Annie Duke Books

Decision-making is not a talent reserved for analysts or poker professionals—it is a learnable skill. In my work as a decision strategist, I’ve witnessed how structured thinking allows anyone to move from guessing to reasoning. The first step is acknowledging that every decision unfolds in a landsca...

From How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

If you’ve ever felt crushed by a bad result or smug after a lucky win, you’ve experienced outcome bias firsthand. The antidote lies in redefining success—not by what happens, but by how you decided. In poker, even the most skillful player loses hands due to chance. My goal was never to win every han...

From How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

We live in a culture that idolizes grit. From the stories we tell our children to the slogans that decorate office walls — “never quit,” “keep pushing,” “failure is not an option” — persistence has become sanctified. But this cultural lens hides a dangerous bias. The assumption that staying the cour...

From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

Every time we say yes to staying, we implicitly say no to something else. Opportunity cost is one of the most overlooked concepts in decision-making — because the forgone alternatives remain invisible. You can see what you’ve invested, but you can’t easily see what you’ve missed by investing elsewhe...

From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

A good result can come from a bad decision, and a bad result can come from a smart one. That uncomfortable truth sits at the heart of Annie Duke’s argument. We are wired to look backward from outcomes and assume they reveal whether we chose well, but in uncertain environments they often reveal very ...

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

Certainty feels comforting, but it is usually fiction. Duke’s central shift is from binary thinking to probabilistic thinking: instead of asking, “Am I right?” ask, “How likely is this?” Most real-world decisions are not made between obvious truth and obvious falsehood. They are made between competi...

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