On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

There is reasonably strong evidence for what Thaler calls No Free Lunch—it is difficult (although not literally impossible) for any investor to beat the market over the long-term. Theoretically appealing opportunities may be challenging to exploit in practice because of transaction costs, risks, and other constraints on trading. Statistical pattern

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This is why pros mentally separate ‘house money’ from their starting stakes. Expected value is an abstraction. What we really care about is the expected utility of our investment—how it will benefit our lives. It's much better to make a bunch of your parallel selves modestly rich than to make one of you spectacularly rich while impoverishing all th

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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

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But I wondered about the toll of a life devoted to dice, to randomness. Mochy took a dispassionate view: that the mathematics are sound and that chance, given a chance, becomes a certainty. “I always say it this way: it’s like playing roulette,” he said, comparing himself to the extra numbers on the wheel that give the casino an advantage. “And in

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