From card sharps to crypto traders, a statistician asks what we can learn from the people prepared to gamble everything

Nothing is more interesting to poker players and less interesting to everyone else than a breathless recounting of who bet how much with a jack and six of clubs in some game years ago. There’s an awful lot of that kind of thing in this book, which celebrates poker players as paradigmatic citizens of a global intellectual community it calls “the River”, which also counts among its inhabitants venture capitalists, crypto traders, fashionable philosophers and mild-mannered statisticians.

One such statistician, Nate Silver himself, came to public prominence as a data-driven analyst of political polls at his website FiveThirtyEight, which predicted the results of US elections in 2008 and 2012 with seemingly uncanny accuracy. But before that he was a poker player, making money especially in the nascent internet-casino business, until Congress banned online poker in 2006. That, he has said, was his political awakening.