Maria Konnikova

Maria Konnikova is a Russian-American writer and psychologist. She has a B.A. in psychology and creative writing from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She has worked as a television producer, written for several magazines and online publications, and authored two New York Times best selling books. She primarily writes about psychology and its application to real life situations.

Maria is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Confidence Game (Viking/Penguin 2016) and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking/Penguin, 2013). She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus on psychology and culture, and is currently working on an assortment of non-fiction and fiction projects.

She is interested in poker and described it as a way to examine the mind’s responses to conditions that involve both skill and chance. Her upcoming book will explore "...poker as a metaphor for life in general." To research this book, Konnikova made contact with Erik Seidel, who allowed her to observe him competing at an event for high-stakes players.

After starting with $20 and $40 tournaments, she began playing in higher stakes tournaments. Konnikova has taken up professional poker playing full-time, and is an Ambassador of Poker League of Nations, the world's largest women's poker organization. In 2018, Konnikova decided to delay work on her book to compete in more poker tournaments with higher stakes.