Where to Start with Annie Duke
Annie Duke is an American author, speaker, and decision strategist who spent two decades as one of the top professional poker players in the world before pivoting to help business leaders make better decisions. She won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in 2004 and earned over $4 million in tournament play during her career. Duke holds a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a National Science Foundation Fellow studying cognitive psychology under the supervision of Baruch Fischhoff. She left academia to pursue poker and later recognized that the decision-making skills she developed at the table applied directly to business and life. Her 2018 book “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts” became a national bestseller and established her as one of the leading voices on decision-making under uncertainty. She followed it with “How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices” (2020) and “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away” (2022). She consults and speaks for organizations including the NFL, Citibank, and the World Economic Forum.
Start here
Thinking in Bets
Annie Duke · 288 pages · 2018 · Easy
Themes: decision-making, probability, cognitive bias, uncertainty
A former World Series of Poker champion shows how to make better decisions when you can never have complete information. Duke brings together insights from cognitive psychology and years at the poker table to offer a practical framework for thinking under uncertainty.
Why Start Here
Duke’s core insight is that life is more like poker than chess. In chess, all the information is visible. In poker, and in business, you make decisions with incomplete information, and the outcome always involves some element of luck. She shows how we confuse good outcomes with good decision-making, and gives you tools to separate decision quality from outcome quality.
The book provides concrete tools: how to form a decision group that challenges your thinking, how to conduct a “premortem” before committing to a plan, and how to update your beliefs as new information arrives. These tools apply directly to any context where you face uncertainty.
What to Expect
A readable 288-page book that moves quickly. Duke writes in a conversational style with examples from poker, sports, business, and everyday life. This is the most accessible entry point into strategic decision-making. If reading about strategy feels intimidating, start here.