(“Poker is exactly like life, but with instant karma,” Chewy remarks.) Practically, though, it implies a degree of nonattachment that seems oddly out of place in a profession built around maximizing expected value, in the financial rather than spiritual sense.

“When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that’s always surrounding them,” he tells me. They take it personally. They don’t know how to lose, how to learn from losing. They look for something or someone to blame. They don’t step back to analyze their own decisions, their own play, where they may have gone wrong themselves. “It’s a re

I know all the places to go that will give us a more genuine Vegas experience. Here’s a cheat sheet. For sushi, Yui and Kabuto. For dinner close to the Rio, the Fat Greek, Peru Chicken, and Sazón. For when I’m feeling nostalgic for the jerk chicken of my local Crown Heights spots, Big Jerk. Lola’s for Cajun. Milos, but only for lunch. El Dorado for

Chance. (It was published in 1663, long after his death.)

And what if the bet is even higher? Suddenly, we have a corrective for many of the follies of human reason. “If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief,” says Kant.

“What you need to know first and most important of all is that poker is storytelling,” he says. It’s a narrative puzzle. Your job is to put together the pieces. “I know that you’ve already

“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

“You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck. . . . One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.” WINSTON CHURCHILL, “MY EARLY LIFE,”

As Solomon Asch, one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, once wrote, “We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter.