The Blind Spot: Survivorship Bias
Lucas Jumalon. If you’re outside the poker world, you might not know him. But in August, this 22-year-old kid from Spokane became one of the biggest names in the game. How’d he do it? Simple: he won the most renowned tournament in the world—the WSOP Main Event.
A $10,000 buy-in. The fourth-largest field in the tournament’s history, with 9,208 entrants. And Jumalon outlasted them all. Eight days of play, at roughly 13 hours each day, just to make the final table. He sat down as the chip leader and never once gave it up, becoming the second-youngest champion in the event’s 57 years. He also won $10 million for his trouble.
It’s the sort of thing poker dreams are made of.
If history is any indication, Jumalon will get sponsorship opportunities and requests to appear on televised games. He’ll be interviewed regularly. They’ll ask him how he did it—his strategies and tactics. His play will be studied, lauded, emulated.
You know who won’t get that attention? The 9,207 other Main Event entrants. It’s obvious why: they didn’t win. He did. True enough. And while there’s nothing wrong with studying Jumalon, the mistake is studying only Jumalon. That’s survivorship bias.
Everyone Loves a Winner
Humans tend to fixate on success stories, often to the exclusion of everyone else. We see the one who climbed to the summit and overlook the 99 who failed. Then we work backward from the winner’s success, drawing a straight line from what they did to where they ended up.
People mistake the story of a survivor for an explanation of survival itself. That’s a big problem because it prevents us from seeing the whole picture. It limits the evidence we use to determine what actually works. Worse, it can make almost anything the winner did look like a reason they won.
But do those behaviors actually create success—or do they only look important because the person doing them happened to win? Unfortunately, our brains are very good at conflating the two.
In his seminal work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains why.
What You See Is All There Is
WYSIATI. You can thank Kahneman for the completely unhelpful acronym, but the principle it communicates is well worth the clunkiness. We humans tend to base our decisions on the information readily available to us. For our brains, if things are out of sight, they’re out of mind.
Or, as Kahneman put it: What you see is all there is.
Our minds build coherent stories from the evidence in front of them. They don’t flag absent data as missing; instead, they chug along unbothered, assuming they’ve got the full story.
It’s a blessing that allows us to make snap decisions in the heat of the moment—and a curse that limits our ability to think rationally. We can build an extraordinarily convincing story without ever asking what evidence is missing.
And that limitation makes us particularly susceptible to survivorship bias. Because winners like Lucas Jumalon are easy to see. The other players? Not so much.
The Other 9,207
Of the 9,208 Main Event entrants, about 85% walked away with nothing. And among those who made the money, many earned little more than a $15,000 min-cash—just $5,000 more than the buy-in. A victory, to be sure, but not a life-changing financial achievement, especially when factoring in expenses like food, travel, and lodging.
In short, the WSOP Main Event is where many a poker dream goes to die. But those results tell us almost nothing about the players’ decision quality.
In a sample size of one tournament, the variance is overwhelming. Someone can play great and bust out early. An inferior player can make poor decisions and survive. And the “correct” play can send you packing.
The simple fact is that, to win tournaments, you have to get tremendously lucky. I would know. The very first tournament I ever played, I came in 5th place out of a field of 120 or so. This isn’t me bragging—I legitimately had no idea what I was doing.
Had you studied the final results, you might have thought I was one of the best players in the room. I wasn’t. I was a kid with some serious beginner’s luck.
Conversely, I’ve known exceptional players who never became recognizable names. They had the skills, but due to timing, life circumstances, or a host of other factors, they never got the chance to “hit it big.”
The late great poker legend Doyle Brunson once said, “Poker is a hard way to make an easy living.” Folks see the glitz and glam of high-stakes games, the celebrity-like status of poker’s top players, and the excitement of massive tournament victories. They think that’s what it means to be a poker pro. But that’s not quite right. Survivorship bias helps explain why the game can look so different from the outside.
People miss the small-stakes regulars working the tables like a day job. And the crushers who got unlucky precisely when they needed to run well are practically invisible. These players aren’t bad—often far from it. But they’re largely absent from the stories we tell about what it takes to succeed. After all, WYSIATI.
The Recipe for Success
Kahneman’s insights didn’t stop at a catchy acronym. He also offers a simple recipe for understanding success. As Kahneman put it: “Success = talent + luck. Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck.”
I’m not saying that winners like Jumalon aren’t excellent at their craft. They are. Winning the WSOP Main requires enormous skill, endurance, discipline, and composure. But talent alone isn’t enough to explain why this one individual emerged from the thousands of other capable players in the field. Luck helps fill that gap.
This reality leaves us with an uncomfortable realization: tiny differences in skill can coexist with enormous differences in outcome.
And we regularly mistake extreme success for extreme competence.
Trust the Winner’s Playbook?
We can see survivorship bias most clearly in Barnes & Noble’s self-improvement section. The shelves are crowded with success stories of the rich and famous. They made it big, and they’ll explain how you can too.
You just have to do what they did, say what they said, or invest how they invested. Entire books dissect the morning routines of millionaires and billionaires. The implicit assumption? Their wake-up time and breakfast selection mattered, and by replicating them, you might achieve similar success.
Of course, this misses a harsh truth: countless people wake up early, hit the gym before work, and eat healthy meals. They aren’t all millionaires. We don’t write books about them either.
Could morning discipline contribute to financial success? Potentially. But we should be hesitant to treat the actions of a few successful outliers as prescriptive—especially when survivorship bias inclines us to overlook everyone who followed a similar playbook and got different results.
Yet, businesses make this mistake all the time. It comes in many names—a recap, a retrospective, a case study—but the error is the same. It assumes too much with too little data. Case studies attempt to connect a campaign’s actions to its results. But they rarely tell us how many other campaigns unsuccessfully attempted the same approach. They also struggle to control for external factors like timing, the competitive environment, and plain old luck.
The result is a good story masquerading as a causal explanation.
Overcoming Survivorship Bias
How do we stop ourselves from falling into this trap? Before copying a winner, ask yourself these three questions.
Are you looking at a full data set, or just an anecdote?
What role did timing, variance, or luck play?
How many others tried something similar and failed?
The key here is to always check the denominator. If someone tells you that they succeeded “because they did X,” your first question needs to be, “Who else did X?” Because ten successes mean something very different if they came from twelve attempts instead of twelve thousand.
Whether in business or poker, success stories rarely exist in isolation. Very few situations are truly one-of-one. Somewhere, someone followed a similar strategy, made a similar decision, or took a similar risk. Their story is part of the dataset too.
So study winners like Jumalon and learn from them, but don’t assume their unique path is the formula for success. And if someone claims otherwise, maybe ask what they’re selling.
