A year ago, New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova announced that she was diving into the world of professional poker as a new player, in order to write a book about it, and now Poker News reports that she has put the book on hold, because she’s doing so well:
In January, Konnikova won $86,400 by beating a 240-person field at the PCA National; in her first tournament after deciding to drop blogs for cards, she won $57,000, according to PokerNews:
“PCA was the moment where everything kind of came together,” she said. “I’m learning and it’s sticking and I’m playing well. It’s a really wonderful feeling when you’re studying and working to have that validated.”
Her huge success forced Konnikova to re-evaluate her plans. With an incredible opportunity in what could be a historic poker event on the horizon, Konnikova decided she had to push the book schedule back and go all in on poker for the time being. She built a revised poker schedule, ramped up in terms of both buy-in sizes and quantity of events.
It paid off immediately, as she finished second in an Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau event for $57,519.
This kind of stunt has a rich tradition among writers and amateur athletes. George Plimpton kicked it off with NFL, MLB, and NHL tryouts in the 1960s for a series of books. More recently, Sports Illustrated’s Michael McKnight spent huge amounts of time trying to learn how to dunk and hit a homer; Slate’s Stefan Fatsis wrote books about his attempts to become a kicker for the Denver Broncos and an elite Scrabble player; and Dan McLaughlin, who had never played a full round of golf before, decided to test out the Malcolm Gladwell-popularized 10,000 hour theory and become a professional golfer from the ground up. It didn’t work, exactly, though McLaughlin got very good.
Konnikova is maybe most similar to McLaughlin in her starting point — “I’m a total poker outsider. I came to this as someone who’d never had any experience with the game” — but she’s nearly peerless in the outcome. (Writer James McManus did finish fifth in the 2000 World Series of Poker while in Las Vegas on assignment to cover a murder case for what eventually became Positively Fifth Street, but he had been a somewhat serious amateur before that.)