Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today in the show, Marie's working on a TV show.

She's been very coy about it, even with me, frankly, but now she has no more need to be.

We're going to talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, that's going to be the lead in to the to the meat of the episode, which is, you know, poker and gambling are big topics in movies and shows, but Nate, honestly, there are not that many good poker movies.

There are a lot of bad.

Yeah, there are a lot of bad poker movies.

There are a lot of really bad poker movies out there.

So we're gonna talking about some of the tropes and cliches that annoy Maria and I as actually poker players.

But like, tell us more about this very exciting First all, does it have a title?

Can you share that?

Or is that no, this does not have a titled.

I am working on the most exciting untitled.

Okay, it is called untitled.

That could be a title.

Yeah, absolutely, what's the show about, Maria, It's it's a gambling adjacent.

Is it is, so we're going to be when we start talking about actually good poker movies.

The names that are going to come up are Brian Koppleman and David Levine, who were the creators of Rounders, which, as we will tell you, is probably the best poker movie that has been made, and the two of them have teamed up with Martin Scorsese to a TV He's just a guy, yeah, cigure, he's new.

He's he's kind of young, like newcomer to the you know, to the world of screen.

It's okay that you haven't heard of him.

You know, he might as well be untitled.

They are teaming up to do a TV show about Vegas and about the world of casinos and gambling and you know, all of all of those fun, high stakes things.

And we I'm one of the writers on the show, and we've been working on it since September, I guess is when the writer's room started.

But yes, I've been very coy about it because you know, it's it's something that we really didn't want to talk about until the show was picked up.

Nate, I don't know how much you know about the inner workings of Hollywood.

But even when.

Even if we have such no name people as exactly exactly, even if you have people whose name Martin Score score what Yeah, even if you have Scorsese and Koppleman and Levine and like all of these heavy hitters who have a lot of you know, not just sway, but proof that they can do things that people want to watch, right, which is what which is what Hollywood wants, which is what Netflix want.

They want people who can bring eyeballs, and you have and you have this team who definitely has a really good track record and doing this.

You know, these are these are people who can really make sure that viewers come and they they've they're known for making good television, good good films.

And yet right even still that's not a guarantee that something's going to be made these days.

It's a really, really tough market.

So we were just waiting until you know, the green light, the official announcements, the go aheads and that's where we are right now.

But it's something that's really exciting.

It is such a rich world, as you know, you know, I spend at least half my year in Vegas and have been doing that for a number of years now, and I'm really excited to kind of have content that actually shows Vegas the way it is and that understands, you know, what this world actually entails, because I feel like so much out there is written and told by people who have no fucking clue to be perfectly honest, right, they're not of Vegas, they're not of the gambling world.

They don't understand the dynamics here, and it shows.

So I'm really excited.

I think we have a great team in place of people who actually know what they're talking about.

I have no idea how the show's going to come out, but I'm proud and happy.

What's it like actually in the writer's room, You're like, are you actually in a room?

Oh, we're actually in a room.

Yes, we actually you have to have right in front of other people.

No, you don't write in front of other people.

The way a writers room works is you sit in a room with a bunch of people and you brainstorm, and you kind of you throw ideas back and forth and you develop things.

You try to figure out you know, what's the shape of an episode going to look like.

There are lots of whiteboards around and you know you're write on those, but it's Yeah, it's more of a you don't start saying like scene one, Nate Silver says, Maria, what are we talking today about today on Risky Business?

Maria, Nate, are we going to do this again?

Nate?

What are you talking about?

Maria?

Yeah, that's not how a writer's works.

It is much more of a kind of back and forth collaborative, like let's get ideas going off each other.

Who actually writes the actual script though, someone's like, I'm just gonna take all your inpoint into account and write the show.

It depends.

It depends on the show.

It depends on It depends on how things are set up so far.

For I actually don't know if I'm allowed to have how much I'm allowed to say, but I believe I think that this is actually pretty public for this show so far.

