The Riskies! 2025 Edition

Transcript

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konakova.
And I'm Nate Silver. Now, today in the show, it is the annual edition of

the riskies.

These are our awards for the best and worst decisions of the year from kind of a gambling/slash game theory lens.

A little bit of poker, a little bit of sports, a little bit of politics, just the usual Nate and Maria topics. Marie, are you excited? I am excited, Nate.

I love handing out awards, especially for bad decision-making. And Nate, there have been a lot of bad decisions this year.

A record number, I I mean, as the world accelerates, were there more than bad decisions last year? I don't know. I don't know.

We've had some pretty bad decision years. But yeah, let's get into the riskies and

we can maybe our listeners can compare to last year to see which year was worse.

Yeah, no, I mean, we have a new president. It feels like Trump's been president forever, right? But like when the year began.

Joseph Robinette Biden was president for the first 19 days. Why is it so funny? Speaking of humor, why is it so funny when you say his middle name? I don't know.
Robinette, what the fuck is that?

You know, is that some Delaware? Delaware thing? It's a funny middle name. Are we sure Delaware is real? Have you ever been to Delaware? Are you sure birds are real?

Birds more than Delaware.

Probably 0.3% of our listeners are in Delaware. We don't mean to insult you.
We know it's a beautiful story. No, I've been to Delaware on the train, usually passing through.
No, I know it exists.

On a train doesn't count. You have to like

sleep,

eat, or pee somewhere for it to count as having visited a state. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Hold on. Peeing in a state counts as visiting.

So like if I get off the highway and use the rest area, it counts as having visited. Correct.

Fascinating.

Those are the rules. Okay.
Okay. Those are the rules.
Those are the rules. Fine.
Excellent. I don't know if I've ever been to Delaware.
I've passed through on a train.

I've probably peed on the train in Delaware.

No, no, no. The train, you have to leave the security perimeter, Maria.
Like it's a little, if you go outside and like take like a stretch break or

a smoke break or a bathroom break at the station in Wilmington, I think that counts. But like, I don't, you have to leave the actual train.

All right. So let's get on with the year in the rear view mirror and the risky awards.

So our first award goes to the Hero Call of the Year, which is a decision that looked crazy at the time, but turned out to be absolutely brilliant. And I felt myself coming up short.

I was like, there were a lot of shit decisions and decisions that looked bad at the time and ended up being bad.

What's something that you think is something that looked crazy and turned out to be absolutely brilliant? I guess Zoran Mamdani choosing to run for mayor. I mean, it didn't seem crazy.

It didn't seem crazy. That's the thing I asked.

What else are you you going to do? I had Mom Dani with a question mark because like Mom Danny fits into it. We definitely need to give Zorin Momdani an award for the riskies.

But maybe it is Hero Call of the Year. Maybe the people who supported Zoran very early on are the Hero Call of the Year.

I mean, I guess all the people who sucked up to Trump and then got pardoned, you got to, you know, give credit where it's due. George Santos, for example.
I don't know.

I guess it didn't seem crazy.

It doesn't seem crazy. So yeah, Hero Call, like something where you're, you know, it's, it's a hero call.
For poker players out there, you know what a hero call is.

It's not you're holding aces and you end up calling top set. It's, you know, you're calling with ace high on a, you know, on an incredibly wet board.
It seems crazy, but it turns out to be brilliant.

Or you're calling with jack high or 10 high because you think that the person has a busted straight draw and has five high.

And yeah, that's the hero call of the year.

We'll, we'll put mom danny there kind of in yeah with with a question mark because um i think that at the beginning of the campaign um when he did decide to run like the odds really did not look good for him nate do you happen to remember what the prediction markets and just what the polls were saying at the very start

i'm sure he was at one percent or or whatever yeah right he was like a incredible underdog right at the beginning yeah all right Well, let's try number two, the worst fold, the decision that left everyone wondering why walk away from such a sure thing.

I mean, quite obviously, if you're a sports fan, the Luka Dantrich trade was this year, and it was still the most inexplicable trade in sports history.

Luka was averaging 35 points a game, nine rebounds, nine assists this year, shooting 47% on field goals. Dallas traded him for the perpetually injured Anthony Davis.

They did back into getting number one overall Pick Cooper flag due to a stroke of luck. Nevertheless, general manager Nico Harrison was recently fired from the team.

Yeah, this was like still the weirdest trade in sports history. I was at this random little poker tournament in Maryland quite late.

