Nate Silver Poker Tips
Silver’s journey from consulting to baseball analytics to professional poker to political prognosticating is very much that of a restless and curious mind. And this, more than number-crunching, is where real forecasting prowess comes from.” —Slate “Nate Silver serves as a sort of Zen master to American election-watchers.
- Nate Silver couldn’t be further from that image. He's a best selling author and hugely influential journalist and he credits much of his success to lessons learnt playing poker professionally.
- Nate Silver’s Poker Tips Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Politics Sports Science Podcasts Video ABC News Jan. 30, 2013, at 9:53 PM. Nate Silver’s Poker Tips By Micah.
- Nate Silver joins us to discuss his former career as a professional poker player, why he still plays, and how poker influenced his current career as an editor and forecaster at FiveThirtyEight. In the strategy segment, Andrew offers an intuitive.
The 2019 World Series of Poker is over. The same night that Hossein Ensan won the Main Event, Carl Shaw won the 89th and final event of the Series, $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em. There were 89 winners at the World Series of Poker (91 if you count the trio that won the Tag Team event separately), but there were a hundred thousand-something people who did not win tournaments. As the Main Event was getting underway, famed statistician, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, and once avid poker player Nate Silver* tweeted a list of the ten “major causes of death in a poker tournament,” a clever list that spurred some fun conversation.
He described the list as not specifically having to do with a player’s bust-out hand, but rather the hand or condition any time in a tournament “that most contributes to your demise.” Here is Silver’s list:
a. Lose a big flip (i.e. AK vs JJ)
b. Get the money in as a favorite but get sucked out on
c. Get coolered (run your strong hand into an even stronger hand)
d. Make a hero call but the opponent has it
e. Make a big naked bluff that doesn’t work
f. Make a big semi-bluff that doesn’t get there
g. Call with a draw because of pot odds and don’t get there
h. Get pot-stuck over multiple streets (either as bettor or caller) with a medium-strength hand
i. Be card dead / get blinded down
j. Make a big fold to cripple your stack and the lose the rest by one of the other methods
It is possible to come up with additions to the list, but they are almost always going to be version of one of the above or a combination of more than one of the above.
Where the Final Hand of the 2019 WSOP Main Event Fits In
Nate Silver at the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown in April 2019Photo credit: WPT via flickr
If we go back to the final hand of the 2019 WSOP Main Event, Dario Sammartino’s tournament death, in this case his final hand, is option (f) from Nate Silver’s list, “Make a big semi-bluff that doesn’t get there.”
Sammartino had 8-4 of spades and the board read T-6-2-9 with two spades when he made his all-in move. He didn’t have made hand, but instead was on a semi-bluff. Even if he was behind (which he most certainly was, as Ensan had pocket Kings), he still had plenty of flush and straight outs to win the hand; Sammartino had about a one in four shot.
One could also make the argument that the moment was partially point (h), “Get pot-stuck over multiple streets (either as bettor or caller) with a medium-strength hand,” though Sammartino still would have had about 40 big blinds if he did not continue with the hand and a semi-bluff really isn’t a “medium-strength hand.”
Sammartino got into the situation he was in about 80 hands earlier, as he was either close or leading for a while heads-up before Ensan pulled away. It is hard to pinpoint a “cause of death” if looking at it from that perspective.
Pick Your Poison
After his top ten list, Silver followed up with the question, “Also, which is the “best” way to lose? (i.e. the one you feel least tilted about afterward). Which is the worst way?”
That elicited a boatload of responses and the interesting thing is that many of them were polar opposites of each other. For instance, @JonLawson32 said, “Getting coolered always pisses me off,” but @peterthomasgct went with, “KK vs AA preflop is probably ‘best’”
Here is another conflicting pair:
“Worst way is being a 95% favorite when money is in and then getting runner-runnered” (@tafkokints)
“Sucked out on is the ‘best’ way to lose.” (@greggentry1)
A lot of people said that they can deal with making the right move but having a bad result. I suppose I can see that, but for me, personally, it’s nauseating to get it in with the best hand only for my opponent to hit a miracle river. I suppose later I can feel good about how I played, but it’s extremely painful in the moment and I end up playing the “what if” scenarios in my head for quite some time.
I hate getting coolered, too. I know many poker players are comfortable knowing that getting it all in with, say, Kings versus Aces pre-flop is nearly unavoidable, but I when that situation would happen, I would always think to myself that I should have been able to see it coming and fold. It’s so easy to convince oneself that your opponent is raising and re-raising pre-flop with Queens when it should be so obvious that he or she has Aces.
Beyond the shock and vomit-inducing rage that getting two-outed or similarly sucked out on causes, for me the worst is probably just going card dead and/or never hitting flops. You slowly fade away in the tournament and just don’t end up having any fun. I feel like there was nothing I could do, while at the same time kicking myself for not reading my opponents well, making some moves, and creating my own luck.
On the flip side, if someone just outplays me, like my 10-year old did the other night, I can tip my cap, sleep fine at night, and wake up determined to be better.
*For all I know, he is still an avid poker player, but he seems extremely busy with other things nowadays.
Lead photo credit: WSOP Facebook page
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Nate Silver is playing in the Aussie Millions poker championship at Crown Casino. Picture: Jason SammonSource:Herald Sun
ASK someone to describe a professional poker player, and they're likely to talk about smokey back rooms and down on their luck gamblers hoping for one run of good cards.
Nate Silver couldn’t be further from that image. He's a best selling author and hugely influential journalist … and he credits much of his success to lessons learnt playing poker professionally.
LESSON ONE: TREAT SUCCESS AND FAILURE EQUALLY
'I think poker helps with understanding (that) you can play the hand as well as you possibly can, and still lose. And vice versa, right?' he says during our interview at Crown Casino, where he's staying while competing in the Aussie Millions poker championship.
Silver defies many stereotypes. His a gay man who's a hero among baseball stats geeks. He's made writing about opinion polls sexy. And he was a hard core gambler who walked away while in front.
After graduating from college, Silver got a respectable job working for accounting firm KPMG.
It was a good, solid job. Only it bored Silver. So he started playing online poker at night.
He hit the game at the right time, when its popularity on TV brought a lot of average players to the online casinos. A player of Silver's skill - he describes himself of being in the top 10 per cent of poker players at the time - could make good money. More than $100,000 a year in his case. And that was on top of his day job.
LESSON TWO: KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ‘EM
Silver got so hooked, he would play through the night, then catch a cab straight to work.
But as the bad players busted out, Silver was no longer a big fish in a small poker pond, and he started racking up big losses. Quickly.
“I had hit a wall playing uncreative and uninspired poker,” he wrote in his book The Signal and the Noise.
“When I did play, I combined the most dangerous trait of the professional poker player – the sense I was entitled to money – with the bad habits of the amateur, playing late into the evening, sometimes after having been out with friends.”
LESSON THREE: KNOW WHEN TO WALK AWAY, KNOW WHEN TO RUN
Silver says being the in poker bubble, can sometimes feel like “you’re in a zero gravity environment” – where none of the usual rules of economics apply.
So he did what most gamblers don't - he walked away while he was well ahead. In five years, he estimates poker netted him a $400,000 profit.
“I sometimes wondered what would have happened if I played on … it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realises that he isn’t much good.”
LESSON FOUR: DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
Those winnings gave him some breathing room to focus on work that interested him. And the freedom to take risks.
'Having had that experience where you win and lose a lot of money … a lot of poker players are very indifferent about money,' he says.
In fact, poker players can be very generous.
'There's a stereotype a lot of people don't know about - if you are around your poker buddies, it's really hard to pay for a meal or a drink,' he says.
'Paying $100 for a steak meal is nothing when I've paid $25,000 to enter this tournament. So in some ways it's kind of healthy (being a poker player), you don't get hung up on little things.'
One stereotype that Silver fulfils is that the old formula of hard work plus good timing usually equals success.
Even if he does nothing else for the rest of his life, Silver be remembered for two things: 1. Creating a new baseball stat so impressive (it could be used to predict the likelihood of a minor league player becoming a major league star) that a company offered him a share of the business for the rights to it. 2. And being the most accurate political analyst working today.
In each of the past two US presidential elections, on his blog FiveThirtyEight, Silver has predicted the result with a high degree of success.
He was so confident in his formula, he put his reputation on the line months before election day. That drew a huge amount of highly personal abuse from other political pundits threatened by this self-assured yet quietly spoken man.
IS POKER GOOD FOR TEACHING LIFE SKILLS? HAVE YOUR SAY BELOW
When you interview Silver, it feels like he's about to explode with nervous energy. But he has proven to have nerves of steel, by both backing his judgement in the face of a torrent of criticism, but also refraining from mocking his critics when he was proven entirely correct, accurately picking the correct result in all 50 states.
While some journalists accused him of being biased towards Barack Obama, the most indefensible attack targeted his personality.
Dean Chambers, who ran competing political analysis site Unswekedpolls, centred his criticism of Silver around him being 'thin and effeminate' and having a 'soft-sounding voice'.
Rather than get riled, Silver laughed it off on Twitter, writing: 'Unskewedpolls argument: Nate Silver seems kinda gay + ??? = Romney landslide!'.
LESSON FIVE: KNOW WHO YOU ARE
Silver says the ups and downs you feel through playing poker prepared him for the slings and arrows of public life.
It's also helped him stay grounded despite being lionised - one US journalist called him Dork Elvis - for being so confident about Obama's victory. Even when the national opinion polls had Obama neck and neck with Mitt Romney, Silver gave him a 90 per cent chance of winning days ahead of the result.
'People like to say that when they get a good outcome, it's because of skill, and when they do poorly it's because of luck,' he says.
'In poker, there's so many ways to get lucky or unlucky. It's very easy to latch on to the noise and see yourself as highly skilled.'
It seems whatever Silver touches turns to gold. His first book – The Signal and the Noise – was published in November last year and quickly went top 10 on the New York Times bestseller lists
But he says experiencing big losses like he did (at one point he lost close to $70,000 in a night) taught him how close the line is between success and failure.
'Poker players grasp (the part luck plays) more than most people in other walks of life. You just become more zen in some sense. If that 10 per cent chance had come up and Romney had won, I probably wouldn't be sitting here, I'd be sitting in Atlantic City trying to find a game (of poker).'
Nate Silver is competing the $2 million Aussie Millions poker tournament against the top 20 poker players in the world at Crown Casino, which concludes on Sunday.
Nate Silver Poker Tips 2020
Originally published asWhat poker teaches you about life