Brian and David, you know, we'll be taking the lead on writing all of the episodes because they're both really excited about this show.

So can they just like passively aggressively say oh, I appreciate that feedback and then ignore it.

Oh?

Sure, absolutely, But they wouldn't.

They wouldn't do that if they don't like very They would tell you that they don't like it.

Yes, when's so, what's the timeline for, like when this would air?

Ha ha okay, okay, okay, okay, that's not me, that's Hollywood.

Okay, No, we yeah, it's.

It's very early in the process, and so it's unclear.

I mean, and I you know, I'm not Brian or David, so I am not kind of in the driver's seat of any of those decisions.

So I just know what I'm told, and I have no idea when this is going to be on air.

But yes, this is really fun.

It's been a great experience.

I love the I love the team, and I've loved working with them, and I'm excited for it too, you know, for it to be on everyone's TV screens and or computer screens or phone screens or however you consume your content.

And on.

On that note, let's talk a little bit more about, you know, poker and gambling movies more broadly, which ones we like, which ones we don't like, the good, the bad, the ugly.

Because Nate, there are a lot of really bad poker movies out there.

We're gonna have like an escalating pyramid of like sins against poker that are sometimes depicted in bad poker movies, movies that include poker scenes that aren't about poker, you know number one, some of whose don't even understand the notion of like table stakes, right, they have the notion that like, okay, yeah, somebody better it's not gonna call my investor, pause the hand, right, we call my investors because of a good hand getting million dollars.

That's one trope, right.

Another trope is like the you know, royal flush versus for a kind kind of thing where you're your cold.

Decks, Nate, have you seen a casino royal?

Yeah, this is an example, right, but yeah, a weak flush against the busted draw kind of thing, right, And the vast majority of the time, like I've never liked, I ever lost with quads.

Probably not in all the poker hands that I've played.

I'm trying to think if they've sure lost with full houses to quads, right, but maybe not lost with quads let alone, you know, straight flush over straight flush or things like that, And that's that's not realistic.

You know.

Another big one that like, I get annoyed because I'll sometimes deal amateur backyard poker games with one group of friends, right, people picking their cards up way off the table to look at them like that's super Oh my god.

But that no, Nate, that happens all the time.

Yeah, with bad players.

I see.

So I just played in a charity event last week, great great school charity, but there were tons of people who don't know how to play poker, and the first thing, or who play it but like not that well, the first thing they do is they take their cards up and they put them in our face.

I'm like, no, put that shit down, right, like, that is not how you look at your cards.

But I've had that happen in tournaments as well, Like there are players who just do that, and I'm like, you have no business playing a thousand dollar tournament or whatever, you know, five thousand dollars tournament if that's how you look at your cards, because people can see that.

And I do try to warn people, you know, not to do it, but sometimes they just won't listen and they just keep keep putting them up.

But in these movies, oftentimes that's how everyone looks at their cards, and I think that that it is very frustrating when you see that.

You're like, no, no professional player would actually ever look at a hand that way, and yet you see all the time, hmm, let's see what do I have here, Let's show it to the cameras.

Yeah, you're trying to conceal information, right, that's the name of the game.

And like, yeah, you know the people who unintentionally at their cards up too high, but like that's that's like bad antiquette.

There's very little awareness in poker movies of like what the stack sizes are, right, you know, yes, what is the amount that you have behind you?

Relatively amount in the pot, which can like radically change strategy.

Right, if there's a hundred thousand dollars in the pot and you have a million dollars behind you, very different than if you have only quote unquote another fifty thousand dollars with In fact, early poker broadcasts you watch like early early World Series coverage or early WPT coverage, right, and they often don't list the stack sizes, which makes it like to a first approximation approximately useless to professional book a player.

But and you don't have It's like it's like watching a mess we and you don't know what the score is.

Right, There's a really exciting play and we're not sure which team won.

So that's like another trope that needs to be needs to be killed.

