Engaging and entertaining ... In his quest to understand people who are obsessed with risk, Silver draws on a wide range of insights ... Ultimately presents an unsympathetic vision of capitalism’s future.
So focused on bettors and the bets they bet that one might suspect it was written not by Nate Silver but by Nathan Detroit ... Silver is a serious poker player. Unless you are yourself serious about poker, you’re likely to find the author’s lengthy hand-by-hand description of his successes and failures a bit tiresome.
A hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking, only this time the author is taking in broader horizons ... Silver might have spent more time exploring domains where expected-value thinking may be even more consequential.
Silver compellingly theorizes that humans are in general too risk averse, and that those who can discerningly fight that impulse often benefit greatly in life ... Given his knowledge of and affinity for poker, Silver tends to belabor that lens through which he looks — perhaps to a fault. Those uninterested in stats or strategies may have a hard time getting through this book. But if you don’t mind or are intrigued by the game, Silver eventually broadens his cohort.
In its prolix and flibbertigibbet way, this smart guy’s book now swerves to large gambling-adjacent matters ... The book is an exercise in self-justification, but what it fails to justify is the assumption that mathematics can in some way predict the course of human affairs ... Politics is not, in the end, just a game of cards.
