Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback)

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.

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

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 astute investor Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

People who believe themselves of social consequence tend to leave more of a paper trail,

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.

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.

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treatises with no obvious use,