, which is a really interesting moment in my life where I'm kind of just like exploring kind of not totally new areas, but definitely I'm not exactly sure what the next few years are going to look like, and that's really exciting, scary, but also exciting.
It is exciting. One thing poker teaches you is to be comfortable with uncertainty and excited about the prospect of not knowing what the future holds exactly.
That's so well put. I love that.
Yes, I mean, and it's not something that we're used to as much in like midlife, right Like, I think people are often trained that when you're young, you have no idea what's going to happen. Next, and that is normal, but in mid life, this idea of uncertainty, I think is very uncomfortable for people, especially if they have kids. But you know what, it's something that I think a lot of people are going to have to deal with more as the world is changing so rapidly, that we just have to get more comfortable with uncertainty, no matter what your circumstances are.
Certainly me, but really for a lot of people, I.
Think those are wise words. And even though we don't know what the future holds, I know that I'm very excited to see what it holds next for you. And I'm excited to read your new book, and I'm excited to see where you end up. And I'm so grateful that you've come here today to share your wisdom and your experience about decision making with us. I know it's been incredibly useful and inspirational to me, and I hope that our listeners feel the same way. So thanks so much, John, Thank you, Maria.
This is awesome.
Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.