On the Edge

Introduction

The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, features one nightclub, seven pools, fourteen restaurants, a thirty‑foot‑high indoor waterfall, dozens of pieces of bedazzled  rock‑ and‑roll memorabilia, two hundred gaming tables, 1,275 guest rooms, three thousand slot machines, and a glimmering guitar‑shaped hotel that shoots beams of neon blue light twenty thousand feet into the sky.

Like most casinos—and like most things in South Florida—the Hard Rock is designed to overwhelm your senses and undermine your inhibitions. Picture a casino in your head. If you haven’t been to a place like the Hard Rock or the Wynn in Las Vegas, you’re probably thinking of a dingy “slot barn” full of cigarette smoke and mazelike rows of chirping machines. Indeed, those can be some of the most depressing places on Earth. But at high‑end resorts like the Hard Rock, the mood at busy hours is exuberant. Few places in American life attract a broader cross section of society. There are adults of all ages, races, classes, ethnic groups, and political orientations. There are senior citizens hoping to hit a slot jackpot; groups of bros and gaggles of girls; and attendees of third‑rate trade association conferences compensating for the awkwardness of it all by overindulging in booze and blackjack.

I spent a lot of time in casinos over the course of writing this book. Needless to say, even the most glamorous ones eventually become tiresome. I sometimes had the feeling of being a professional wedding photographer: everyone was having the time of their life, their very special day. But I knew all the tropes, all the recurring characters—the dude trying to hide from his buddies at the craps table that he was playing beyond his means; the BFFs from the bachelorette party jockeying for pole position when a hot bachelor walked by; the friendly couple from Nebraska having the night of their life playing blackjack before giving all their winnings back twice over.

It was April 2021. I was in Florida for the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, the first really big poker tournament in the United States since the pandemic. For better or worse, I’d been pretty careful about avoiding crowded indoor spaces until I got vaccinated for COVID‑19. I hadn’t even been on a plane since March 11, 2020, when I learned midflight that Tom Hanks had gotten COVID, that the NBA had suspended its season, that President Trump had shut down travel from Europe—and that my fellow passengers and I had landed in a riskier universe.

But it was a year later, and it was time to gamble. Judging by the crowds at the Hard Rock, a lot of other people were in the same frame of mind. Despite their reputation for risk tolerance, casinos mostly did shut down in the early days of COVID. Even the Las Vegas Strip—which I’d always as‑ sumed would continue to operate even in the event of a nuclear apocalypse—was closed for two and a half months. During this period, casino gaming revenues across the United States were down by as much as 96 percent from a year earlier.

But they rebounded with a vengeance. Somehow, between the anxiety caused by the unprecedented mass death of COVID and the boredom caused by the unprecedented lack of social interaction, Americans’ appetite for YOLO (You Only Live Once) behavior exploded, manifesting itself in everything from illegal fireworks displays to traffic accidents to cryptocurrency bubbles. (Bitcoin prices increased roughly tenfold in the year after  the  WHO  declared COVID‑19  to  be  a  pandemic.)  And  so  in  April 2021—even as schools remained closed in parts of the country—American casinos won a staggering $4.6 billion in gaming revenues from their patrons, 26 percent higher than in the same month two years earlier, before the pandemic.

Poker players came out in a show of force at the Hard Rock. In April 2019, the last time this particular tournament had been held before COVID, it had a respectable 1,360 entrants. The 2021 version drew almost twice as many—2,482 entrants—despite still being in the middle of a pandemic and a travel ban affecting most of the poker‑playing world. It could easily have been more: demand was so overwhelming that there were hours‑long waits to pony up $3,500 and register for a seat. Still, this was the largest‑ ever number of entrants for a tournament on the World Poker Tour, which sponsored the event. Appropriately enough, the tournament was eventu‑ ally won by an ICU nurse from Grand Rapids, Michigan, named Brek Schutten, who had done his time in COVID wards.

We played through unusual conditions. There was a mask mandate, which I’d expected to be an enforcement disaster: poker players are both individualistic and irascible, not the types to quietly follow orders. But most of them were so damn happy to be playing poker again that there were relatively few complaints.* A bigger constraint was that, as a COVID half measure, the poker tables were equipped with kludgy octagonal plex‑ iglass dividers. This made for one entertaining wrinkle: whenever a player got knocked out of the tournament, the floor staff would squeakily eulo‑ gize his departure by wiping down his section of the plexiglass, like an NBA towel boy wiping the sweat off the court after some hapless forward had just been dunked on by Giannis Antetokounmpo.

However, the plexiglass had the effect of fun‑house mirrors, making it hard to properly view your opponents. Sure, I could see the other players well enough if I concentrated. But contrary to what you might have heard, most poker tells aren’t given away by blatantly staring at an opponent and getting a “soul read.” Instead, it’s subtleties on the boundary of conscious observation: a flick of the wrist here, a quickening of the pulse there; an opponent you spy, out of the corner of your eye, looking more erect in her seat after she first peeks at her cards. (She probably has a strong hand.) Poker is mostly a mathematical game, but the edges are so thin that you’ll take whatever reads you can get.

Between the plexiglass, the masks, and being out of practice being around other people, I felt like I was playing poker underwater. My body betrayed my anxiety. Not only was I feeling my pulse when I made a big decision, but for parts of the tournament, my hands even began trembling when I bet chips, something that’s almost never happened to me before or since. When I reviewed a few hands later with my poker coach—yeah, I have a poker coach, like some people have a personal trainer—they nearly all featured me overplaying and overthinking situations as though mak‑ ing up for a year lost during the pandemic. The Hendon Mob Poker Database says I eventually finished in 161st place in the tournament for $7,465, but I actually lost money on the trip.

