On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

“Generally speaking,” Erik begins, “your tournament cash rate should be around twenty, twenty-five percent. Not fifty percent.” What? I’m cashing too much? How is that a bad thing? “The way the math works is that the money is concentrated up top. The only people who really make money in this business are the ones who can make it to that final table

Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information. When their estimates of these probabilities diverge by a sufficient margin from the odds on offer, they may place a bet.

There’s never a default with anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation. Even seven-deuce—the worst hand, statistically speaking, that you can be dealt—can be playable in the right circumstances. The thing is, the circumstances are usually not right—and the hyper-aggressive player may run over everyone for a while and forget that at some point,

The viewer was led to believe that poker is easy to learn, easy to profit from, and incredibly action-packed—none of which is true. But that didn’t stop many of them from concluding that only a ticket to Las Vegas separated them from life as the next Chris Moneymaker. The number of participants in the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 main event expl