Nate Silver • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

Is America’s increasing penchant for gambling another sign of stagnation?

Besides, when an originator like Peabody bets, the SuperBook at least gets valuable information—one of the best bettors in the world has tipped his hand and the Westgate can use that to adjust its lines.

Between all forms of gambling, Americans are probably making in excess of $1 trillion in bets annually.

someone with an informed, original opinion about what the betting line should be, usually formulated through painstaking statistical modeling.

Poker abides by a “trickle up” theory of wealth: the bottom 10 percent of players are losing money quickly enough to support a relatively large middle class of break-even players.

Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information. When their estimates of these probabilities diverge by a sufficient margin from the odds on offer, they may place a bet.

what good is a prediction if you aren’t willing to put money on it?

In the United States, we live in a very results-oriented society. If someone is rich or famous or beautiful, we tend to think they deserve to be those things. Often, in fact, these factors are self-reinforcing: making money begets more opportunities to make money; being famous provides someone with more ways to leverage their celebrity; standards o