And yet, it was a great experience. After an isolating election year in 2020—isolating because I was working remotely during the pandemic, and because for reasons I’ll explain to you later, I find presidential election years to be alienating—I felt welcome in the poker world. The World Poker Tour even tweeted congratulations to me from their @WPT account, not something they’d usually do for the 161st‑place finisher.

I’m not sure I fully recognized it in the moment, but the tournament was the first taste of several realizations I’d have in the course of writing this book. One was that something important was happening, something that went beyond poker. That the tournament had drawn a record number of players—that people were so aggressively “returning to normal” in the hyperreal and obviously‑not‑COVID‑safe environment of a casino—that seemed significant. People have always had different risk tolerances, but they’re often hidden from public view. If the person standing right in front of me in the grocery line is planning to spend his evening curling up and watching Netflix, and the person right behind me is planning to go on an all‑night cocaine bender at a strip club, I don’t really have any way to know that and I really don’t care.

But COVID made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces. For a lot of folks, COVID was the Wild West, forcing them to confront risk and reward with little precedent to rely upon and expert guidance that changed constantly. My experience in writing this book is that people are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance—and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote. Maybe Netflix Guy and Strip Club Guy aren’t even shopping at the same grocery store anymore; Netflix Guy moved to the country now that he doesn’t need to be in the office, and Strip Club Guy moved to Miami—and was probably playing against me in the poker tournament.

I want to be careful here. In any statistical distribution, you’ll find some people on either end of the bell curve, and this book often focuses on people on the extreme right tail of risk. But risk‑taking is an understudied personality trait, and the academic literature is divided over the extent some people are generally more risk‑taking as opposed to taking risks within specific domains. My favorite example of a domain‑specific risk‑ taker is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who served on President Biden’s COVID‑19 advisory board. In a May 2022 op‑ed, Emanuel said that he was avoiding eating indoors at restaurants because he was worried about long COVID, but also bragged about riding a motorcycle. That seems like an insane pair of risk preferences to hold. (Motorcycles are about thirty times as deadly as passenger cars per mile traveled.) With that said, I can think of plenty of areas in my own life in which my risk preferences are hard to defend as being rational or consistent. People are complicated, and even among poker players, there are plenty of degens (degenerate gamblers) and plenty of nits.*

Indeed, most of us seem conflicted about how much risk we want in our lives. One of the truisms in studies of risk is that younger people take on more risk than older ones. That may be changing, however. Teenagers in the United States and other Western countries are undertaking far less risky behavior—drugs, drinking, sex—than they did a generation ago.

And yet, literal gambling is booming. In 2022, Americans lost around $60 billion betting at licensed casinos and online gambling operations—a record even after accounting for inflation. They also lost an estimated $40 billion in unlicensed, gray‑market, or black‑market gambling—and about $30 billion in state lotteries. To be clear, that’s the amount they lost, not the amount they wagered, which was roughly ten times as much. Between all forms of gambling, Americans are probably making in excess of $1 trillion in bets annually.

And here’s something that probably should keep more of us up at night: American life expectancy has stagnated. During the pandemic, in fact, it declined, to 76.4 years in 2021 from 78.8 years in 2019. Life expectancy numbers during a pandemic can be misleading—they essentially assume we’ll maintain the same number of COVID deaths going forward when we likely won’t—and the numbers have begun rebounding to some extent. Even before COVID, though, American men had lost a tenth of a year of life expectancy between 2014 (76.4 years) and 2019 (76.3).

In fact, the United States is now an outlier among highly developed countries. Based on our very high GDP, you’d expect American life expectancy to be about five years longer than it is. The reasons for the shortfall are complicated, involving a mix of cultural and political factors as well as the United States’ high inequality. But they partly reflect the United States being more risk‑taking—we have more driving at freeway speeds, more opioids, more COVID, more firearms—and less willingness to sacrifice freedom or economic growth for longer lifespans.

The other big realization I had on that flight home from Florida was that this world of poker players and poker‑playing types—this world of calculated risk-taking—was the world where I fit in.

This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. It may even run in my blood. Neither of my parents is much into cards or casinos, but my paternal grand‑ mother, Gladys Silver, was an outstanding gin rummy and bridge player and a notoriously punitive one: if you weren’t careful about concealing your cards, she’d take full advantage of that information as a way of teaching you to be more careful next time. My great‑grandfather Jacob Silver founded an auto‑body shop in Waterbury, Connecticut, which held a poker game on payout day every second Friday—until, according to family legend, the wives of the mechanics forced him to switch payment from cash to checks because too many of their husbands were coming home with empty wallets. Another great‑grandfather, Ferdinand Thrun, was a notorious arsonist who came up with such innovative ways of committing insurance fraud that there literally weren’t laws to charge him with. Ferdinand would have run a pretty good bluff.
 
And I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so‑called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began be‑ cause of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualify‑ ing tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million. If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty‑something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot. The number of partici‑ pants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online.

I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep‑deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle, take a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day. Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus.
 
It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gam‑ bling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.
 
But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP‑led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat.
 
There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty‑year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent.
 
Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008. There’s no way to say this without bragging, but FiveThirtyEight kind of blew up, going from having a few hundred readers per day at the outset to hundreds of thousands by Election Day that year. Then before I knew it, it had tens of millions of readers; in 2016, our election forecast page was literally the most engaging piece of content on the internet according to the analytics service Chartbeat.