LUCK OF THE DRAW

Nate Silver argues that poker can help us game our uncertain world.

- IDREES KAHLOON

Poker requires assessing risk with imperfect data—a true human undertaking.

Keeping a poker face had never struck me as much of a feat—until I had to keep one. My pulse quickened, my cheeks felt flushed, and my eyes were desperate to dart and size up the pot. What had been a mediocre hand was transformed, after the flop came down, into something spectacular: every card from seven to jack—a straight. All that remained was to play it cool and build up my cash prize. The bets started small, and then grew. The next two cards looked innocuous enough. My beautiful straight was intact, and the pot had expanded rather nicely.

Truthfully, I’ve never been much of a gambling man. My previous experience was limited to a few college poker nights during which my friends would hastily explain the difference between a straight and a full house and then rake in my charitable contributions to their respective beer funds. You could safely call me risk-averse. In fact, the only really reckless financial bet I can recall making was deciding to become a professional journalist.

Nate Silver, America’s most famous elections prognosticator, got me to cut loose. His new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” (Penguin), uses poker as a model for responding to uncertainty. Having drawn the lot of reviewing it, I realized that I couldn’t do it justice without learning more about poker—specifically Texas hold ’em. “On the Edge,” like his previous book, “The Signal and the Noise,” is a hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking, only this time the author is taking in broader horizons. Silver left FiveThirtyEight, the statistics-based news site that he founded and sold to Disney, but is still in the business of predicting election results. Yet his first love is poker—he once played it professionally—and “On the Edge” sees him return to that passion.