Nate Silver Wants to Teach You How to Be a Better Gambler

Over the course of reporting his new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver spent several years getting to know pretty much every type of gambler. He met card counters, poker champions, Las Vegas bookmakers, crypto bros, venture capitalists and even people who believe they can guess which slot machines are about to pay out.

These “advantage players” are perhaps the most elusive species within what Silver calls “the River”—the world of professional risk takers that includes poker great Phil Hellmuth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blackjack team, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and Silver himself, who is best known as an uncannily accurate election forecaster. “They have a very different posture—much more erect, like, focused,” Silver says of professional slot players as we stroll past banks of video screens and spinning wheels at Resorts World New York in Queens, New York. He scans the room but comes up empty. There are no advantage players among the elderly men and women pumping money into these machines.