Casino culture … downtown Las Vegas. Photograph: B Tanaka/Getty Images From card sharps to crypto traders, a statistician asks what we can learn from the people prepared to gamble everything
Nothing is more interesting to poker players and less interesting to everyone else than a breathless recounting of who bet how much with a jack and six of clubs in some game years ago. There’s an awful lot of that kind of thing in this book, which celebrates poker players as paradigmatic citizens of a global intellectual community it calls “the River”, which also counts among its inhabitants venture capitalists, crypto traders, fashionable philosophers and mild-mannered statisticians.
One such statistician, Nate Silver himself, came to public prominence as a data-driven analyst of political polls at his website FiveThirtyEight , which predicted the results of US elections in 2008 and 2012 with seemingly uncanny accuracy. But before that he was a poker player, making money especially in the nascent internet-casino business, until Congress banned online poker in 2006. That, he has said, was his political awakening.
People of the River – “Riverians”, if you will – have a rational understanding of risk (poker and blackjack players know all the probabilities) and know when to bet big and when to fold. They are likely to be geeks and libertarians. All this makes them unlike the inhabitants of a rival parallel world, “the Village”, where politicians, regulators, academics and media types live, driven by emotions and hunches, and identifiable by their “distinctly left-of-centre politics”.
The book proceeds as a rambling hagiography of Riverians as they play poker (again and again), but also bet on other casino games in Las Vegas, bet on sport (a huge business in the US especially) and bet on startup companies as venture capitalists, hoping to strike it big with a stake in the next Google. Much of this is entertaining and colourful, especially once we are introduced to the mad zoo of cryptocurrencies, “shitcoins” (currencies of zero intrinsic value, amusingly discussed) and eye-wateringly expensive NFTs (digital pictures of cartoon apes and whatnot). Silver spends several chapters on the story of Sam […]
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