Liv Boeree Gives TED Talk On ‘Decision-Making Skills’

Liv Boeree Gives TED Talk On ‘Decision-Making Skills’

British poker pro Liv Boeree is one of the few female poker players who has found success playing poker.

Boeree has worked hard on building her brand by using social media and sharing her success through different mediums.

She has accumulated over $3.7 million in career prize money and recently took the stage at a TED event to share “3 Lessons on Decision Making from a Poker Champion”.

How can players accurately assess their skills? How can they predict outcomes? How much should people trust their instincts in poker and in life?

These were some of the questions that PokerStars Team Pro Liv Boeree addressed during her talk.

TED Radio Hour

The Importance Of Luck

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Boeree said that life is a lot like poker in that it takes a combination of skill and luck to succeed. She feels that people must take a moment and ask themselves how much they are truly responsible for when they experience success.

Boeree illustrated her point by talking about poker players who win big tournaments and overestimate their skill. Such a thing can lead to overconfidence. People need to acknowledge the amount of luck that played a role in that success so that they can assess their own skill more realistically.

Overestimating Intuition

Boeree claimed that poker has changed to the point that players can’t solely rely on their intuition in order to win. These days, players rely on a slow and careful analysis. She explained that the reason for this is that our intuition isn’t as great as we like to think it is. Our gut feelings are vulnerable to biases and wishful thinking. This is why Boeree suggests that when we are forced to make decisions that we pay attention to our gut feelings but we should rely on careful analysis before making a decision.

In her speech, Boeree said

Poker is a game of probabilities and precision. And so you have to train yourself to think in numbers

Risk Analysis

Boeree explained that probabilities play a part in both poker and life. She advised her listeners to not jump into anything without taking the time to count the costs and do a proper risk analysis. By doing this, the many interpretations that come from murky probabilistic language are removed.

This isn’t the first time that Boeree has taken a TED stage. She has shared on similar topics at TED events in the past and those talks focused on statistical thinking and how it applies to both poker and life.