My phone was dead when it scrolled across the ESPN bottom line. I like literally thought I was having like a stroke or hallucinating.

I'm like, why the fuck would you trade Luca Donchich for Anthony Davis? But it was real. I mean, that has to be like the winner here.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I think that for sports fans, that's definitely the winner. And I actually remember doing this podcast episode with you and reading about this.

And as a non-sports fan, I was like, wait, what in the world is going on? This is very weird.

So

I had a different one for Worst Fold.

I had the Democrats in the government shutdown folding and deciding to to avoid it. Oh, yeah.
I had that as the worst fold of the year

for the decision that left everyone wondering, what the fuck did you just do? Why did we, why were we even in this pot, right? Like, why did we play this hand to the river if you're going to fold?

Like, what were you thinking? You want to do the next one is cooler of the year. Cooler, if you're not familiar, is when

When you have a very good hand, your opponent has an even better hand, and there's not much you can do to avoid it. So you have Pack of Kings.
I have Pack of Kings. Maria has Pocket Aces.

So, for this one, and this one is a little bit controversial, but I would put Sam Altman and Open AI, who was leading up until very recently, kind of in all indicators. And then

I realize there's somewhat of a recency bias here, but

Absolute Great Hand has been like all the best researchers,

market edge, and seems to have somehow fallen behind by sticking to kind of their, you know, their approach and potentially putting a little bit too much weight on how do we generate money right away with things like Sora, et cetera, like basically creating slop as opposed to trying to refine models and seeing, you know, Gemini clauded leapfrog over them in a lot of different metrics.

So I think that there was no reason that had to have happened because I think that OpenAI had the biggest resources out of any company.

So like I said, maybe this is, maybe you don't agree with that, but for me, like it seems like they had a great hand, but it's right now, they'll probably not, they're not going to lose in the long term.

But right now, it seems like they're on the back foot. Yeah.
I mean, this is a slightly different spirit of cooler, in which it's kind of like maybe misplaying a very robust situation, right?

Yeah, no, I think the smartest people who are observers of AI say that like open AI has probably lost its lead in the large language model category.

Yeah, squandered its lead.

Now, the salation has also gone up by 3x or 5x or something over the course of the year. I'm sure Sam Altman is still sleeping well at night.
But yeah, I mean, you know, who else?

I mean, if you want another sports one, Notre Dame missing the college football playoff because they think they're special and refuse to join a conference.

That's maybe a little esoteric, Maria, but like,

but they're

a privileged bunch of rich kids who,

you know, think they're special and couldn't get in line and join a conference and play a real schedule. But that's, that's, you know, neither here nor there.
All right. Well,

there we have it.

So tilt of the year. So kind of what's the most emotional decision of the year? I've got, I've got lots for this one.
I mean, it feels like we have to mention Elon Musk at some point.

I think he's had a

had a fantastic year and, you know, kind of crashing and burning out of doge

even faster than I thought. And I thought it wouldn't last particularly long.
Yeah, I think, I think,

you know, I think Elon's got to be up there. What do you think, Maria?

I was going to give it to RFK,

who has emotionally, you know, been so, I mean, he's doing quite well. He's accomplished everything, but I think that he is one of the most emotional people that we have seen.

And his crusade against vaccines, against science in general, against NIH funding, against all of that, seems to be very emotionally driven.

Someone who cannot be convinced by any data and just has this personal vendetta and feels like everything is personal about him, right?

Like everything that he says, he makes it feel like, oh, people are out to get me personally. And I am the scapegoat, and I am going to prove them all wrong.

So it seems to me like he's the tiltiest person. Like I would actually, you know, I would bet that playing against him at the poker table would be an interesting experience.

I think he's someone who would let, he would take everything personally and really let the losses go to

go to his head. Do you think that Trump would be good at poker? No.

I don't. We've talked about this before.
I think that Trump's overconfidence and overblown ego would keep him from being good at poker, right? He doesn't take negative feedback.

He would think that that he's a lot better than he actually is, which is actually ideal.

Like, those are the best people to play poker against, the ones who have an overblown sense of their own skills, right?

Because they're not going to be taking negative criticism, negative feedback, and they're not going to be learning as much.

And they're going to be the ones who are blaming the cards, blaming the deck, you know, blaming everything except their own play. And you want that, right?

You want someone who is incapable of learning from those types of things.

Now, he would be someone who I think would be very successful against NITs in the short term because he'd be super aggressive, right?

