The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website:
We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking “I agree” below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service.
Nate Silver is playing in the Aussie Millions poker championship at Crown Casino. Picture: Jason SammonSource:Herald Sun
ASK someone to describe a professional poker player, and they're likely to talk about smokey back rooms and down on their luck gamblers hoping for one run of good cards.
Nate Silver couldn’t be further from that image. He's a best selling author and hugely influential journalist … and he credits much of his success to lessons learnt playing poker professionally.
- World Series Of Poker - Nate Silver Has Big Stack In 'One Drop' Tournament On Friday. Since 1988, CardPlayer has provided poker players with poker strategy, poker news.
- Crossposted on Naked Capitalism I just finished reading Nate Silver's newish book, The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail - but some don't. The good news First off, let me say this: I'm very happy that people are reading a book on modeling in such huge numbers - it's currently eighth on the New.
Silver created the website in 2008 after he stopped playing poker professionally. In 2013, ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight and hired Silver as its editor-in-chief.
LESSON ONE: TREAT SUCCESS AND FAILURE EQUALLY
'I think poker helps with understanding (that) you can play the hand as well as you possibly can, and still lose. And vice versa, right?' he says during our interview at Crown Casino, where he's staying while competing in the Aussie Millions poker championship.
Silver defies many stereotypes. His a gay man who's a hero among baseball stats geeks. He's made writing about opinion polls sexy. And he was a hard core gambler who walked away while in front.
After graduating from college, Silver got a respectable job working for accounting firm KPMG.
It was a good, solid job. Only it bored Silver. So he started playing online poker at night.
He hit the game at the right time, when its popularity on TV brought a lot of average players to the online casinos. A player of Silver's skill - he describes himself of being in the top 10 per cent of poker players at the time - could make good money. More than $100,000 a year in his case. And that was on top of his day job.
LESSON TWO: KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ‘EM
Silver got so hooked, he would play through the night, then catch a cab straight to work.
But as the bad players busted out, Silver was no longer a big fish in a small poker pond, and he started racking up big losses. Quickly.
“I had hit a wall playing uncreative and uninspired poker,” he wrote in his book The Signal and the Noise.
“When I did play, I combined the most dangerous trait of the professional poker player – the sense I was entitled to money – with the bad habits of the amateur, playing late into the evening, sometimes after having been out with friends.”
LESSON THREE: KNOW WHEN TO WALK AWAY, KNOW WHEN TO RUN
Silver says being the in poker bubble, can sometimes feel like “you’re in a zero gravity environment” – where none of the usual rules of economics apply.
So he did what most gamblers don't - he walked away while he was well ahead. In five years, he estimates poker netted him a $400,000 profit.
“I sometimes wondered what would have happened if I played on … it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realises that he isn’t much good.”
LESSON FOUR: DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
Those winnings gave him some breathing room to focus on work that interested him. And the freedom to take risks.
'Having had that experience where you win and lose a lot of money … a lot of poker players are very indifferent about money,' he says.
In fact, poker players can be very generous.
'There's a stereotype a lot of people don't know about - if you are around your poker buddies, it's really hard to pay for a meal or a drink,' he says.
'Paying $100 for a steak meal is nothing when I've paid $25,000 to enter this tournament. So in some ways it's kind of healthy (being a poker player), you don't get hung up on little things.'
One stereotype that Silver fulfils is that the old formula of hard work plus good timing usually equals success.
Even if he does nothing else for the rest of his life, Silver be remembered for two things: 1. Creating a new baseball stat so impressive (it could be used to predict the likelihood of a minor league player becoming a major league star) that a company offered him a share of the business for the rights to it. 2. And being the most accurate political analyst working today.
In each of the past two US presidential elections, on his blog FiveThirtyEight, Silver has predicted the result with a high degree of success.
He was so confident in his formula, he put his reputation on the line months before election day. That drew a huge amount of highly personal abuse from other political pundits threatened by this self-assured yet quietly spoken man.
IS POKER GOOD FOR TEACHING LIFE SKILLS? HAVE YOUR SAY BELOW
When you interview Silver, it feels like he's about to explode with nervous energy. But he has proven to have nerves of steel, by both backing his judgement in the face of a torrent of criticism, but also refraining from mocking his critics when he was proven entirely correct, accurately picking the correct result in all 50 states.
While some journalists accused him of being biased towards Barack Obama, the most indefensible attack targeted his personality.
Dean Chambers, who ran competing political analysis site Unswekedpolls, centred his criticism of Silver around him being 'thin and effeminate' and having a 'soft-sounding voice'.
Rather than get riled, Silver laughed it off on Twitter, writing: 'Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide!'.
LESSON FIVE: KNOW WHO YOU ARE
Silver says the ups and downs you feel through playing poker prepared him for the slings and arrows of public life.
It's also helped him stay grounded despite being lionised - one US journalist called him Dork Elvis - for being so confident about Obama's victory. Even when the national opinion polls had Obama neck and neck with Mitt Romney, Silver gave him a 90 per cent chance of winning days ahead of the result.
'People like to say that when they get a good outcome, it's because of skill, and when they do poorly it's because of luck,' he says.
'In poker, there's so many ways to get lucky or unlucky. It's very easy to latch on to the noise and see yourself as highly skilled.'
It seems whatever Silver touches turns to gold. His first book – The Signal and the Noise – was published in November last year and quickly went top 10 on the New York Times bestseller lists
But he says experiencing big losses like he did (at one point he lost close to $70,000 in a night) taught him how close the line is between success and failure.
'Poker players grasp (the part luck plays) more than most people in other walks of life. You just become more zen in some sense. If that 10 per cent chance had come up and Romney had won, I probably wouldn't be sitting here, I'd be sitting in Atlantic City trying to find a game (of poker).'
Nate Silver Poker Tips Free
Nate Silver is competing the $2 million Aussie Millions poker tournament against the top 20 poker players in the world at Crown Casino, which concludes on Sunday.
Nate Silver Poker Tips 2019
Originally published asWhat poker teaches you about life