I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

I don't think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before - and prepare to attack like never before.

Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.

People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it's in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives.

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.

Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.

Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.

Each of us has a network of emotional and logical associations that is unique to us. Activate one mode of the association, and you activate a predictable pattern of behavior. A situation isn't just the external events that take place; it is how each individual processes those events and integrates them into her thoughts and feelings.

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Virtual reality has already proved useful in treating phobias and PTSD. It can help people overcome a fear of heights, for example, through simulations of standing on a balcony or walking across a bridge.

Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn't taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.

I hate casinos. I have zero interest in gambling.

Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

If we rush too quickly to be scientific, to begin our experiment or catch our criminal as soon as possible, we risk never getting to the answer at all.

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information - and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate.

Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.

Humans are startlingly bad at detecting fraud. Even when we're on the lookout for signs of deception, studies show, our accuracy is hardly better than chance.

The name 'con artist' really does capture it. They're artists, and I have admiration for all artists.