Will Trump Bring the River to Washington?

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today,

the election's over.

Wait, what am I doing today?

Today, Nate is having an existential crisis over the fact that the election is over and he no longer knows who i was so thrilled i i gave a uh

talk in orlando florida um it was kind of like the official official last election obligation i had and the talk's done at 1 30 and i dovetail to like the big mexican strip ball restaurant and get like the world's largest plate of fajitas and have margarita and i'm like fucking yeah dude this election's over but um but the implications for our country are not over we're going to be talking a little bit about um donald trump's cabinet picks the influence of the community i call the the river, people like Elon Musk,

and looking a little bit ahead dangerously toward 2026 and the midterm map.

And after that, we'll shift gears a little bit and talk about the NAPT, the North American Poker Tour,

where I played last week and had some good results, including a 14th place finish in the main event.

So we'll talk a little bit about that, about the strategy, the thinking behind it, and our poker plans for the future.

Since we last spoke, Nate, Trump has started making some of his initial appointments.

And so we're starting to see the kind of initial trends, outlines of what Trump 2.0, what the administration is going to look like.

Some of those appointments

seem to be more rivarian than villagey in nature.

Let's talk a little bit about that.

Let's talk about river river versus village and what the Trump administration seems like it's going to be as of now.

Yeah, so the river is my name for this kind of psychographic region of the world of people who take calculator risks for a living.

So Silicon Valley and Wall Street in Las Vegas, both the casino and, and at least the skilled game players, poker players, sports bettors, and the like.

And the river had gotten much more

anti-village.

The village village is the name for like the establishment, the world that Kamala Harris comes from.

So Harvard and the New York Times and a government where Democrat is in charge.

Very risk-averse establishment, the expert class.

And that class had like a bad week last week, I think.

You know, will Elon be formally part of the cabinet?

I don't know.

I guess you can bet it polymarket and the odds are in favor.

I'm not sure that Elon necessarily wants to have a cabinet seat.

I'm not sure that he needs to have a cabinet seat to have a lot of influence over the trajectory of the administration.

You know, typically Republicans are also more willing than Democrats to appoint business people to cabinet seats.

So, for Treasury Secretary, for example, Scott Besant, a hedge fund executive, is under consideration.

Trump has, however, also made a lot of very kind of

normal appointments.

Elise Stefanak, for example,

who is a, used to be kind of moderate

Republican member of Congress,

is going to be the UN ambassador, assuming that Republicans win the House by enough seats that they can keep the House if they lose a couple of those seats, which is actually like a little bit of a risk.

Marco Rubio is set to be Secretary of State.

Elise Zeldin, a former New York Long Island representative, relatively, moderate, relatively,

is under consideration for EPA administrator.

So, and there are some more MAGA-e-picks.

Stephen Miller, who has very conservative views on race and immigration, is the deputy chief of staff for policy.

But, you know, Trump is,

how to put this?

Trump's cabinet nominations, I would say, on balance so far with Rubio, for example, are

maybe not quite what

the village would most have feared, I don't think.

I mean, I'm sure there will be one or two or three or four that they really dislike.

Stephen Miller is certainly one of those, for example.

We'll see about Attorney General's a very important one, for instance.

But, you know, maybe that reflects a little bit of the

a little bit of

the river's influence, just maybe.

I mean, I would say the river should, in principle, be in favor of more rational governance that's kind of pro-business and pro-growth, doesn't do stupid things right um

you know now in practice they get very red-pilled and so you don't have the most intelligent version of the arguments coming from like elon musk for example um but you know like if i were

let me put it like this um

if trump called me

and then i'd say well you want to be popular don't do a bunch of tariffs it might be popular on the surface but it'll make the economy worse don't deport a bunch of immigrants we can have a more organized conversation about that, right?

And then maybe other stuff.

Okay, whatever.

You're Trump.

It's not, and I'm not going to do what I want anyway, right?

But, you know, can they get Trump to moderate on these issues?

Then I don't know.

That remains to be seen.

And the answer when it comes to Trump and moderation on the one hand is never been on anything.

On the other hand, it's not always clear where Trump's passions lie and what he really cares about beyond himself.

You know, there was some polling that found that one reason that

Harris's message on abortion didn't resonate as much as they were hoping for is because voters just didn't really believe that Trump was passionate about

the abortion stuff, right?

So where will he be guided, I think, is an open question.

Yeah, I actually had a really interesting conversation right before the election with a poker player who will remain nameless,

who was not going to be voting and was kind of saying that, you know, oh, obviously, you know, I'm pro-choice, but

I don't think that Trump is going to do anything bad for abortion.

That's not an issue that's going to sway me one way or the other because Trump is just leaving it up to the states.

So just like parroting back kind of that message.

And this was a very smart person.

And it just, it made me realize that,

yes, that a lot of people don't really, you know, it's one of these like, I don't think it will actually happen types of things.

And I'd like, I'd like to believe that it won't.

And I think that that's psychologically kind of that kind of hopeful or willful ignorance or trying to say like, I don't think that's going to happen.

Oh, you know, it's not really that bad.

I think that that is actually a very major thing.

But I do actually wonder, you know, we're talking about the river versus the village.

Trump is very much of the village, right?

He is very establishment, you know, old New York family money.

Like he, and the only time he, the times he's tried to foray into the river, like the casino business, he's bankrupted it, right?

He's proven himself to not be very adept when he does rivarian things.

So

I think that we do need to realize that I think he is the village as well.

Elon Musk, of course, does represent the river.

And I don't think so far

we have seen signs that with or without an appointment, it seems like at least for now he's still on the ins with Trump, you know, putting him on the call with Zelensky, talking about foreign policy when that seems to, you know, why in the world would he be doing that?

I think that that's a really interesting trend.

And we do see, I think, this confluence of, you know, Silicon Valley technocrats, et cetera, big money coming to Washington in an informal advisory way that to me, and I don't want to, you know, I'm not trying to draw too many parallels that might not hold, but

to me, it's actually kind of evocative of what happened when Putin came to power initially, where you had a lot of oligarchs and a lot of big money, a lot of big business people backing him and thinking, you know, this is going to be good for us, this is going to be good for our bottom line, and we're going to be able to control him.

And obviously, what happened was a lot of them are now dead or in jail or in exile because Putin was absolutely not controllable and ended up turning on basically all of the people who brought him into power.

So I think that that's an interesting

semi-parallel.

And I'm very curious to see whether Elon Musk and others like him are going to be able to maintain their influence in Washington or whether we're going to see something like that as well.

Because we know that Trump has no problems turning on people who were allies of his, right?

He's done that.

He did that in Trump 1.0.

And Trump 2.0 is probably going to be more brazen.

Although, as you say, who knows?

I mean, so in the book, I don't put Trump in either the village or the river.

I think he wishes wishes he could have been in the village.

I think he isn't.

And at some level,

if you're not wanted, then you're not.

Fair point, Nate.

Fair point.

I mean, look, I don't.

I don't know.

I can't get into the Trump-Putin

comparisons.

He won a fair election by quite a bit.

No, he won by quite a bit.

He won a fair election by a decent amount, in part by like winning over lots of votes from lots of like Hispanic and Asian people from younger voters and has a more like diverse coalition.

And like, I don't know, I, you know, I don't know.

I, I, uh,

I mean, we talked about this a little bit last week, but like, okay, let me ask you, Maria.

Yeah.

Does the fact that Trump won by this convincing march and have you update your views on Trump at all?

It does not have me update my views on Trump himself.

I still think that Trump is someone who only cares about number one.

It does

make me realize that kind of the discontent

goes much deeper than

I realized.