Yeah, and I think that a lot of times.

By the way, Casino Royale is a fun movie.

I like that movie.

I think it's a great movie.

Daniel Craig is wonderful.

But one of the things that that movie, like, it really bugs me is if you think about kind of the sizes of those pots and those steaks, like no one has anything behind, right, Their buy ins are completely illogical when it comes to the stakes of the game, Like, wait, if we're playing that much a hand, then everyone, then you're not buying in for a million dollars.

You have to buy in for a lot more, right, Like that stacked to pot ratio should not be happening at these intervals, and so people really do lose that sense of perspective because they're like, oh, a million sounds like a big number, right, And this sounds like a big number, but there is a lack of kind of knowledge about what the number should be.

And let me then add on to that.

Things that can frustrate me is that movies tend to conflate tournament and cash poker, right, like there's no clear they don't really understand that the two are very different games, and that you can play poker where chips have no monetary value.

And so it really frustrates me when you see people playing a tournament and they're announcing their bets in terms of dollars and they're basically kind of carrying on as if it's a cash game.

But I'm like, wait, no, you're in a tournament.

That's not how this works, right, You're not betting ten dollars.

Or you're not now my mom, my mom is a victim of So I was playing in some World Poker taur tournament two years ago, right, and like whatever, you start out with sixty thousan chips, a hundred thousand pips thing, maybe an impt and like I wound up with like four hundred and fifty thousand SCHIPs at the end of day one, was one of the chip leaders.

It got circular on social media.

My mom was like, you made four to few thousand dollars.

I'm like, no, Mom, might have made I've made zero dollars so far.

I think I eventually catched that hearing it for seven thousand dollars or something, right, which is probably your modal expectation.

After day one, even with a big.

Stack, And so, yeah, your mom can be forgiven, because a lot of times movies make it seem that way with like the dollar signs and all of that.

But yes, I've had people be like, oh my god, why can't you just take it and leave at the end of the day.

I'm like, because this isn't money, Like this is play money.

These are play chips, and I can't know, of course, Like believe me, if I could not, if I could cash out a million right now, then then I'd be I'd be out of there.

By the way.

Great poker movie that I would put in my top three and eight, I'm wondering if you've seen this one is California Split, which is a classic by Robert Altman, and it's about two friends, one of whom's a degenerate gambler, one of whom becomes a degenerate gambler by association.

But there's a there are some great poker scenes in there, and I think that that also one of the things that gets right is it really depicts kind of that the mentality of the gambler who is up and makes money and won't walk away right, who thinks that okay, you know, but then at the end, I mean, I'm gonna spoiler this.

This movie came out decades ago.

If you haven't seen it, Like, just watch the movie.

It's a good movie.

But at the end, one of them does walk away, right, He does actually make that decision after winning in this huge game with Amarillo.

Slim actually an amoralos.

Slim has a part in the movie and ends up ends up walking away winner and then splitting the winnings and just saying I'm done.

And I think that that's very cool, and that does happen as well, but it does depict to that kind of mental calculus also of is this a good spot?

Is this a good game?

Right?

Can I make more money here?

When should I walk away?

When did I get lucky?

Because I just beat players who were a lot better than I was a lot of people don't have that discipline and don't have that self awareness, and a lot of people, as we've talked about in the past, night end up having an overblown sense of their own edge and their own skill.

And so it's such a good poker skill to know, Okay, you know what, I'm just going to take this money and I'm going to leave.

You don't see that often depicted correctly in movies.

Yeah, it's not quite a poker movie, but as a gambling movie.

The movie twenty one, which is based on the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrick, that came out kind of right when it was getting into poker, and like that, I guess the book could come out the movie was maybe later, right, And I know Jeff ma one of the principles behind this Good Guy, you know, that depicted a very romantic idea of like you kind of fly into Vegas and you're literally bringing home suitcases of cash, right and kind of staying up all night.

And when I talked to Jeff for my book about his experience the MIT black Jack Team, which is what it's about, it's like, yeah, no, right, we would kind of like you know, we would go and this is before you even had nightclubs in Las Vegas, right, we were when it was always going to Vegas.

We're going to some fucking casino and like Dubuque, Iowa half the time.

So we thought it was a sharper or a less sharp, you know, less detection of card counters, which is what they were doing.

Right.

So, like you know, real gambling is a grind most of the time, right, And like one thing you see too, like this is a problem with like movies in general, Like Maria, I would like for there be like a movie or this TV show right where like there are complications that unfold and then they kind of unravel themselves in a very non dramatic way.

It's like, oh, that was just a misunderstanding.

That was just a misunderstanding.

Actually, right, let's just make up and you know, and nothing much happens to the anti clima.

Actually know all that foreshadowing.

Those are just weird coincidences.

Nothing actually happened, just to keep people on their toes, just to have some like gto bluffing frequency when you're having the more predictable I guess outcome, you know what I mean.

But that probably won't happen.

But yeah, Jeff's biggest complain about the book, particularly the movie.

I mean the book itself and is a althor another person I met friendly guy, you know.

Ben says, this is kind of a popular book and I wouldn't say inspire bat toy story, but it's trying to to make a little more cinematic and the movie goes further.

Right, Jeff says, look, the movie didn't depict so Heet really mad.

When a scene depicts him or his character on tilt, the character like loses every single hand he plays, Whereas conversely, when they're doing things the right way right, they win every single hand.

They might literally not be a hand that they don't win.

Right.

Similarly, in like rain Man, it doesn't Hoffman character right, he goes and they win every hand.

And like blackjack, even if you kind of know how many cards you're in the bet, yeah, you might have a fifty two, fifty three to fifty four percent edge, which is very big for gambling, right, but you're not.

Going to be winning huge by the way, Yeah, yeah, but.

You're not gonna be winning every bet.

Right.

It's very hard to depict like randomness, and it's hard in real life.

It's hard to say I made a good forecast, I made a good bet.

There was a fifty five to forty five bet, which is great.

You're still going to lose that bet forty five percent of the time.

Right.

The notion of a sure thing, the notion of you know, variance, goes out the window, and randomness goes out the window.

It's all the kind of a morality play, and like that's another unrealistic component of like of movies in general, but especially gambling adjacent movies.

Yeah, no, absolutely, I mean I think that a lot of things have to change in service of storytelling and creating a story that's both visually compelling and also has a compelling kind of storyline and that seems plausible to people.

So, you know the part of what you were talking about, how like the actual trips did not look at all like that, you know, not flying to Las Vegas for these glamorous weekends every time and you're obviously like in the middle of nowhere and like not very glamorous casinos, doing not very glamorous things.

That's part of it.

That's kind of part of the visual appeal and kind of the story.

But the other part of it, the randomness.

I think that that is something that you know, the human mind just completely struggles with.

And poker.

We've talked about this before, as I spoke about with Frank Lance, who who studies games.

He's a game designer.

He teaches games at NYU.

You know, he loves poker because poker is a game that teaches you what true randomness looks like and he told me that you can't do that in a game that's designed, you know, like a computer game, because true randomness doesn't seem random to the players, right, So they actually have like random number generators that aren't random, where you have like, okay, like if this person has lost this many times, you know, then you need to have him win now because they're gonna think that the game is rigged.

And so it's just disconnect where when the game isn't rigged, it feels rigged, and when it's rigged, it doesn't feel rigged because the actual way that randomness works can feel rigged right to the human mind.

Just why, by the way, so many people are like, oh, Booker's rigged, like this is rigged.

That's rigged, because they're like, how improbable is I'm like, no, it's not fucking rigged, Like this is just character like this is how probable it can be, yes, but yeah, this is how like this is how probabilities actually work.

But now, like if you can't grasp that when you yourself are playing a game, now, imagine like the poor filmmaker trying to make something seem realistic and trying to make randomness and variants look real, like, oh man, that's a thankless task, right.

You can't.

You can't, like, for the sake of storytelling, you need to actually play around with it so that it seems random even though it's not actually random, and that's not how randomness works.

And so you do have this constant tension where like you understand what it should be like in reality, but you can't do it right.

You're making a movie.

You have to keep the audience engauge, and even when you're a game designer, you can't do it, which is once again why Frank Lance likes the purity of poker, because you know the game is what it is, and you can't fuck with it by by being a game designer who you know, decides, Oh, you know this person, this person has lost a flip Nate ten times in a row.

They've got to win it this time around.

Oh man, this person has gotten their aces cracked three times, you know, and they're supposed to win seventy five percent of the time.

We're gonna we're gonna have to make sure that the next time that he's dealt a says he's going to win.

That ain't how it works.

It would be nice if it were, but it's not.

And we'll be back right after this.

What's the first movie that you remember seeing that's kind of a poker movie?

And I don't think it has to be like a movie where poker is the plot, because there aren't very many of those, but a movie where poker plays like a pivotal role.

I mean, yeah, I'm trying to think more broadly about like what my image of poker was like before I started playing, and then before I started playing kind of seriously.

But yeah, I did see Rounders, which is a movie by of course, Brian Koppleman and David Levine, who you're working with on this new show.

Yes, Brian and David are wonderful, and Rounders is the first poker movie I ever saw.

Yeah, I mean Rounders is so Brian is a real poker player I've played.

He is.

It's Brian.

I don't think Brian would describe himself as like an expert poker player, but he loves the game, right, you know.

He talked to me about like the exhilarating sense that you get when you're kind of like doing this thing that's kind of in this liminal space poker right where you're playing late at night in an underground room somewhere where it's literally underground or not depends.

Sometimes it's on a high rise or something, right, and having the shared experience of like taking risks and so like in general, like his poker scenes get things.

I mean, if you wanted to get them fully right, I'm sure he would, right, but they get things most of the way right, you know, I mean look, Rounders famously exaggerates the importance of tells.

There there's a tell involving an Oreo cookie, for example, right that the John Mackowich character exhibits.

Let's play some CODs.

The rule is this, you spottom to tell, you don't say a fucking word.

I finally spotted KGB's and usually I'd have let him go on chewing those oreos till he was dead broke.

But I don't have that kind of time.

It's usually not quite it's a movie.

It's a movie.

It's a movie, right, you know, I kind of came of age and like the Rounder's mini boom for poker, where like you know, geeky twenty something meant but like this seems really cool, right, This is a way to like have this experience where is a nerd you can kind of make good.

Yeah, I think that Rounders definitely captivated me.

Now, I did not start playing poker after I was pretty young, so I couldn't play poker when Rounders came out, But I do remember seeing it and just loving the movie.

I think my favorite thing about the movie was probably Matt Damon back then it's just me perfectly honest and yeah, I know, I know, and you know, John Malkovich like the since you know, since I'm Russian and like his should act.

It was just hilarious, like it was just a fun movie.

But it definitely stayed with me because you can tell that Brian and David both play poker, both love the game.

By the way, Brian has a cameo in the movie which is a lot of fun at Borgata.

He's at the poker table, so that's you know, I think that's a fun little moment in there.

And ask any poker player, and I think you're going to get Rounders as one of the top ones.

So I mean, obviously every kind of poker player's same.

As quote is from Rounders.

Well play a clip for our audience.

Listen here's the thing.

If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, and you are the.

Sucker by the way, do you leave it to be true?

Is that?

No, I don't think.

I don't think that's true.

I think that, but I do think that there's truth in it.

Like with so many sayings, right that the moment I always caution people against overconfidence, right, and the moment that you think that you kind of have the edge over everyone, you should be very careful.

And I would also say that it's not true for me because I play in tournaments right where your seat draw is random.

Matt Damon Rounders is about cash games, and there you actually I think there's much more truth there because you have to say, like, especially if it's a cash game where like there's some good spots, or like you know, or you were invited for some reason and it's a game that is hard to get into, you have to wonder, like you have to ask the question why was I allowed to play?

Right?

Is it because of my charming personality and my witty banter and table conversation.

Maybe, but maybe they just think that you're the spot, right, Maybe they actually think that you are someone who's good to play with.

I had a really funny experience a few years ago where I someone reached out to me a game runner from one of the high stakes games in Las Vegas that is, at one of the casinos.

I'm not going to mention who the runner was or what the game was, and it was like, you know, hey, like we'd love for you to join us anytime, like when we're when we're playing this game, Like we're happy to like pay for your airfare to Vegas.

And I was like, and I'm going to go ahead and say no.

And it turned out that another friend of mine who's a female poker player, got the same invitation, and we were like, huh, like do they just really want a girl at the table or what does it say about their impression of how we play poker at those higher stakes.

But the moment, you know, you get that invitation and I asked a few people about it, They're like, it's a good game, and I was like, yeah, you know, I'm still still not going to do it.

Like so that's kind of one of the I think that that's some of the truth in that Matt Damon quote.

Yeah, if it's a TV game, it might be that might be one of the weird exceptions where like, maybe we believe this was not a team again, Okay, that's more believe it or not.

Relative to the poker world, we are normies believe it or not.

Right, But yeah, you should always be asking like, why have I invited to be played in this game that inevitably will be portrayed to me?

Is very good.

The other thing you have to watch for, which is not necessarily bad but something to be aware of, right, is that if you exhibit any reluctance about how high the stakes are, assume the de facto steaks are at least two acts higher than then the person in body of the game is projecting.

I think it's a good heuristic to look at.

In it is a tournament, to say, like to look around the table and say where am I making my my money from?

Right?

Or am I making money?

If you're not making money, then a cash game.

If you're having fun, stay right.

Otherwise leave it a tournament that might affect your strategy.

It might actually depends on if it's late at night.

If it's late at night and get a new table the next day, you might say, you know what, I'm just gonna kind of be a little bit of a knit here.

I need to.

I can wait for a better table tomorrow.

Right, But in general, actually it's the opposite.

In general, if you're like, Okay, I'm at a tough table.

It's ten in the morning, I'm playing until ten at night, right, you actually have to take more more risk and look for dinner edges because you won't find these stick, robust fish that give you big free money basically, But I think it's kind of worth looking around and saying, where am I making my money from in this game?

Right, And if you're making a lot of money, you might actually pick yours fustle more carefully, like in the main event for example, sometimes was obvious.

So you make a lot of money in poker from players who are too passive and sometimes too tight.

Right, if somebody only folds unless they have a really good hand, and then we have a really good hand, then make huge opus bets.

Right, it's not as fun as picking off a bluff or something.

You make a lot of money from that from that player.

You do, you do, absolutely absolutely, But yeah, so I do think that there there's definite truth to that and kind of it's good strategy advice to always look around.

And by the way, if you can't spot the sucker at the table, right, if you can't spot the spot, then you probably are the spot.

And you want to avoid getting into big pots because you will get outplayed.

And we'll be right back after this break.

They we've talked about a lot of things that you know are bad about poker movies, because most poker movies are kind of bad.

Do you have any poker movies that you'd put on like your bad list where you're like, oh my god, like this is just just no, or or do we just want to stick to our good list here?

I haven't seen that many.

I mean we haven't.

You know.

I liked Rounders.

I liked like Molly's Game, right, I think that does a better job than than most.

Yeah, well, Molly's Game had some really good consultants.

I actually know one of the people, David Peretti's, who is a poker player, who consulted on some of those poker scenes.

So they actually asked real players to help them out with the choreography of the poker and I think that that shows for sure.

I think that those those hands in Molly's game are both dramatic but also believable, like it could happen.

