In a world full of randomness and chance, making smarter decisions in the face of uncertainty is a skill worth mastering. In Thinking in Bets, professional poker player Annie Duke becomes our guru to help us make better bets in life.

Life has been compared to a box of chocolates. A more ancient comparison is to the game of chess, which has been around for about 1,500 years. But is the comparison between life and chess accurate? Hungarian-American polymath John von Neumann didn’t think so. He called chess a “well-defined form of computation” where there is always a solution to a given problem, even if it isn’t readily apparent to the player. Real life is very different. In the words of von Neumann, “it consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do.”

If von Neumann is right, then real life starts to sound a lot more like poker than chess. What he’s saying makes a great deal of sense. In chess, you see all your pieces and all your opponent’s on a neat, eight-by-eight grid. There’s no hidden information nor are there additional pieces that can be marshaled halfway through the game. A roll of the dice won’t incapacitate a rook. There’s no uncertainty. If you lost, your moves were objectively inferior to those of your opponent.

In poker, you don’t know which cards are coming your way, and you don’t know what your opponents have. You make decisions in spite of a high degree of uncertainty. You can know probability and make all the best decisions and still come up short. A novice player who just learned poker ten minutes ago can get a lucky hand—or a string of them—and beat a seasoned professional. Common hindsight conversations after a poker tournament are often about doing everything right and still getting unlucky. That’s not the kind of commentary you hear after professional chess matches.

Chess requires computational skill more than luck. Poker, like game theory, involves bluffing, deception, and probability.

On February 1, 2015, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks fought for Super Bowl 49. The Patriots were up 28-24 against the Seahawks in the final moments of the fourth quarter. The Seahawks had possession at the Patriots’ one-yard line, and it was only second down. This was a promising position for the Seahawks, but the Patriots’ defense intercepted the quarterback’s pass, crushing Seahawk hopes for a comeback.

The Monday morning quarterbacks were not kind to Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who made an unconventional call for a pass instead of a carry. Newspapers and sports commentators dubbed it “the worst call in Super Bowl history.” Despite the overwhelming barrage of criticism, a few fringe voices argued that the play was justifiable—and actually rather clever. Of the 66 pass attempts from an opponent’s one-yard line during the regular season, none had been intercepted. There was good reason to think the play would succeed.

And how different would the headlines have been if the receiver had caught the pass? It would have been hailed as a“brilliant” and “innovative” play call. If it had been an incomplete, it would have been forgotten as soon as the Seahawks set up for the third down. Pete Carroll was just unlucky.

We humans have  great difficulty distinguishing between a good decision and a good outcome. We tend to evaluate the former based on the latter: a decision is good if and only if the outcome is favorable. In poker, they call this tendency “resulting,” where a player reevaluates overall strategy based on a few unlucky hands.

Carroll understood the tendency of resulting. He stood by his call in an interview several days after the game and made the distinction that most of America had failed to when he called it, “the worst result of a call ever.” The connection between the decision and the result is not always so clear. There is ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk involved in decision-making.

In some charity poker tournaments, when everyone’s put all their chips in the pot and they can’t bet anymore, the players who’ve bet everything will show their hand for the audience to see before being dealt the final cards. Experienced dealers will call out the odds that certain hands will win. If the odds of one hand winning are 76 percent, and the other hand’s odds are 24 percent, what conclusion do we draw if the hand with the 24 percent chance wins? Was the dealer “wrong”? Most people are quick to assume that the dealer made a mistake, but unless we are talking about probabilities of 100 percent (a statistical rarity), either outcome is possible—including the less likely result.

The categories of “right” and “wrong,” “correct” and mistaken” don’t work well with probability, but most people fall into black-and-white vocabulary pretty readily.  We saw this in the hysterical reaction to Pete Carroll’s play-call. We witnessed it in the outrage over Brexit and Trump. Based on the statistics that numerous polls brought in, it was likely that the UK would remain in the EU and Hillary would win the presidential election. People were furious at the analysts for “misleading” them. But the analysts were not misleading anyone. Polls are developed precisely because the future is uncertain. If Trump had a 40 percent chance of winning the election, that was still a solid chance at securing a win. If you are playing a hand in poker that has a 60 percent chance of winning, celebration is premature.

An event can go one way or another (or another). Decisions in life, whether at a casino or a voting booth, are, essentially, bets on an uncertain future.  Phrases like “I should have known!” or “See, I told you!” reflect an anguished “resulting” that leaves us unstable and unable to see things in proper perspective. The world is full of randomness and hidden factors we can’t understand. We’re not privy to all the facts. If we cling to a possibility like its prophecy, we set ourselves up for disappointment.

