Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback)

The investment banker was a breed apart, a member of a master race of deal makers. He possessed vast, almost unimaginable talent and ambition. If he had a dog, it snarled. He had two little red sports cars yet wanted four. To get them, he was, for a man in a suit, surprisingly willing to cause trouble.

People who believe themselves of social consequence tend to leave more of a paper trail, in the form of memoirs and anecdotiana.

Many of my classmates had sacrificed the better part of their formal educations for Wall Street. I had sacrificed nothing. That made me a dilettante, a southern boy in a white linen suit waltzing into a war fought mainly by northeastern prep school graduates.

Probably the real truth of the matter was that I was frightened to miss the express bus on which everyone I knew seemed to have a reserved seat, for fear that there would be no other.

I want to be an investment banker. If you had 10,000 sheres [sic] I sell them for you. I make a lot of money. I will like my job very, very much. I will help people. I will be a millionaire. I will have a big house. It will be fun for me. —Seven-year-old Minnesota schoolboy, “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” dated March 1985

the statistical likelihood of there being three sixes within a batch of, say, forty randomly generated serial numbers? For a great player, however, the math is the easy part of the game. The hard part is reading the faces of the other players. The complexity arises when all players know how to bluff and double-bluff.

The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war. The questions a Liar’s Poker player asks himself are, up to a point, the same questions a bond trader asks himself. Is this a smart risk? Do I feel lucky? How cunning is my opponent? Does he have any idea what he’s doing, and if not, how do I exploit his ignoran

The Game: In Liar’s Poker a group of people—as few as two, as many as ten—form a circle. Each player holds a dollar bill close to his chest. The game is similar in spirit to the card game known as I Doubt It. Each player attempts to fool the others about the serial numbers printed on the face of his dollar bill.

Almost everyone on Wall Street took his money seriously, regardless of its origins,