Yeah, it does it, you know, as a poker player to movie makers, right, I'm not asking for a ton, right, like just just things that are like that are plausible ish, you know what I mean?

There are things that kind of like and that's like couplemen.

Is it like he's doing things that are kind of like not literal, but like at least kind of in the in the spirit no, a nod to real poker basically, yep.

I think I think that that is the important thing.

If we were making a movie about you, who'd play you?

Or if you were if you were in a Parker story and you were there.

I will let the audience speculate.

It doesn't have to be It doesn't have to be someone who looks like you, just someone you know, who do you think should play you?

Who do you think should play me?

Maria?

I don't know, it's I'm weirdly I feel like the hems about who would you have played me?

I don't know.

I need to think about it.

Are there good like sports betting movies?

Like?

Not really?

Right?

No?

I don't think so, I mean not that well no, oh wait, no, uncut jumps like absolutely one of the most one of the most brilliant movies, Like such a good movie, such a stressful movie, like movie at the edge of your seat, and like, holy shit, Adam Sandler was great.

And by the way, Adam Sandler could totally play you unate, I would.

Approve of that.

Yeah, no, look, I yeah, I should have brought that up earlier, because that, like that captures the degeneracy of this character is like a little bit addled, kind of that rang true to me, right, and like, you know, I'm not saying it's the average gambler, but like that's a really you know, that might be the best gambling adjacent No he's not.

I don't think.

Yeah, I don't think he's the average gambler by far.

Like he is at the very very dejense like end of the spectrum.

But he just like he kept that movie Sandler himself, and just the movie captures that energy and kind of that mindset so incredibly well.

By the way, if you haven't seen it, we won't spoiler here, you should watch it, but it's such a stressful movie.

Don't watch it as like a way to relax before bed, Like it's one of those movies where you're just like stressed the entire time, even when nothing particularly stressful is happening.

Anyway, that movie, I think is one of the best gambling movies I've ever seen.

It's just absolutely brilliant in terms of capturing the spirit of the thing.

It also made me understand Parlay's nate and how hard it is to hit your parlay.

But I actually like that movie explains it so well because it shows it right.

It shows like how it accumulates, how you have to hit different points, like what has to happen, and how many things have to go right, which is why parlays are stupid bets, as you've told me multiple times, and I think as lots of people have told me.

But you can make a ton of money.

I mean, they just they aren't inherently they just high risk, right, you're basically taking the windows.

They're very high risk, right, right, automatically betting on the next game, right, And so yeah, exactly.

But you know, there's there's a reason why there's a reason why they're popular, you know, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, some people think blackjack is boring because you basically win or lose one x your bet.

You can double down and stuff like that and split.

But you know, all right, Maria, we talked about this TV show you're working on, But if you are making a proper poker movie, what would it be about.

You'd make it about the biggest bluff.

Okay, it would make my book into a poker movie.

Duh, that's the poker movie that absolutely needs to be made.

So people making movies listening to this do it.

I mean, I think gamblers in general, I mean, first of all, you have like the degenerate gambler versus a creational gambler's kind of like a still gambler.

They all kind of co mingle.

But like, I don't know, if we're determined to make a good a good movie about the kind of poker gambling lifetime, we could, we could.

We'd ham it up a little bit, Maria, the purists we critique some things.

We could do a good job, though.

I believe we would.

I think so.

I think so.

And in terms of you know, who'd play me, it depends on when the movie gets made, because you know, I keep getting older, but fictional me does not.

But someone who is already a little bit older than I am, but you know, is a is a movie star, so that doesn't really matter.

But who has a similar background and so I would love for her to play me would be Natalie Portman.

She's also one of the good thing, one of the few.

Yeah, yeah, you know, we went to Harvard together.

She was older, she was ahead of me.

She studied psychology us like me.

You know, she's Jewish.

I'm Jewish.

There are not that many Jewish leading ladies in Hollywood.

