Well, I don't think I'll be outguessing and outwitting "almost everybody" after reading this, but it was still an interesting book. With topics ranging from rock, paper, scissors strategies to office pools to the stock market, it's a good bet every chapter will not be of equal interest to a reader. The chapter on the stock market was a struggle for me to get through, and I didn't care much about the sports-related chapters either.
But the book explored some interesting ideas about how our minds tend to work, how bad people are at randomness and how we see patterns where there aren't any.
The introductory chapters to Parts One and Two were more fascinating than many of the chapters that followed, but I still liked several of the topics that were covered. The chapters on passwords, crowd-sourced ratings, manipulated and fake numbers were good, as well as the chapters in Part Two on big data and retail prices. It was also handy that the author did a summary of tips and strategies at the end of each chapter.
There's probably something for everyone in here, and it's worth a look. ( )

This brilliant book I read through in a 2 hour flight and unfortunately, a two hour delay. It's fast and and easy to read. A few chapters are only a couple pages long.

The author deign that people are predictable even when they think they are random. This book touches on sports, stocks, algorithms to find financial fraud, best practices for multiple choice tests, poker, and how to win at Rock Breaks Scissors.

This is more of a 4.5 star book, so I'll round up this time. ( )

Rock Breaks Scissors is billed as a “practical guide to outguessing and outwitting almost everybody”. Sounds fun? It was, mostly. This book covers so much ground, from tennis to the Oscars to (you guessed it) rock paper scissors. This is both good and bad, since covering everything means you have less time for the specifics. The chapters were rather short – some were only a couple pages long.

Another downside is that it’s hard to be interested in every chapter. The Rock Paper Scissors chapter was so much fun, but the sports betting chapters were considerably less so (I’m not a gambler). Now, I read the book all the way through (because that is what I do), so you can trust me when I say that you should feel free to read what sounds interesting and ignore what doesn’t. That’s really the best way.

Be warned: There is some dense math in this book (especially in the Stock Market chapter), so if you’re not a math person, you might just want to avoid this book altogether. Full disclosure.

So I give it a 3.5, gaining points for being awesome and losing them being all over the place (in terms of topics).

PS: I got this book for free through Goodreads First Reads
( )

Poundstone is someone who's gone in for deep dives on Von Neumann, game theory, Carl Sagan ... and more recently, "Are You Smart Enough to Work At Google?" There's no doubt he's taken on a pop-sci flair of late, and while it's understandable from a marketing/positioning standpoint, a book that promises to be full of ways to "outguess" and "outwit" almost everyone turns out to be a lot of largely common-sense suggestions with some actual science behind them, and one or two genuinely counter-intuitive strategies that (unfortunately) sound like they're straight out of freakonomics.

It's interesting, actually - I loved the first Freakonomics book, perhaps because it forced me to think about things in new ways, but also because it genuinely offered insights into things I wouldn't have otherwise given any thought to. But that type of discovery really only works once, and by the time Superfreakonomics came along (to say nothing of the blog, podcast, etc.), it felt like retreading old ground. Not unnecessary or useless, mind you, but more incremental advances rather than breakthroughs. And frankly, if we're talking about how to win the office NCAA pool and your advice is "use the algorithms you can find on websites but tweak them slightly in case someone else is" seems aimed more at the desperate gambler than your general reader.

So I guess, if you haven't read Freakonomics (or haven't thought about it since it came out), this is a good relatively up-to-date replacement. Everyone else can feel free to take a pass.

Poundstone is someone who's gone in for deep dives on Von Neumann, game theory, Carl Sagan ... and more recently, "Are You Smart Enough to Work At Google?" There's no doubt he's taken on a pop-sci flair of late, and while it's understandable from a marketing/positioning standpoint, a book that promises to be full of ways to "outguess" and "outwit" almost everyone turns out to be a lot of largely common-sense suggestions with some actual science behind them, and one or two genuinely counter-intuitive strategies that (unfortunately) sound like they're straight out of freakonomics.

It's interesting, actually - I loved the first Freakonomics book, perhaps because it forced me to think about things in new ways, but also because it genuinely offered insights into things I wouldn't have otherwise given any thought to. But that type of discovery really only works once, and by the time Superfreakonomics came along (to say nothing of the blog, podcast, etc.), it felt like retreading old ground. Not unnecessary or useless, mind you, but more incremental advances rather than breakthroughs. And frankly, if we're talking about how to win the office NCAA pool and your advice is "use the algorithms you can find on websites but tweak them slightly in case someone else is" seems aimed more at the desperate gambler than your general reader.

So I guess, if you haven't read Freakonomics (or haven't thought about it since it came out), this is a good relatively up-to-date replacement. Everyone else can feel free to take a pass.