And I do think that

the other thing here is we've talked about the incumbency effect on the show in the past, and it does seem kind of worldwide right now that it's kind of reversing.

that you know with inflation with all of these things incumbent parties are actually not doing that well that instead we do see people wanting change and so i would not be at all surprised you know let's let's talk a little bit you you know you you kind of hinted that we'll talk about 2026 2028 i wouldn't be at all surprised if the democratic parties make more gains in 2026 because um you know when you're the establishment um it's much more difficult to kind of play the victimhood card um and and say oh you know it's the establishment versus us.

Now we are the establishment.

So I think that we might start seeing kind of things go the other way because I think that some of the vote wasn't necessarily a vote for Trump so much as a vote for, I'm not happy, I'm not doing well.

These people in power, you know, seem to be responsible.

So like, let's put someone else in power and hope for the best.

You're right.

Like relatively speaking, Harris actually lost less vote share than a lot of incumbent parties around the world.

I mean, I think the U.S.

is somewhat exceptional in certain ways.

But also, I mean, yeah, in

starting on January 20th, all these um headwinds that democrats face become a tailwind um yeah democrats almost flipped the house it looks like they'll be something like three or four seats short so you're going to have like a effectively um freedom caucus led majority um which will not always disagree will not always agree with what you might formally have called the GOP establishment majority.

All of it is pretty MAGA now for the most part.

And Democrats held their losses to four Senate seats, which sounds like I'm spinning, but here's the thing.

So you have 47 seats now,

and you're going to have Trump be able to appoint the cabinet nominees he wants within reason.

Can Democrats get back to 50 Senate seats by 2028?

In which case we have a President Shapiro or President Gretchen Whitmer or whomever else.

Gavin Newsom, I think, probably thinks he's going to get it, but I think I've got against that.

So for Gavin Newsome, I'm just kidding,

you know, can they have a Democratic Senate?

And the answer is, yes, it's not that hopeless for Democrats because they need three pickups.

If they win the presidency, they can win with 50-50.

There are two races in North Carolina between now and 2028.

There is one race in Wisconsin that's GOP held, and there's one in Maine where Susan Collins keeps holding on every year, but now her luck might run out, right?

So Democrats need to win three of those four without losing any of their own.

There are some other longer shot bets.

Ohio, where Sherrod Brown lost, has a special election because of J.D.

Vance in 2026.

And that's a race Democrats will surely contest.

If he ran again in a more blue environment, he might be in a toss-up race there.

But yeah, look, we're kind of going back

to like, look, all the risks, the existential risks to democracy, I think, are

less now.

Because you had a clear verdict, you didn't have a disputed verdict.

Harris, thank goodness, didn't dispute the verdict.

I'm sure Trump would have if the same result had been on the other foot.

You know, look, you'll have commentators say, well, what he doesn't want to give up the presidency in 2028.

I've never seen any type of like warrant for that theory necessarily.

No,

I hope you're right.

And

I do think that it is good that

this was not disputed.

I think that that's one of the very few silver linings of this election.

And I do really hope that kind of democracy holds enough that we have another free and fair election four years down the line.

And until we see signs that that's not the case, I'm just going to assume that that's going to happen and

that

our democratic transition will work.

Do you have any parting thoughts, anything you think we should be looking at, paying attention to kind of heading forward, or just

let's revisit when it becomes a little bit more clear.

I am like, one of the things that I'm very curious about is to see kind of how much the Muskian influence

will remain in the Trump administration, or if he'll turn on him sooner rather than later.

It's something that I'm just like quite curious about.

You know, look, just for like the pure economic stuff between the tariffs and between what I expect will be a lot of cronyism in the White House, I don't necessarily expect a marvel of economic efficiency, exactly.

So, for me, and again, that's kind of more of like an advanced argument.

Tariffs are one of those things that seem appealing on the surface, but the economics are really bad if you're an econ wonk.

So, yeah, I worry about that.

And, you know, I think Democrats need a way to like have attack lines on cronyism, which can

dovetail well with populism of different kinds.

I mean, I think they don't know which way to go.

