Duke opens by introducing what she calls "resulting" — the common tendency to judge the quality of a decision purely by its outcome, even though outcomes are shaped by luck and uncertainty as well as decision quality, especially in the short run.

Why this distinction matters:

• A good decision can produce a bad outcome due to bad luck, and a bad decision can produce a good outcome due to good luck — resulting conflates these two genuinely separate things, leading to flawed learning from past choices
• Duke, drawing on her professional poker background, explains how skilled poker players learn to evaluate their decisions independent of any single hand's outcome, focusing instead on whether the decision was sound given the information available at the time
• This reframing sets up the book's central practical goal: learning to evaluate decisions on their own merits, separate from the inherently uncertain outcomes that follow

This opening distinction is the foundation for the probabilistic thinking approach Duke develops throughout the rest of the book.