The first episode of the new podcast from Maria Konnikova and Nate Silver, Risky Business, is available from today. It’s billed as a show about making better decisions, from the poker table to the world beyond. Click here to check it out.
The two hosts both have backgrounds in poker, as well as professional interests in journalism, risk, human behavior and statistics, providing the various threads that run through their new joint venture.
You can check out our recent interview with the pair to learn more about how and why they’ve come together to host this new weekly podcast, the first episode of which includes topics such as:
- Konnikova’s recent deep run in an EPT Monte-Carlo side event, including a breakdown of a crucial hand at the final table
- The upcoming US election, and the potential impact Robert F. Kennedy Jr could make as a third-party candidate
- WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and how professional sport needs to deal with the gender pay gap sooner rather than later
Lessons from the final table
What makes Silver and Konnikova’s conversations so interesting to listen in on, is how they apply everything they know from poker to issues around decision-making in wider society.
Take Silver’s approach, as a Biden voter, to the potentially destabilizing presence of third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr in the coming election.
“If you're a democrat, I'd be worried because Biden is losing to Trump right now. I wouldn't care so much about RFK Jr, that's not my first concern. If you're losing in a poker hand, you want more variance, you want more things that are in the mix right now… The more worried you are about Biden's position overall, the more you should welcome chaos.”
Another interesting analogy stemmed from Konnikova’s experience in Monte-Carlo, where she talks listeners through a tricky hand she played from first position.
“In decision-making in general this is a really crucial point: position really really matters and you want to be the last person to act… If you're in a salary negotiation, you don’t want to throw out the first number, you want the other person to make the first offer, because you do not want to accidentally lowball yourself. You just want to know what the other person is thinking and then be able to respond to that.”
It’s a fundamental point that will be instantly understood by poker players, but Risky Business is casting a far wider net than that. The podcast has enough variety and substance to give players cause to use their skills to think about issues other than poker, as well as enough poker to hopefully broaden the game’s appeal and bring new players to the table.
For that reason, and more, we’ll certainly be tuning in next week.