I think they're kind of like shocked at

how much certain parts, and it's again, it's minority of Silicon Valley, it's probably a quarter or 30% or something.

But I think they were not ready for how much money there would suddenly be from the crypto space and from the AI space and from things like that, mostly working against them, and what it was going to be like to have

these people who, of course, of course, Democrats want to discredit Elon Musk, and Elon Musk acted like a total fucking goofball at various points of the campaign and retweets a lot of unreliable information.

But at the same time, he is a different type of person who can vouch for Trump and and give him some credibility, as are these podcasters and the various like podcast bros of different kind,

you know, as is his increasing number of minority supporters, racial minority or ethnic minority.

And so like, there are people that can like, that can now vouch for Trump and kind of like, and all the Democrats are kind of like uncool dorks, pretty much.

And like, how can they, well, they have like celebrities.

I mean, Joy Reed, the MSNBC host, was like, you know, Beyonce endorsed her and blah, blah, blah.

It's like, come on.

Like, you you can't, like, it's not like actually how you win elections, you know?

But look, look, Democrat, the sooner Democrats, I think,

this is controversial.

Trump is likely to hang himself, hang himself to be unpopular again in the normal ways that incumbents are unpopular in their second term,

meaning

spending too much money, even though GOP is supposed to be a deficit reduction.

They're not.

They probably have another big tax cut that we're not paying for and engaging in unpopular foreign policy conduct and personal scandals and just general fatigue and bad decision making that you make when you're 78.

I mean, Trump is a few months older than Biden was at the start of his first term.

And so, you know,

I don't know that the rhetoric of like existential crisis, like, I don't think it was helpful to Harris, and I don't know that it would be helpful to Democrats now.

And it's made a little easier when you actually have a clear verdict on election night where Trump will win the popular vote.

And so, you know, looking forward to, and by the way, I think the Democrats have taken this loss about as constructively as you possibly can.

I have not seen a lot of liberal tears necessarily, right?

You know, in general, Democrats recognize that we have to move to the center, which is hard for parties to recognize.

And that seems like, that seems good.

So, you know, look, as far as like having

steering the country back toward, I don't know, maybe I'm neglecting the damage Trump could do in four years.

Yeah.

I mean, I think there is a lot of damage that people don't really talk about that he, that he could do in four years.

You know, some one of the things we haven't talked about is science.

And we know what happened during Trump 1.0 with science funding, with NIH funding, research funding, and the types of research that suddenly could not get any funding, you know, fetal cells, stem cell research, like a lot of things that are crucially important

and people are afraid that that's going to happen again.

RFK, you know,

being potentially very influential in the administration.

I think that there are some effects like that that we're not even thinking about, you know, or like religion, you know, bringing religion into classrooms, what happens with federal judge appointments.

So right now we just had the Louisiana requirement to put Ten Commandments in every classroom.

That was actually struck down.

We're going to see an appeals process there, right?

All of those appointments that Trump is going to be making,

changing the judicial system.

We'll see what happens to the Supreme Court.

You know, what are they retire, who retires?

or dies.

You know, I hope no one dies and how Trumpian the Supreme Court becomes, because there's a difference between conservative and Trumpian, right?

There's a big difference between, you know, your regular conservative judge and a Trump judge appointee.

So I think that there are lots of effects like that that we haven't talked about yet that Trump could very much put in place in four years.

I think we will potentially see things that are going to be incredibly harmful.

There's some good stuff.

No, one good thing is I think we'll probably wind up getting a a ban on gain of function research, which may have been responsible for the COVID pandemic and I think is from an expected value standpoint has negative expected values.

So that's good.

You know,

I could probably point out a few other things.

I don't want to necessarily give people a laundry list of every single position that Nate's hold, but yeah, that Nate holds.

But yeah, look, one reason why I find myself being

a bit less worried about Trump than I might have been with that larger victory is that it does create more of a mandate for more mainstream cabinet members to come in, right?

You know, Secretary of State's a good job, but the fact that Marco Rubio, one of the more,

I mean, he ran a banner presidential campaign in 2016, but one of the more normal electable GOP senators and maybe the most important role, I mean, that seems valuable.

Well, right.

Here's hoping.

And, you know, and I do think that if we see, I hope that we see politics.

You know, I would love to see politics moving more to the center.

I would love to see

third parties become stronger.

There are lots of things I would love to see.

And if any of those end up being, you know, downstream effects from this, that would be wonderful.

Maria, we can now guiltlessly talk about poker.

So you want to do that?

Let's do it after this break.

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Okay, let's now guiltlessly talk about poker date.

So we are

now

finished with the North American Poker Tour, the NAPT, which is the PokerStars flagship event in North America.

So there were, the main event had almost 900 players,

and I was lucky enough to be four of those players.

Four of those players.

So

despite Norman Chad scolding, you're still rebuying into these things, Perry.

I am still rebuying, despite the scolding that I received.

Yes.

So I, the first, okay, so

I played.

So day one of the main event was November 5th.

So that was kind of a big day in the country.

And I was doing quite well.

You know, everything was fine.

I had plenty of chips.

I never had a lot of chips, but like I was never, you know, I was kind of hanging in there.

And then as the, as it got late, you know, second to last level of the night, when it became quite clear

that this was not going to end well for Kamala Harris, that Trump was probably going to win.

I think I texted you a few times about my existential dread.

You did not engage with those doomery texts.

And I, quite frankly, punted.

You know, I made,

you know, I made a decision that it wasn't a horrible punt.

What do you think about this name?

I had about

35 big blinds.

I was in the small blind.

It had folded to me.

I had Ace 10 offsuit.

So for people who don't play poker, that's a very good hand.

And the small blind when it's folded to you.

I raised

the big blind re-raised

and I shoved with my Ace 10.

How many big blinds do you have?

About 35.

So Ace 10, the small blind.

So I raise to like three big blinds.

Big blind re-raises to, let's say, nine big blinds, and I shove.

I think it's probably pretty close to GTO.

Yeah.

I think that it's...

I mean, you're not supposed to fold.

Right.

You're not supposed to.

You're definitely not supposed to fold.

So for people who don't play poker, by the way, blind versus blind confrontations are very interesting because,

you know, people think that you're taking advantage, right?

There's a lot of psychological play there.

but i but i busted that was my first bullet um and then my second two bullets um that was november 6th um those were not puns but i just you know sometimes you have those poker days when you can't win a hand right i never got above starting stack like i could never get anything going um so i i ended up um not being able to do much over there um and so then i bought in for the fourth time my fourth bullet um on the start of day two which was the last time that you can buy in so i started the day with 20 big blinds.

For people who don't play poker, that's playable, but not, you know, not a huge stack by any stretch of the imagination.

And far below average, I think average at that point was like over 50 bug blinds, close to 60, because this is a you know, it's a main event.

So on day two, we have 90-minute levels.

Like this is a deep-stacked tournament.

And

yeah, so I ended up starting day two with 20 big blinds and had a good day two,

but didn't bag a lot um started day three made day three right uh made day three with uh 30 big blinds um and ended up making the final two tables of the tournament um on day four um and

ended up so first place was almost eight hundred thousand dollars um i was out in 14th so i got around forty thousand dollars and it was sad

it's it is so perverse that like

you almost win just shitloads of money and then it's kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is kind of crazy.

And so for day four, you know, I was on the televised table the whole time, which is actually quite interesting because, you know, the dynamics of the- Do you like playing on the TV table?

No, I don't.

I don't love giving away all of that information.

I would prefer people not know how I play, to be perfectly honest.

But I've gotten, you know, I understand that as an ambassador for poker, it's important to do that.

And I try just not to think about it.

There was one hand where I actually ended up making a correct fold on the turn with top pair.

I had, this was also a blind versus blind situation.

So I had limped in with ace 9

and the big blind checked.

The flop was ace 5-3.

I bet one blind, got raised, called.

The turn was a 5.

I checked and ended up folding to a big turn bet.

And I later heard people talking about it, you know, once we were on break and the stream had caught up saying,

you know, oh my God, like I, I can't believe she folded.

Like she should have called and paid you off there talking to the person I was playing against, Brock Wilson, who's a, who's a great player.

He had 5-3, right?

So he had turned a full house.

And so I was drawing pretty much dead.

And

so it was a very good fold.

But one of the reasons they thought I would have called was because it was on a TV stream, right?

And you don't want to look dumb folding top pair in a spot like that where you're almost always good.

And I said, you know, I just don't care, right?

Like, I don't actually give a fuck if people aren't.

Especially when you feel,

when you feel that passion, because folding is hard, right?

When you feel that temptation to make a tight fold, I'm trying to train myself to like just flick the cards in, right?

Not get too attached.

So let's also talk about

a hand then.

And we'll stop talking strategy after this, I promise.

But, you know,

whenever I review performances like this, right?

It's such a big, it's such a big difference to come in 14th and 1st, right?

I made 40,000.

I could have made...

800,000, right?

Like that's, that's huge.

And every single place at that point is worth a lot of money.

And so you go through all of your decisions.

My bust out hand, don't regret at all.

You know, I had nine big blinds under the gun and shoved Jack Tet Suited, right?

That was perfectly fine.

Ended up running into queens and did not suck out the poker term for hitting what

you should not hit.

So that was totally fine.

But I do regret a hand that got me short where I raised Ace Kang, one of the best starting hands from Under the Gun, and got called by the Big Blind.

And the flop, I don't actually remember the exact flop, but I think it was like something like eight four deuce.

Um,

and

I ended up checking back as opposed to betting.

And I think that there's, you know,

Ace King offsuit.

Okay.

Yeah.

Um, so I checked instead of betting when it was checked to me.

And then the turn was a queen and the big blind bet

and bet bigger than I would have bet the turn, but but he ended up betting and I called.

And then the river was a blank and he checked and I checked back.

And he ended up winning with a four.

And I really regret how I played this hand.

I actually think I messed it up multiple times.

And that's the hand that kind of I think that had I played it differently, and even if I'd busted, even if he had hero called me with his four, I think I would have felt much better about it than I did in retrospect from having played it more passively.

So I think that this is kind of the theme of the show.

That's a theme of the show, right?

Passive, passive play is not, is not, is, is a decision, and it's not always the right decision, even when you're

have ICM considerations, which is independent chip model, pay jumps, et cetera.

Yeah, because the reason you're calling, because you can just fold a turn.

If he's betting into a queen, I mean, it can mean different things, but you don't have a pair.

It's supposed to be a good card for your range, right?

So if he's betting, if you are calling, then it's because I think you're calling almost your whole range, right?

And so it's calling with the intent of

betting pretty big on the river.

Exactly.

Maybe

potentially raising certain rivers against a small bet um with your representative ace queen and so yeah i look i think you're mentioning earlier how like oh it doesn't quite seem like a punt right and i'm not sure if this this is like a ham where it's more in the passive category but like i sometimes the things that involve like multi-street planning are the things that tend to go away when when you're tired, when you're fatigued or been playing too much or whatever else, right?

And so it's so, you know, the 20% of the time you're supposed to to reshove ACE10 off seat at 35 bigs, maybe you're doing that 80% of the time because you have to just think things out of your hand then, right?

You don't have to like have this complex plan.

And so, and so that can be a sign of fatigue, I think.

And we'll be back right after this

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You seem to have had,

I guess, since the World Series, like a really good run of

poker.

What do you attribute that to?

Just variance?

Are you doing things differently?

You know, I think a lot of it is variance as we've talked about.

It's always a boring answer.

Yeah, I just want to say that.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is variance in the sense that, you know, I've, you know, been studying and trying to play well the whole year.

Unfortunately, you know, the World Series, I just, as we know, ran like absolute shit and really below expectation.

Some of it is probably just a more intensive study because I was really upset after the World Series.

And that's a good motivation.

Upset not because, like, oh, I'm so sad, you know, poor me, but upset because I was like, you know, am I, I realize I'm not running well, but I really want to up my game.

Like, I need to be competitive.

Otherwise, what am I even doing spending my time playing poker, right?

What am I doing just spending money on this?

I don't, I don't like that feeling.

And so that's, I think, never underestimate that as a motivation when you're trying to do better.

What kind of things have you been studying?

I have just tried to, so number one, I've really, really tried to study, this seems very boring, my pre-flop game, to make sure that I really did not have many pre-flop leaks because that's just so basic, but that's something that I think is often understudied because it's not just

It's not just kind of opening ranges from all positions, but it's, you know, how do you respond to three bets?

How do you respond to four bets?

How do you play different parts of your range in all of these situations?

And so I've tried to go deeper on that to make sure that I'm plugging as many leaks as I can um kind of at the beginning of my game because that sets you up to play well afterwards right like if you have a major leak or even a small leak at the beginning then the entire game tree changes if you're making those early mistakes so that's something that i've really um worked on yeah if you really want to um

see the importance of pre-flop play some deep staked

cash uh

for limits that you care about enough to get some actual feedback, right?

Um, yeah, you know, because I think a lot of cash game players are like, I've been playing more cash lately, like, or of the mindset that, like, oh, I can

make it up with my superior post-flop play.

And the fact is that if your range is just too weak, then you just can't.

You have too many bluffs and not the right bluffs, right?

Um, you are constantly on the defensive about not wanting to bloat pots, right?

Um, so we're trying to get that more correct.

And obviously, in some cash game settings, you're kind of node-locking to not people, people not playing optimally, right?

And you're trying to be conscious of your image and not being too much of a nit, but like,

yeah, you will really drill pre-flops importance into your head if you if you're playing huge four or five-figure pots.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And early stage tournaments for people who don't play poker or who want to learn are very similar to cash games because you do start out quite deep stacked, right?

Sometimes you have 200 big lines, 300 big lines.

And so that's when your mistakes are very costly, especially pre-flop mistakes.

And so many people just, you know, want to see a flop, right?

And so they'll put themselves in situations where

they're not calling correctly, they're not raising correctly, they're just not playing correctly.

And even though this is something that I know, you can always refine your pre-flop play.

And this is just something that I decided that I was going to focus on more because

there was a time when I was like, okay, like I got pre-flop down.

Now I'm going to like work on three bed pots and and I'm going to work on, you know, four, I'm going to work on like blind versus blind in this specific situation.

And at some point I realized, you know what, now it's time for me to go back to the basics, but in a more advanced way and to really make sure that I have that solid.

And I think that that's just good advice in general for life, right?

Even if you have a strategy for something,

as you get more advanced, as you start kind of being more sophisticated, you might want to revisit some of the fundamentals and basics to see if you need to update right to see to see what's happening because the world also changes poker changes poker strategy changes people's game evolves and so you do constantly have to update things even when you don't think you need to update them even if you think oh like my you know pre-flop what else is there to learn right i know what my ranges are no ranges change right and and styles change and things change um and i think that just with everything it's really important to keep revisiting to make sure that your process stays optimal because if you don't update your process it's going to grow stale as everything else changes around you.

But,

you know,

let's end on a positive poker note.

And I'm going to choose to take my 14th place finish as a positive focus on the good.

You know, I outlasted almost 900 players and I almost made it.

Next time, Nate, I'm going to make it to that $800,000 score.

Next time, Maria.

If I don't win it, because next time we'll be playing together, hopefully.

All right, we can chop.

We can chop.

Let's do it.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kondakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

And if you want to listen to an ad-free version, sign up for Pushkin Plus.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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