He'd be someone who would kind of fight for every pot, who would bet big, who would like have all this bluster and confidence.

And if you don't see through that, I think that aggression pays off in the immediate term.

But in the long term, if you then don't adjust and keep that up and you're playing against good players who do adjust to you, you're going to go broke.

Yeah, in poker, the better failure mode is aggression. You know what I mean? Yeah.
You induce more mistakes and different types of mistakes from your opponents.

And, you know, I think it'd be better than Biden. Better than Biden.

Yeah, I mean, that's not saying much, but yeah, I think it probably would be better than Biden.

All right.

So let's go to another good decision-ish.

It doesn't have to be good, actually. It's the GTO call of the year.

So game theory optimalist call. So the most balanced sound decision of the year.

What have we got for balancing sound decisions? Well, look, especially in the NFL in general, strategy on fourth downs, for example, is becoming much more GTO.

But I'll do a politics one here. Give it to Gavin Newsom.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good one.
Not my favorite, not my favorite

personality. However, he did

understand that if Republicans were going to engage in mid-decade redistricting in states like Texas, that California should reciprocate. It's kind of straight out of like the prisoner's dilemma.

Even if you think aggressive gerrymandering is bad, even if you think the GOP started it,

you know, you have to respond. And so Newsom did that aggressively and effectively.
And so he wins this award, in my opinion. Yeah, I think that that's actually a very good,

very good pick on your side, Nate. And it's a breath of fresh air to see someone actually make a good political decision, right?

We've had so many shitty political decisions this year, and on both sides of the aisle, right? Like, so many people just doing things where you're like, What in the world are you even thinking?

And he did, uh, he did see that opportunity and he executed it well. He also was able to get the support he needed to pass the measures that he needed.

He was able to, even people who don't like him, you know, had to smile at his social media. Kind of

his social media team was good at mimicking Trump and kind of, you know,

making him, at least for a moment, win that social media war. So people, I think.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm going to give him too much credit for that part, but

he has gained ground in like

prediction markets for the nomination race and polls. And so, you know, look, I mean, a lot of it is cringe.

Unfortunately,

cringe sometimes works. Cringe, there's a big audience for, you know, especially for like older

MSNBC watching Democrat, they love the fucking cringe. They love cringe.
And Gavin Newsom is cringe. His Twitter account is cringe.
And cringe is winning.

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Okay, next.

The Danny Kahneman Memorial Cognitive Bias of the Year Award. What cognitive bias best explains 2025?

I am going to say

a mix of, I mean, these are very related, of recency bias

with historic amnesia and general like illiteracy about how things have played out in history, where all of the decisions seem to be focused on such short-term thinking, right? Just using like,

who are we, like, who am I beating right now? Who am I trying to get one over on right now? Who am I trying to beat today? Without kind of this

consideration of, wait, like, there's a lot of history here, and

this is not just the present moment. There are, you know, there.

There are data points that are going to kind of be helpful to me that happened way in the past. And I have to be thinking like into the future as well.
You know, things like, you know, tariffs, right?

It just seems to just

have a certain historical amnesia where, you know, how did this kind of thing play out in the past?

But in general, just all the decisions seem to be very short-sighted and very in the moment focused without

grounding in

how does this actually

look, what are the implications, what can I take from historical lessons so that

this decision is actually

good for the future and not just for the present moment?

Yeah, look, it's pretty classic for new presidents to come in to the Oval Office and overread their mandate.

Trump being so insistent on tariffs, I mean, even if they haven't had quite as much of a negative impact as some economists might have predicted,

you know, consumers have been very gloomy about the economy for ever since Liberation Day, quote unquote, back in April.

You know, without this investment in AI, it's not clear the economy will be growing very much at all. And Trump just won an election on inflation.
Everyone calls it affordability. You know what?

Call it fucking if I have this rant on this show before. You know, affordability feels too fucking euphemistic to me.
Call it, it's a little too highbrow. Call it fucking inflation.

You know, you win an election on inflation and then you pass a bunch of tariff fallacies that cause higher inflation. It seems like

some type of cognitive bias or deserves to be somewhere in the negative category of these awards. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.

So

let's go on to our DGen of the year, which we, as of last year, renamed the Epei Mizuhara Award for Degen of the Year.

We don't have anyone quite on that level, but there were a lot of contenders for this one. I mean, what about Chauncey Billops, the former head coach of the the Portland Trailblazers?

