The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
by Maria Konnikova · 22 Jun 2020 · 377pp · 117,339 words
final tables, including a third-place finish in the year made famous by an accountant, Chris Moneymaker, winning the top prize and starting the modern poker boom, the so-called Moneymaker effect. Finding a good mentor is crucial to learning any new skill—and one of the things the best mentors do
The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski · 23 Feb 2016 · 360pp · 85,321 words
fate of the once lucrative American poker industry. In 2011, US authorities shut down a number of major poker websites, bringing an end to the “poker boom” that had gripped the country for the previous few years. The legislative muscle for the shake-up came from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act
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, 185–186, 187–188 university course studying, 214–215 well-known research into, 169 World Series, 140–141 as a zero-sum game, 145, 181 poker boom, 198 poker face, optimal, 192 poker industry, 198 poker websites. See online poker sites Polaris poker bot, 185–186 Polaris 2.0, 186–187 policy
Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling
by Danny Funt · 20 Jan 2026 · 285pp · 100,897 words
underdog story, along with the 1998 Matt Damon movie Rounders, which made earning a living from poker look both incredibly dangerous and sexy, ignited a poker boom. Websites with offshore servers sprang up, introducing the concept for many Americans, especially young men, that you could gamble online with real money and, with
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to gamble. Decades later, therapy helped him realize that these traumas planted the seeds of his own addiction. Spencer came of age during the online poker boom. Upon turning eighteen, he signed up for a credit card with a £200 limit and immediately maxed it out on William Hill’s poker site
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words
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
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a couple of years—but like most edges in gambling, 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
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carried on,” said Isaac Haxton, a high-stakes pro who dropped out of his computer science program at Brown University to play cards during the Poker Boom of the mid-2000s. Haxton, who in his early days on the tournament circuit was sometimes teased for his resemblance to Harry Potter, is an
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would care to admit. I’m not going to repeat every unverified allegation I’ve heard over the years from old-timers, but until the Poker Boom years, the prevailing attitude was often that a poker player would win by any means necessary. There were also several strange circumstances. Lew was given
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poker game.” But in 2021, the number of cryptocurrency users was growing so fast that the overwhelming majority were new to the industry. In the Poker Boom of 2004–07, the deluge of new customers made it so that more experienced players could print money just by playing solid, tight, predictable poker
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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
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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
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tournaments, 6, 7–8, 56, 154n, 503n variance and, 105, 106–11, 112 See also exploitative strategies; risk impact; solvers (poker); World Series of Poker Poker Boom (2004–2007), 12–13, 68, 315, 493 PokerGO studio, 48–49, 73, 77 polarized vs. condensed ranges (poker), 493 politics, 14–17 AI existential risk
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(WPT), 7–8, 500 World Series of Poker (WSOP), 107 bracelets, 97, 480, 506n corporatization of, 43–44, 44 Main Event, 94–95, 489, 493 Poker Boom and, 12, 68 “wrong on the internet,” 501 Wynn, Steve, 144, 145, 146–49, 157, 185 X x-risk. See existential risk Y Yau, Ethan
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman · 17 Jul 2023 · 329pp · 99,504 words
Hunting dozens of times. He was great in the Oceans movies. Rounders was maybe the only good thing to come out of the mid-2000s poker boom. He even made Stuck on You mildly entertaining. Why did he need to promote an exchange for unregistered, unlicensed securities on national TV when all
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.5 million pot. Millions of amateur players saw themselves in the twenty-eight-year-old from Tennessee who had suddenly hit the jackpot. The online poker boom was on. Online poker grew from almost nothing into a multibillion-dollar business in less than a decade. A few online poker rooms in the
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with those sites, drawing in even more average Joes. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 laid the groundwork for the demise of the poker boom. Domestically, it meant that the people behind those websites were engaged in illegal activity and could be arrested. Some of them would be. Companies that
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver · 31 Aug 2012 · 829pp · 186,976 words
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
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its course. FIGURE 10-1: WORLD SERIES OF POKER MAIN EVENT PARTICIPANTS, 1970–2006 The Start of a Poker Dream The other catalyst of the poker boom was the Internet. Internet poker had existed in some form since 1998, but it began to go mainstream in 2003 as companies like Party Poker
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some bad ones to be a favorite to make money. Fortunately, there were plenty of these bad players—what poker players call fish—during the poker boom years. There is a learning curve that applies to poker and to most other tasks that involve some type of prediction. The key thing about
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regulatory environment in different countries, the amount of advertising that the poker sites were doing, and perhaps even the time of year.23 During the poker boom years, however, the player pool was expanding so rapidly that there was always a wealth of fishes. That was about to change. The Poker Bubble
Private Equity: A Memoir
by Carrie Sun · 13 Feb 2024 · 267pp · 90,353 words
Rounders, a cult classic, with lines like “If you can’t spot the sucker . . . then you are the sucker.” The movie came out before the poker boom of the aughts, a craze they had helped feed by giving the Hollywood treatment to the underground world of illegal high-stakes gambling. After some