On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (Penguin Publishing Group) - Softcover

Silver, Nate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593491645 ISBN 13: 9780593491645

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The Instant New York Times Bestseller | With a New Preface from Nate Silver for 2025
New York Times Book Review Paperback Row selection

“Engaging and entertaining . . . a glimpse of the economy of the future.” —Tim Wu, New York Times Book Review

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise, the definitive guide to our era of risk—and the players raising the stakes

In a world wired for chaos, these players are rewriting the rules. High-stakes, high-IQ, and often high on their own mythologies, they are driving the next era of finance, tech, and politics. But what happens when their bets go too far?

Nate Silver’s On The Edge reveals the hidden world of the River. It is the domain of gamblers and like-minded folks who move markets and change the fabric of society: poker legends, hedge fund titans, crypto speculators, and even those willing to bet the world’s future on AI. They are obsessives with a deep hunger for volatility and an unrelenting desire to exploit every edge over the rest of us. Silver embeds with them, competing in the World Series of Poker, visiting Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX compound, and attending wild Miami yacht parties at the height of the crypto bubble.

On the Edge is a front-row seat to a new world order built on risk, math, and ambition—a gripping ride through the minds shaping your future, whether you like it or not.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nate Silver

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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”...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593491645
• ISBN 13: 9780593491645
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 577
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland