Sleep, Track, Don’t Multitask: How To Succeed In Online Poker

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Pushkin.

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

What's on tap today, Maria?

Maybe a little, maybe a little

pokey poke?

Sorry.

Please answer that out.

No, no, do not.

Do not edit that out.

Anyway,

we haven't talked about poker in a while.

This is a Saturday episode.

It's supposed to be more fun.

So we're going to talk a little bit about poker and more particularly online poker versus live poker.

I think this might reveal more than you think about how we process information, how our brains work.

And Maria is a sicka who still likes online poker.

I do not.

You'll see that difference come out too.

Yeah, I'm excited to get started.

Nate, let's get into it.

This past weekend was the start of the online bracelet series, which the World Series of Poker has been doing for a few years now, basically starting during COVID when bracelets were moved online, when there was no World Series of Poker live during the summer.

And it's become more and more of a thing where these highly competitive events with coveted WSOP bracelets have moved to the internet.

And there's a lot of, we're not going to talk about kind of, is this a good thing?

Is this a bad thing?

We'll leave that question alone.

And instead, we'll talk about just in general thoughts about playing online and playing live.

Maria, you seem to like online poker more than I do.

Well, Nate, so, you know, we do some disclosures on this show.

And as listeners of the show know, I am an ambassador for PokerStars.

I'm a PokerStars team pro.

PokerStars is an online poker company.

So I have had to get used to playing online, which is not my preferred method of playing, by the way.

I far, far prefer playing live to playing online.

But I learned to play poker playing online because the beauty of online poker is the sheer quantity of hands that you can get in.

And so the experience that you can acquire is much

faster.

So I used to, you know, when I just started playing for the biggest bluff, I would reverse commute to New Jersey multiple days a week to play online because I...

Where would you play?

In cafes.

I would play.

but not at mcdonald's we talked in the last episode about how you've never been in mcdonald's yeah so no not not at a mcdonald's um but i have um

definitely explored the world of online cafes that are open late in hoboken and jersey city do they know what you were doing

Yes, yes, they knew what I was doing because I had my laptop out and I was playing online.

There was one cafe that I started going to.

The owner loved online poker and at some point was like, can I play a few hands when I was playing a tournament?

And I was like, no, you're not allowed to do that.

But

he was very excited.

Was it that you were not allowed or that you thought he was a fish?

Well, you're not allowed to have someone else play for you on your account.

But if like Phil Ivey,

isn't he from New Jersey?

Yes.

If Phil Ivey owned the cafe, would you let him play?

No.

I would not.

My next book is about cheating.

What if Phil Ivey would kick you out of his cafe

unless you let him play?

I would say Philip I played.

So it's A, the best player in the world, and B, you can no longer use a cafe.

I mean, I feel like, doesn't that outweigh the?

No,

I would say, Phil, I cannot believe you do not value your reputation because you know I'm a journalist and I'm going to write about this in my book about cheating, how Phil Ivy.

basically said that he wanted me to cheat.

And this is not a good look for you, Phil.

So what you're saying is that when you won your online bracelet, Phil Ivy was ghosting for you, right?

But you agreed not to disclose that

in a cafe in New Jersey.

Exactly, exactly.

So, Nate, I actually think that

this is probably one of the

most degen things that you will hear me do, Nate.

Last weekend, so I was in Vermont for a long weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Sunday, after driving back from Vermont, and you know, listeners of the show have heard my WASP story.

after all of this happened I went back to Brooklyn you know dropped all my stuff off and then took the path train to New Jersey where I had booked a hotel room for Sunday night to hop in to the first two events of the World Series of Poker online bracelet series so went for the sole reason you know of playing these events,

did that, and then, you know, went to work in the morning from New York.

Is it a nice hotel?

Hyatt Regency, right on the water in Jersey City.

Nice enough, great, great views.

Highly recommend for online poker, stable internet connection, no, no issues with geolocation, which can be problematic when you're right on the water, as I found out, because

sometimes what ends up happening is they pick up Wi-Fi from New York and suddenly we'll kick you off.

So Hyatt Regency did not have any of those issues.

But I can't tell you much about the hotel because I checked in, you know, went to my room, fired up the tournaments,

went to sleep, and woke up and left.

And that

was it.

But,

you know, it actually made me think about

so many differences, right, between playing live and playing online, and especially with series like this, when it starts so incredibly late.

So for people who aren't as D-Gen-y, these events start at 3.30 and 4.30

Vegas time, Pacific time, which means 6.30 and 7.30 p.m.

East Coast time.

So now imagine if you actually go deep in the event.

So when I won my World Series of Pokémon online bracelet, I was playing in Vegas and we finished the final table.

I won at like 3.30 a.m., which would have been 6.30 a.m.

East Coast time.

So if you think about that, it's insane, right?

That's actually a crazy, crazy time to start a tournament.

And it probably

freezes out a lot of people who

would have otherwise played.

Like, for instance, this past Sunday, I was like, you know what?

I don't know if I'm going to do that again because.

It's exhausting to do that.

So I didn't cash one of the events.

I cashed the other one.

So ended up, you know, busting at like 2 a.m.

And I was like, was it really worth it

for just, you know, a few grand to do something like that?

No.

And

you answered it.

But so there are a lot of different considerations when you're playing online that you don't have to deal with when you're playing live.

We talked back when it was the summer and we were playing the live World Series of poker events.

We talked about using, you you know, this new software that showed who was going to be at your table and how you would, how it gave you extra information, right?

And how you could then rate the players, rank them.

Nate, you had this very complicated spreadsheet, which I love, and you actually gave the players

scores.

Yeah.

Yeah, you had it, you had a rating scale.

So you had all this extra stuff that you normally wouldn't have.

But online, there are kind of, there are several issues.

One is

people don't use their their real names, right?

So there are screen names that people use.

So

you see the people at your table, but you

may or may not know who those people are.

People do track screen names, and there are communities of poker players that study together that have these big spreadsheets of people's online screen names and say, oh, this is this person, this is this person.

So then, Nate, they can do what you did during the World Series because they have the real name to go along with the screen name.

But if you're someone who's not in that community, you might have no way of knowing, right?

So you're actually missing that whole big piece of information.

And you used to play online poker for a living.

We never really talked about your experience of doing that and how you thought about kind of those, you know, informational edges, informational asymmetries, and how the value of data, how it shifts between live and online.

Because obviously, like live, one of my big edges is the fact that I'm a psychologist.

Like there's, and there's this wealth of data.

I don't have any of that online, but I'd love to hear about your experience and kind of that contrast.

So when I played online, I played limit hold'em primarily.

I did quite well for a period of a few years, which I attribute

not necessarily to deep study, but like, look, poker, number one, poker is a game where all that matters for your win rate is how is your strength relative to the players you're playing against, right?

I can walk into games where I'm the best player at the table by far.

I can walk into games where I'm the worst player at the table by far.

I like think I'm closer to the best than the worst, right?

The average game I'm sitting in, I think I'm plus EV, but like that's what really matters.

So in the poker boom years, the money maker boom, the online poker boom, the average person was quite bad.

And then, um, and then things got tougher.

When party poker and other sites closed to Americans after the UIGEA passed in 2006, a lot of the better players,

excuse me, a lot of the worse players dried up and left the game.

So, yeah, my last six months were losing months after having felt like it was an ATM for some period of time.

However, even then, I was playing in,

you know, almost the higher stakes available at the time as far as like, as high as like $100,000, $200

blinds, which is a pretty big game for 2005.

Yeah.

Not as big as a No Limit game with those stakes, but like it was a real game.

I would impress people by like buying in.

I would like drop my whole roll down.

I'd put buy it for $60,000 just to look cool because it was a fucking dork and I was in my 20s.

Right.

And like,

but even then,

You had maybe a few dozen regulars, right?

And so like you did have some reads right I think I like to get in like people's headspace with them a little bit what a lot of people do when they play online is they will multi-table meaning playing more than one game at once and I would do that I would do that

but I would play three or four tables as opposed to like some people would literally play eight or 16 or 20 right where they're just playing totally paint by numbers poker almost always playing like way too tight and I try to like I try to like be a little more focused on individual decisions, but like, but you know, but like, that's not the environment we're in now.

I mean, back then, um,

there was not RTA.

RTA is real-time assistance where

there are now solvers.

And it's illegal.

It's illegal.

And maybe I do get the props sometimes.

I do play occasionally, less and less and less and less.

But like, I'll get the props sometimes saying, prove you're a human and not a computer.

Maybe I, maybe that's a sign that I'm playing too mechanically or playing like a solver.

Hey, Nate, I've never gotten that prompt.

What does that say about my poker play ability?

I don't know.

But now, it feels weird to say, as kind of a math guy, right?

You know, I feel like my relative strengths in poker are actually kind of like the soft skills, at least relative to that like elite player population, right?

Like I think I have a pretty good attitude about money.

I think I

definitely am not always playing my A game.

I don't think I have super tilt problems.

You know, I can pick up not against, maybe you should forget about the best pros, but against like amateurs.

I can read players pretty well.

I can, I can estimate pretty well and piece some shit together, right?

And be more composed.

And like, you know, online, I think those advantages are lesser, number one.

And also, like, I just find like,

you know, when I play poker

live,

there's an act of intentionality to it, right?

It's like I decided today

to, because there's no casino within an hour and a half of me, right?

I decided to take a trip to a casino

to play a tournament and take a week out.

It'll cost me money.

It'll cost me money, you know, hopefully I'll make back the entry fee and win.

Most of the time you don't, right?

But like, but there's an opportunity cost there.

I could be doing something else, right?

And like, but there's an act of intentionality there that gives me more presence.

You know, the other problem too is that kind of mentioned this earlier, like because these tournaments start in the p.m.

typically, right?

Or you've just been playing a long time and there's like, and there's fatigue because you don't get, you know, live poker is nice and frankly fairly slow until you get to like shorthanded poker, right?

You're not playing most of the time.

You have your break for 20 minutes every two hours, right?

You have a dinner break.

Like online, even if you do start early, it's kind of a grind.

But like, you know, I've just had fucking times and I'm like, okay, I was bored tonight.

decided to fire up like a $50, $100 tournament, right?

And like, is it really worth me staying up another two hours for

to ladder up and win an extra couple hundred dollars in expected value?

Like, I don't know, right?

And so, you like, I find the whole thing kind of

difficult.

And we'll be back right after this.

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I think the lateness thing is a huge factor.

I actually think that the entire East Coast is at a huge disadvantage to the West Coast because your cognitive function is not going to be as sharp, you know, at when it's midnight for you, it's only 9 p.m.

for the people who are playing from Las Vegas.

That's a huge difference.

Yeah, I've looked at this in the context of, so here's a little actual actionable gambling tip.

Although it's probably accounted for in the points right, so there's maybe not edge there, right?

We have this NFL model we've been working on for a couple months now, right?

Where literally any every NFL game since 1920 is accounted for in all types of stuff, all types of fancy shit, right?

You know, teams playing at night

when it's outside of their time zone.

So the West Coast team has a big advantage versus an East Coast team in night games, right?

It's about almost a full point, which

is not huge, huge.

That's all I think.

But like in the comics of NFL, we're like, if you have a point edge, you will beat the point spread on average, right?

That's pretty big.

In fact, even when the game is on the East Coast,

the West Coast team can still be more fatigued.

Or the East Coast team rather can still be more fatigued because they're playing.

You still have the West Coast team playing at 5 p.m.

locally till 8 instead of 8 until 11.

When you play most NFL games in the afternoon, practice in the afternoon, et cetera, right?

A bit of a reverse effect, by the way,

where the West Coast teams do a little bit worse in games that start at 1 p.m.

Eastern, 10 a.m.

West Coast time, but it's a little asymmetric, right?

People, I'm a night owl, so maybe I'm an exception, right?

But like most people stretch a little better in the morning if they have to get up earlier than in the evening, at least for physical types of activity, right?

So like, yeah, that's type of stuff like does matter quite a bit.

Yeah, no, I mean, for sure, there's a lot of data on our cognitive function and time of day.

And let me just say that there are two factors that are that really matter.

One is just the actual light outside, right, and how it affects our body's circadian rhythms.

Because as we evolved, light cues really matter and kind of make a difference.

And there are certain cues towards morning that tell us to wake up, certain cues towards evening that tell us to go to sleep.

But your chronotype, so Nate, you said you're a night owl, your chronotype, that's that's what that is, right?

Your own internal circadian rhythm

that also matters.

So there are people who are who have an earlier chronotype, and so they actually function better in the mornings.

There are people who have a later chronotype, they function better later.

It's easier in modern society for early birds to function because their chronotype is aligned, more aligned, right, with modern demands and also actually more aligned with

light.

And I'm guessing there are no data on this, Nate, because this is not the way that professional sports work.

But I'm assuming that the advantage will go away if the West Coast team has been on the East Coast for two weeks.

We could look at.

But I don't think that ever happens, right?

I don't know.

I think NL teams would generally fly.

But yeah, I mean, all the sports science stuff is getting better.

Homefield advantage is generally declining, right?

Because they're like, yeah, you want to show up in that environment a couple of days days beforehand, for sure.

Yeah, I mean, you'll think about on the couple of days, but

not two weeks.

And it takes a while for your rhythms to reset.

I mean, if you're trained for it, like, as I've, you know, the past several summers played the World Series for at least a couple of weeks, right?

You can, you do get training, right?

One of the advice people's piece of advice I give is like, if you're playing, if you really care about the main event in the World Series, which if you love poker, you, you probably should, right?

Like, don't have that be your first tournament.

I mean, you want to get in some reps.

You want to kind of know where the bathrooms are, literally.

I mean, you know, all that stuff, all that stuff matters.

I mean, one thing I noticed is like, I have an uncanny recollection for live hands that they played weeks, months, years ago, down to, you know, down to the color of, you know, what suit of the cards were, you know, Ace Five of Diamonds, even though that might not matter or whatever else, right?

Or the color of the chips or how, but like, I, you know, online, I'm like, I think I played a quads versus full house hand last night or something like that, right?

I I just don't, I don't have the tactile like recall.

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm sure that people who just play online all the time, it becomes

there probably is different brain architecture that is involved because that's the way our brains work, right?

They're flexible and they do kind of change according to how you're using them.

And so I'm assuming it's for someone who's an full-time online player.

This is probably not the case.

But one of the things you said, Nate, that really resonates, and there's so much science behind this, is that our brain does process, retain,

and

just

work through information much, much better when it's physical, when we're actually doing it, when we're learning by doing and not by, you know, doing by pressing a button.

So work that I think is actually kind of related.

I hadn't thought about this until until now, but I think that this is quite relevant.

There's a ton of work, and this research started, you know, probably several decades ago, and it's only gotten more and more powerful in the sense that replicated bigger studies.

So there's a lot of work that shows that the single best way of taking notes, right, retaining information is to do it by hand, to actually physically write.

And that there's a huge difference between taking notes by hand and typing on a computer.

And there are multiple reasons for this.

One of them is that there is this connection between the hand physically going through these motions and the brain that strengthens the wiring.

The other thing is that you don't.

write as quickly as you type.

So you already have to process the information to know what's important enough, right, to write down.

How do I write it down?

How do I take the different themes from it?

How do I actually distill this?

And so you're not just passively listening.

You have to actively do this.

Whereas if you're typing, you can basically type everything, but you retain that information a lot worse.

So this made me think that with online poker, there's actually a similar effect going on where when it's live and also the way that our brain retains information and encodes information, the more points of encoding you can have, the better.

So if you have like a memory where you have you remember, oh, these were the colors, right?

These were the smells.

This was what I just had for, you know, if you can encode in a multi-sensory way, it's going to be much, much more powerful, much more lasting.

You're going to take a lot more from it than if you just do kind of a one note type of thing.

And when you're playing live poker, you have that, right?

Because you are in a multi-sensory, you're in the real world.

You are in an environment with people.

There are dynamics.

You can see looks, you know, smells, unfortunately.

There are a lot of things that are going on that will help you process, retain, and actually kind of learn from this.

Whereas online, it's just buttons and it's just a screen in front of you.

And our brain just does not process information well that way.

So I think that there is a huge disconnect.

It's also, from a strategy standpoint, like

more points of estimation, right?

You just have more information that you're looking at.

Yeah.

And like, to me, I think my strengths as poker player in some ways are like

triangulating different points of information, right?

Not the best GTO player, not the best live talesperson.

You don't have the most poker experience, but if you're a seven out of 10 in all those categories, then I feel like there's some added value there,

especially in environments where you're late in a tournament or it's an unusual setting or there's an unusual player or something's happening, right?

And you kind of like are good at making like snap estimates quickly and like adapting to that.

And like, and those skills all

go away.

You can kind of be more, I don't know how you'd put it.

You can kind of be more like spectrum-y about playing online, right?

You just have to focus on like, on like certain things, right, obsessively, and you can block out other things.

Whereas I like kind of the

elements of surprise and unusual elements to some extent, right?

That's where my like life experience as I get into my mid to late 40s starts to matter more potentially.

And we'll be right back after this break.

Finally, to kind of wrap this up, I'd love your opinion.

So, you know, I was playing when I played these New Jersey events.

It was the first time I'd actually played on this new New Jersey client.

So I made a new screen name that no one had ever seen before.

So no one knew who I was.

I'm not going to say what it is.

I want to preserve that information for as long as possible.

But on the other hand, I had zero notes.

Like my Nevada account, I actually know who a lot of the players are.

And like I have notes on them.

And here I had none, right?

I actually was starting from a fresh slate because even the names that I recognized, because it's the same player pool now, it's a one-player pool.

So I recognized that I'd played with some of them, but I didn't remember

who it was because that was on my Nevada account, which I couldn't sign into when I was playing in New Jersey.

It's not like my notes transfer from one account to the other.

And so I was playing, one of the events I was playing was a 6-max, which means for people who don't play poker, it's six players.

So it's more shorthanded.

You're playing more hands.

It's more action.

And so I was torn.

I was like, should I be really focused on the table, paying attention to, you know, bed sizing and what people are doing?

Or should I frantically be Googling these screen names to figure out who these people are and trying to find out some information?

And am I, you know, basically, how do I divide, how do I value that, right?

Because I know that there are some people who have that information by virtue of having played and I'm at a disadvantage, but I'm also disadvantaging myself by looking it up while playing and trying to process all of this other stuff.

And so I was torn, right?

So I'm actually curious to know what your thoughts are since we've talked about this in live poker.

It's a slightly different calculus when you're in a situation like that.

Yeah, look, I think in general, look, I got in the habit of the World Series of Poker where you go in and you spend the first 10 minutes kind of looking people up, right?

You know, I think there's always a question

about how explicit you want your thought process to be, including things like taking notes about your hands versus like quote unquote playing in flow, right?

You know, every now and then, maybe every fourth or fifth session, I'll be like, I'm just going to write down every hand I played today, look it with my coach later for my own gratification.

I think you can make you play better too.

You have like a a little bit of permanent record for yourself, right?

But there's times when, like, look,

now we're running fairly deep, or there's an unusual dynamic at the table, or people are in conversation, and the conversation is giving me more information than, you know.

So, I think it's important to like be able to play in flow, and it's also like kind of like stressful, right?

But I don't know.

Look, I'm not taking a very professional attitude when I play online poker necessarily, right?

I'm looking at it as like recreation, whereas

with a live poker, then I take it quite seriously, right?

I I think information overkill

can be a detriment.

But again, it's a very different fucking skill.

It's like you're in air traffic controller or something, right?

And yeah, I mean, you know, I think the best player on live puzzles are listening to the like, yeah, I might not have player reads, but I have population reads.

I know that the average player doesn't check raise often enough when there are three flush cards on the board or when they do, it's never a bluff kind of thing, right?

Like that type of mass data mining is probably

very helpful, I would imagine, right?

Yep.

No, absolutely.

And yeah, in game, I made the decision that

so I told you I was playing two bracelet events.

One was a mystery bounty, which was full table, and one was 6 max, which was a higher buy, and it was a $1,000 buy.

And thankfully, that was the one I cashed in.

So it was a, you know, 1K 6 Max.

And I made the decision that I would try to look up the players at my 6 Max tables, but not at the Mystery Bounty because Mystery Bounty, first, more players, but secondly, more population tendencies, right?

Because it's a Mystery Bounty format.

So people are doing things like try to build up big stacks.

It's a smaller buy-in.

So you can make some sort of

generalizations, right, about how people are playing.

But then, Nate, I got incredibly frustrated because I spent this time, you know, noting all of the My Six Max, and then I get moved to a new table.

And all of a sudden,

you know, that the strategy that you described for the World Series, where you spend the first 10 minutes, doesn't work online because you might be getting moved.

You might be at the same table.

You might get lucky and be at the same table for two hours, but you might get moved every 10 minutes.

And it's incredibly frustrating.

And I did feel like when I was looking things up, I was missing hands and missing some information.

And maybe it is more important to just focus on, okay, this person seems to be, you know, three-betting too much or

whatever it is.

And this is an important thing.

We're talking about kind of the importance of information, but there's also psychologically, you can get information overload and you have to

actually figure out like,

how do I prioritize and weight this information and what information is the most valuable?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I did play a pandemic game online, but with a fixed player pool where half of the people are on Zoom, right?

And that's very different.

You know, look, I think poker is a much more fun game when you have the dynamic of playing repeatedly against the same opponents, right?

That can be true in a World Series poker event where you're there from noon to midnight.

You You know what I mean?

You actually develop some long-term equilibriums potentially, right?

And if you're switching tables at the time, you don't get that.

But look, Maria, I'm going to have you close.

Let's say that I

moved to a country where there's more access to online poker and no, no cash live poker, right?

No live poker.

What would your three tips be?

Because you're better at this than me for getting two tips even.

What are your one to three tips for improving as an online player?

I mean,

the reason I started off by talking about the schedules, I think that that is actually incredibly important, that you should try to look at events and schedules that will be more conducive to your sleep schedule and when you're sharper cognitively.

So I know people who don't, you know, who live in the United States, when it comes for big series like W Coop, which just happened, which was, is one of PokerStar's kind of signature series, they leave the country to play those series and they actually game it to figure out, you know, where should I be, which country should I be, which time zone should I be in, so that the schedules are best for my performance.

So I think that that's important and kind of knowing that about yourself and not playing a schedule that is going to be somewhere where you cannot perform at peak performance.

And related to that, I think there are lots of people who would disagree with me on this who are online players, but I would actually say limit multi-tabling.

I think it's more important to focus on one, two,

max three tables.

But your decision quality, I see some of some players I really admire.

So Patrick Leonard Pads, who constantly posts on social media about his hands.

And I love him.

I took, you know, I took his course

at Run It Once poker.

You know, I think he has absolutely great content and he's an amazing player.

But when I see his computer screen, like it, you know, it gives me a heart attack.

Like he's playing

10, 11, 12, all of these.

He has this huge multi-table setup.

And it just, to me, if you're trying to improve,

quantity in that case does not trump quality and you can't give as much focus to yeah, it's a weird thing in some ways to say like

uh,

I mean, because your edges in online poker, most forms of poker, but especially online poker, are like, are very small, you know what I mean?

And it doesn't take very much to like send you into break-even or negative, right?

If you're giving away X amount of dollars per hour in rake and X amount of dollars to variance and bad luck, right?

Then like, you know, you go, you make one more mistake per 100 hands and you might be a losing player, right?

So like, yeah, it just seems weird to me that like,

I mean, unless you were in the kind of poker boom days where you can play very mechanically, right?

Like I think I'm much better when I focus on one to sometimes two decisions at a time.

I don't know.

So, so yeah, that would be my piece of advice, number two.

And I think that that actually goes hand in hand with how our brain works, that our brains cannot multitask and it's very difficult for us to process all this information.

We're never processing it at the same time.

We're just, you know, serially task switching.

That's bad.

That's cognitively depleting.

That's going to actually make us even more tired by the end of the session.

And then the third one, Nate, would go back to kind of what we were talking about with information and notes.

I would say focus on the quality of your notes.

And if you can, like when I play live, I take notes by hand.

And I think that that's sometimes I do it on my phone because I don't always have a notebook.

But when I do it by hand, there's something.

really fun and interesting about that.

Do you have good handwriting?

I have legible handwriting.

It can be good, but

when I'm writing quickly, it's not pretty, but you could read it, which is important.

But I'm used to writing by hand.

I write all of my drafts by hand when I'm even my books.

What?

I didn't know that about you.

Yes.

You didn't know that?

Did you write

with a fucking pen and paper?

What?

Yes.

This can be another episode, Nate.

What?

I would have given a thousand win against that.

So take good notes

and actually review hands so that

you can learn from your sessions and have them be something where

you're actually actively learning information.

Yes, Nate, I have notebooks filled with drafts.

And I type, obviously, too.

And I don't like literally write every single word.

But yeah, I write tons by hand.

And like the biggest bluff, I think the first draft of that whole book was written by hand.

It's just so much slower.

Yeah.

You're going to get the title, Maria.

It's so much slower, which gives you more time to process.

And also when you type it up, because then I type it up after it's edit number one.

I'm processing up here.

I'm processing up here.

The typing is just the last step.

Well, here we go.

With that, with that confession, we will leave our listeners for this weekend.

So Nate,

maybe you and I can plan a trip to New Jersey to play online poker for a day.

Or maybe we don't.

good, what do they have there?

They have tailored.

I think we can find some Italian food.

Yes, got some Sri Lankan shade over there.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Let's have dinner and uh play some poker.

Okay, deal.

Phil Ivey, you're invited if you're in New Jersey.

Sabaro, Sabarro.

Got something authentic.

It'll be fun.

You, me, and Phil.

Um, 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 Kanakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

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

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Lydia, Jean Kott, and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

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