I would definitely want her to be me if possible.

Hey, Natalie, there are actors who played poker.

Matt Damon, there are does, Till McGuire does I'm not sure there are any who were regarded as being particularly nor McDonald the comedian like poker.

Yeah, no, there are a ton.

I mean, there's a lot of overlap.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays poker, Matt Damon in real life loves poker, Ben Affleck, Wahlberg, like that whole crew from Boston plays poker.

I don't know about Casey Affleck, but I would assume he plays as well.

You know, there are lots of star power poker players.

In terms of who's actually considered good, Nate, Let's not go there.

We're sure that they're all excellent players, and we would love to sit at a game with them and be able to compliment them on their level and on how brilliantly they play.

Right, if you're at the World Stories of Poker, would you rather it's against an actor or a professional athlete rather acting?

Yeah, me too, actor immediately, I mean, I have just an immediate answer.

Professional athletes are often very good poker players because they just, like you know, they compete for a living, and they have that they have that sense of competition, they have that hunger to win, they have the aggressiveness like a lot of them make, you know, like Richard Seymour, who's an excellent poker player.

Like a lot of them make really good poker players because they understand it right, and they're smart like athletes are.

And I'm not saying actors aren't smart, but acting is a different You can be very smart, but you're in a different profession, right, Like and you might say, oh, actors have better poker faces, that doesn't really matter.

Most people have good poker faces.

Like that's actually not that important.

But the like the competitive spirit and like understanding aggression, knowing how to gauge that reading your opponents.

I mean, if you're a thinking like imagine being a quarterback, right, you have to be reading people all the time.

Like if you're a thinking athlete like man, you're going to be formidable at the pokering table.

Yeah.

Game theory comes up a lot absolutely in sports, right for tennis it comes up a lot, right.

Uh yeah, A starting picture Greg Maddox, great Atlanta Braves picture literally would randomize his calls allegedly based on the stadium whites and things like that.

And he's a Las Vegas guy who I believe plays poker pretty well.

Yeah, so yeah, the athlete and they're competitive, right yeah, actor actors is probably maybe like a plastic surgeon, if you yeah, like the plastic surgeon, like a real estate I guess I have some real estate people in one of my home games, so maybe I should.

They're great at poker, of course, real estates.

Well we'll quit while we're ahead.

Well quit, well we're ahead.

What's your So what's your if you're gonna be if we're sitting down for you know, a night of rounders rewatching or whatever it is, what are we gonna be serving.

What's your favorite movie snack?

Uh?

Nice class of peanut?

NOI yeah, I'm not a thing snacker?

Do you know that, Maria, I'm I'm totally with you.

Nate.

Let's let's let's let's get a bottle of wine.

Yeah, and do a poker movie night.

That would be my favorite snack.

I have enough other sins where like snacking is like the one I don't have.

Basically now, I don't snack, and I actually, fellow listeners, if you ever watch a movie with me, please do not be eating.

I hate like the sound of like someone eating popcorn next to me.

Like, please know, it's a me thing.

It's it's not.

You, it's me.

But like, come on, let's let's watch the movie and enjoy the movie.

You don't have to be snacking literally all the time.

Let's have a nice dinner before or after and then enjoy the movie.

So Nate, well, we'll have a nice bottle of wine if we're watching the movie and then having dinner.

If we've already had dinner, you know, maybe we have some whiskey or you know, a nice some after dinner, some after dinner libations.

I think that's my ideal movie night, comfortable couch, nice alcohol and nice screen.

You know, let's uh, let's do it and and poker that as you say, nay, you don't have to be perfect, but like, let's get it semi believable so that we can get invested.

And the end to my ideal movie night, it's you know, Natalie Portman playing me on the screen.

So let's make it happen.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM.

Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova.

And by me Nate Silver.

The show was a Cool production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia, Jean Kott and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruger.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too, But once again, only if you like us.

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Thanks for tuning in.