Maria Konnikova is a psychologist and writer. She earned her PhD in psychology from Columbia University, and she's written for The New Yorker for years. Her first book, Mastermind (2013), used Sherlock Holmes to explore how we can think more clearly, and it became a New York Times bestseller. For her next project after The Confidence Game, she set out to study the balance between skill and luck by learning poker from scratch. She won an international championship and went on to play professionally, and she wrote about the experience in The Biggest Bluff (2020), another bestseller. She also hosts The Grift," a podcast that tells the stories of con artists and the people they fooled.
