The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by
Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012
Per interview with Vasik Rajlich. 48. “Amateurs beat GMs in PAL / CSS Freestyle,” ChessBase News. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2467. 49. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.” CHAPTER 10. THE POKER BUBBLE 1. “Chris Moneymaker Ranking History” in The Mob Poker Database, thehendonmob.com. http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player_graphs/chris_moneymaker_18826. 2. I first played in one of the smaller events at the World Series of Poker in 2005, although I did not participate in the $10,000 main event of the tournament until 2009. 3. The catch was that you had to play a certain number of hands at the site before you could cash out any winnings. 4.
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Nobody has yet designed, and perhaps no one ever will, a computer that thinks like a human being.49 But computers are themselves a reflection of human progress and human ingenuity: it is not really “artificial” intelligence if a human designed the artifice. 10 THE POKER BUBBLE The year 2003 was the start of the “poker boom,” a sort of bubble economy in which the number of new and inexperienced players was growing exponentially and even a modicum of poker skill could be parlayed into large profits. The phenomenon had two immediate and related causes. One was the 2003 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, which was won by a twenty-seven-year-old amateur, a Nashville accountant with the auspicious name of Chris Moneymaker. Moneymaker was the literal embodiment of the poker everyman: a slightly pudgy office drone who, through a never-ending series of daring bluffs and lucky draws, had turned the $39 he’d paid to enter an online qualifying tournament into a $2.5 million purse. ESPN turned Moneymaker’s achievement into a six-part miniseries, played on nearly continuous repeat on weekday evenings until baseball season finally came along to fill the void.
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Moneymaker was not some slightly-above-average schmoe getting the cards of his life*1 but a poker savant who was cunning enough to have developed into a world-class player almost overnight. The viewer was led to believe that poker is easy to learn, easy to profit from, and incredibly action-packed—none of which is true. But that didn’t stop many of them from concluding that only a ticket to Las Vegas separated them from life as the next Chris Moneymaker. The number of participants in the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 main event exploded, from 839 the year that Moneymaker won it to 8,773 just three years later. I was one of those people.2 I lived the poker dream for a while, and then it died. I learned that poker sits at the muddy confluence of the signal and the noise.
Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--And How It All Came Crashing Down . . .
by
Ben Mezrich
Published 27 May 2013
Of course, Scott knew all about Chris Moneymaker, who’d won the World Series of Poker’s main event in 2003. Moneymaker had been a regular Joe, an accountant who won his spot in the event by playing a thirty-eight-dollar online tournament at PokerStars. When he won the World Series—going head to head against some of the greatest professional poker players of the era—his $2.5 million prize had inspired a whole new generation. Moneymaker hadn’t trained in dark poker rooms or smoky casinos. He’d learned how to play at home, online. If a guy as average seeming as Chris Moneymaker could win the World Series of Poker, then anyone could.
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by
Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024
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 because of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualifying 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.
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As a testament to how far ahead of the curve he was, Brunson was still a regular—and a substantial winner—on the televised poker game High Stakes Poker well into his eighties despite never really having used the modern poker software tools called “solvers” that were about to upend the game. Like many other aspects of modern life, poker has gone through its own Moneyball-style revolution. The catalyst came in 2003—the year that Moneyball was published—when Chris Moneymaker, an amateur who had earned his seat online, won the $10,000 Main Event at the World Series of Poker. That triggered an explosion of interest in the game—and between Moneyball and Moneymaker, poker has never been the same. When Moneymaker won, the Main Event had 839 entrants, then considered a shockingly high number.
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Plus EV: Having a positive expected value. Pocket pair: In poker, two hole cards of the same rank, e.g. 7♦7♣ is “pocket 7s”; these are generally strong hands. Poker Boom: The period beginning in 2003 of rapid expansion in poker because of the increasing availability of online games and Chris Moneymaker’s win at the 2003 Main Event. The Poker Boom ended between 2006 and 2008 because of increasingly aggressive enforcement actions against online poker. Point spread: A sports bet in which you predict the margin of victory. A positive number (Chiefs +3) means that you win the bet if the Chiefs either win the game outright or lose by fewer than 3 points; a negative number (Chiefs -3) means that you lay points and the Chiefs must win by at least that amount.
Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by
Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010
As the most powerful of the old-school mob men who came up through street bookmaking, Sacco was in prime position when cable television sent the poker game Texas Hold ’Em into millions of American living rooms. Some shows featured closely watched celebrities like Ben Affleck playing cards, while others helped create new celebrities: amateurs such as the improbably named Chris Moneymaker, who paid $39 to start playing in a tournament feeder game online at PokerStars.com and made it to the top in Las Vegas. Moneymaker’s $2.5 million win in the 2003 World Series of Poker drove millions to their computers to join in. Annual online poker revenue soared from $90 million in 2002 to $2.4 billion in 2005.
The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by
Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011
Answer Only the Question Asked Many last names in America are “occupational”—they reflect the professions of our ancestors. “Fletchers” made arrows, “Coopers” made barrels, “Sawyers” cut wood, and so on. Sometimes the alignment of one’s last name and one’s career is purely coincidental—see, for instance, poker champion Chris Moneymaker,6 world record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt, and the British neurology duo, who sometimes published together, of Russell Brain and Henry Head. Such serendipitous surnames are called “aptronyms,” a favorite word of mine. Such were the sorts of thoughts in my head when I called attorney Melissa Prober.
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by
Ben McKenzie
and
Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023
When David’s mother called him on June 26, 2020, he knew what it was about before she said a word. ° ° ° In the early 2000s, around the same time as the housing boom, online poker exploded. Myriad gambling websites appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, encouraging young men to fork over real money to try their hand in a game of digital cards. In 2003, a young amateur player named Chris Moneymaker gained entrance into the World Series of Poker—the pinnacle of the game—via an online satellite tournament hosted by PokerStars. Moneymaker won the whole tournament, taking in the $2.5 million pot. Millions of amateur players saw themselves in the twenty-eight-year-old from Tennessee who had suddenly hit the jackpot.