Nate Silver
speaker
1,377 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 29 Jun
Nate Silver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
We have some argyle socks. I'm not sure what's happening.
The last card. Because supposedly in the old riverboat days and poker's origin, if the dealer was crooked and cheated or was suspected of cheating and the last card affected the hand, he'd be thrown into the Mississippi River.
It's a game of escalation. Let's say you're playing a $5, $10 hold'em game, which is a medium-sized game. and you have $5,000 on the table. So the first bet typically in that game, someone would bet 30 bucks to try and win the five bucks and the 10 bucks, relatively small money.
In fighting for those $15 worth of blinds, things can escalate and escalate until all $5,000 are on the table or even more than that potentially. And so it's a game of escalation.
Yeah, as you get to the river, then there are fewer cards that can come. It's called the game tree. You can imagine a branch prunes out and then narrows again toward the end. But the more money on the table, the deeper you can get because you can raise and re-raise and check raise and all these things, right? It's a very complex game. Actually, it took longer to solve poker than to solve chess.
It is kind of solved now. I mean, we can get into what that means exactly. Tell me.
And it can kind of play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there, right? One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly. The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, we actually like study how computers play poker. But the computers must be very honest. Computers fucking bluff all the time. One discovery they made is that you have to bluff a ton in poker.
That's what makes people have an incentive to pay you off when you have a real hand.
Right, it depends on the size of the pot and it depends on cards that come in other things, right? But you have to bluff a lot and also concealing information, although it's intuitive if you think it's poker, it's a game of limited information, but you want to be very deceptive.
Sometimes you want to slow play with a strong hand that's very important or check a strong hand just to avoid giving away too much information.
If you know that a certain player bluffs just a little bit too much, then all of a sudden, a huge number of your hands are calling that would be folding before, or vice versa. Or things like, this player tends to make a big bet when they have a bad hand as a bluff, and a small bet when they have a good hand. You love that type of player, right?
It's like, okay, so now when you have a good hand, I can get away cheaply, maybe even fold, or at least pay you only a small amount. But when you're making a big bluff, then you're not balancing your strategy.
Maybe 100%. More short, it's maybe 70-30 math versus psychology. And it's also like a type of discipline. In the abstract, there are computer programs you can study with and coaching videos. I have a poker coach who's kind of the poker equivalent of a trainer, basically. But can you execute when all of a sudden you're playing for like $50,000?
Yeah, and I played in like the World Series of Poker a lot. I made day six of the main event. By the time you make it to day six, every pot is literally worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. You don't get to cash it in right away. My parents would have been like, oh, I have a million chips. And they're like, you want a million bucks? Like, no, I have chips.
And like the exchange rate's like 10 to one. And the World Series of Main Event, there are 10,000 players now. There are not 10,000 good poker players. in the United States, right? And so like they're amateurs and they're so nervous, they're like shaking. And so like it becomes learning how to deal with a flow state and a little bit of stage fright and executing in those high pressure situations.
And when you do it enough, I'm a very talented amateur.
Kind of developed like a little bit of a sicko tendency where you're like, I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money and more focused and in a weird fucked up way, even like a little bit more relaxed. I don't know. It's weird.
There absolutely is. And this is one thing that took me a while to learn. And I learned it by talking to this one guy who consulted with traders. He actually was a neuroscientist and studied these Wall Street traders. Like, these people are fucking crazy. They think they're so crazy. rational, but they're not.
Talk to an astronaut, talk to a guy who's trained fighter pilots, talk to a guy who trained professional golfers. And they kind of all say the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system, a different operating system when you're under stress. And actually a good athlete will have a higher escalation in his or her heart rate
under stress a trader will have higher spikes in testosterone and dopamine and things like that that's okay because it means that your body is reacting to stress when you learn in poker i'm not going to feel the same playing a ten thousand dollar pot as in a five dollar pot in my beer league game on tuesday night learning like okay i can start to master that or at least fuck up less than other people yeah when you learn that then that becomes kind of powerful
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