Understanding life decisions in terms of probability instead of insisting on certainty allows us to develop mental fortitude. Life gives us plenty of opportunities to feel bad if we measure our decisions purely by how they turn out. Who enters into a dating relationship in the hopes of deriving only positive feelings? (Unfortunately, a lot of people do.)

For most people, the word “bet” brings images of lottery tickets and horse races, but this is too narrow a conception. Merriam-Webster defines “bet” as “a choice made by thinking about what will probably happen.” Whenever you choose between multiple possible futures, you are betting. When you tell your kids to eat their vegetables, you are betting that incorporating healthy foods in their diet will leave them better off than giving them ice cream at every meal. When you order a burrito instead of tacos, you’ve made a bet. When you decide to move to a new city for work or school, you are placing a bet that you will be happier, more fulfilled, and better off for doing so.

Part of the reason most fail to see personal life decisions as bets is because, where casinos are bets against the house or against other players, most decisions are bets made against  future versions of ourselves that we don’t choose. That pang of regret, that shout of “I should have known better!” or “I should have gotten the red one” is the belief that you have lost a bet. The alternative future self that you didn’t select is essentially saying, “Told you so!”  

How do we know when we’re making a good bet? Can we be sure that we’re choosing the best possible future? Of course not. Life is full of uncertainty. To be comfortable in the face of uncertainty is vital to making solid decisions. There are short-term benefits to evading risks and opportunities, but doing so is not a viable long-term approach to life. Kicking the can down the road is a “bet” too, but  it’s one you’ll lose and will cost you in the ability to make decisions effectively. Be okay with uncertainty, and watch your bets get better as you see the world with more clarity.

Outcomes are a form of feedback, whether we consciously evaluate them or not. These experiences give us an opportunity to learn, but experience does not become expertise unless we consistently distill lessons from those experiences that can be leveraged in the future.

The most helpful way to vet past experiences is to discern what was skill and what was luck in past decisions. Entire books have teased out the nuances and interplay between luck and skill, but for our purposes here, let’s call outcomes heavily influenced by decisions the result of skill, and outcomes that can’t easily be traced to decisions “luck.”

The feedback loop that develops is a belief leading to a bet that leads to one of a number of possible outcomes. When we review the outcome of a decision, we are mentally sorting it, putting it either in a “luck bin” or the “skill bin.” If we put an outcome in the skill bin, we have reinforced the belief that led to that bet and are more likely to repeat the loop. If we chalk an outcome up to luck, it is dismissed instead of reinforcing the feedback loop. It is tough to differentiate between luck and skill at times, and there are many bets in which both play a role. Getting better at distinguishing between the two helps us focus on the things we can control and improve upon (skills) and let go of the things that are beyond our control (luck).

Lao-Tzu’s famous aphorism that, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” may not actually be the best approach to long-term goals. Instead of looking at the far-off destination from a step-one position, it might be better to imagine yourself at the end of a successful journey, looking backward from where you’ve come.

When most people take the present as their starting point for planning, they think about what their next step needs to be, and attempt to anticipate all potential outcomes from that next step. With each new step, you end up with a dizzying array of possible outcomes and heaps of uncertainty that stymie rather than stimulate. The future hangs heavily on the limits of our consciousness and the immediacy of our circumstances.   

Studies have revealed that working backwards from a goal (also called prospective hindsight or backcasting) increases a person’s ability to correctly identify factors leading to success by 30 percent. Envision yourself or your team popping champagne bottles and holding up a newspaper in which the front page story headline is about your successful project. Reminisce on the journey. What was involved?

When Central Park was first landscaped and open to the public in 1858, it looked barren and war-torn. Today the park is full and lush. It took the designer’s ability to envision the final product to carry the project through to completion. He knew what it was going to look like before the groundbreaking.

Just as backcasting can help you think about all the strategies and tactics that will go into  success, it is also important to do the same with disasters. The “premortem” exercise also works backward from the goal, but instead of the headline reading “We’ve Reached Our Goal!” it reads “We Totally Failed.” What happened? Where did things go wrong?

“Remembering the future” to discern likely positive and negative inflection points will help you arrive at the most realistic picture of the future possible. Does this eliminate uncertainty? No, but it will improve your odds and help you make the best bet possible.