Oh, I had Chauncey. I had Terry Rosier.
I had all of them. Terry Rozier.
Yeah, we have, I mean, we had the indictments, the NBA indictments.

So you could, you can take any of those athletes, coaches, like people who were making lots of money and who made very, very questionable decisions

that have

jeopardized their i think i'm gonna i'm gonna go with chauncey he's the most prominent of these figures right um he's an nba hall of famer i believe otherwise known as co-conspirator number eight, I believe, or I forget which number he was.

I'm gonna give I'm gonna give Chauncey the award. Okay, that that's that makes sense.
So, I initially gave it to Chauncey, and then I thought maybe Terry, because Terry actually threw games as well.

So, as far as we know, allegedly, allegedly threw games by letting people bet on like different outcomes and then you know

sitting out and uh

fading injury, et cetera, et cetera. So, depending on, yeah, but Chauncey Billups is obviously more prominent.
So, yeah. Does Michael Mizrahi deserve consideration here? For Degen of the Year?

Yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, Michael Mizrahi is quite a D-Gen.
He won the World Series main event. He won the Players' Championship.
So, Degen of the Year could be a good thing.

There are rumors that he was out quite late at various clubs and stuff. Anyway, but

I think Chauncey earned this, but in the weaker year, then we'd have to consider Michael Mizrahi.

That's fair. We had a very robust slate of nominees this year.
It's like the Oscars when the best picture nominees come out and you're like, shit, how do I choose? Right.

This year, the DeGen of the Year slate was really full. We're sorry, everyone who didn't get it.

Better luck next year. How about the knit of the year,

Nate? Who do you think was the nittiest this year?

Who was the guy who folded Ace King at the final table? Is that Kenny Hallard? He's supposed to be a great guy, right? But

I'm moving out of

you could give it to Chuck Schumer for folding on the shutdown. Here's an obscure one, which I find kind of funny, right? So Brad Lander was the New York City

compatroller is, by some measures, was the most broadly liked candidate in the New York mayor race. And he basically endorsed Zoran.

and helped clinch Zoran

finishing in first place in the primary, right?

Because he thought he was going to get, I mean, I'm sure he hates Cuomo, which understandable, but he thought he was going to get like the deputy mayor's job. And Zorin was like, nope, sorry, bro.

You know, I'll endorse your campaign for Congress. But like, so that was a case where like you make a sacrifice and wind up getting,

getting nothing. for it, right? I mean, he got lots of kudos on Twitter from Democrats who don't like Cuomo, but like that comes to mind a little bit.

Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah,

I was going to go with someone like Schumer in line with my Democratic shutdown as the worst fold of the year.

Because knits, you know, that's the thing. If you're a knit, you're going to end up making nitty folds that you should not be making, right? Like those two things go hand in hand.

One of the worst things about being a knit is that you fold hands that you really should be calling and you don't put yourself.

Sure, you can protect your chips, but you also don't put yourself in a position to win, right? That kind of strategy ends up putting you on the back foot repeatedly.

And I think that that's kind of what happened here. Did you make any bad folds this year, Maria?

I don't know.

I don't know. Wow.
Well, no, no, in the sense that I wasn't shown.

I think I'm sure that I made some very bad folds, but in order to know whether you made a bad fold, the person has to then show you what they had. Right.

And if you aren't sure if they were bluffing or not, then you don't know if it was a bad fold. But I'm guessing that I made some really bad folds this year.

Like, if I were betting on it, I would say like over 90% certain that I've made some really bad folds. But I can't, I didn't have any of those situations where someone then showed me their hand.

I had situations where they then told me what they had, but I don't trust that because I don't trust poker players to actually tell me the truth about what they had in a lot of situations.

Poker players lie. I have one in a home tournament where like

this woman was quite bad at poker and I had like it was a board with like three of a kind in the board. It was like, you know, seven,

seven, seven,

nine

king or something, right? And I had like a pair of nines, so full house, right? And

she bat a lot with a pair of sixes, right? So an underpair to the board,

a weaker full house than I had. And I just thought, well, okay, this is a really tight player.
But like, she didn't actually know.

She didn't realize that like having a full house was not actually a great hand on that board because there's so many better full houses or quads. So

I folded because I gave her too much credit, basically. That's funny.
There's a, you know, the one of the pivotal poker scenes in Molly's game.

You've seen the movie? Yes.

So there's, there's a scene where a good player makes a huge fold

because he doesn't realize that he's playing against a bad player. He didn't realize, I think, that Brad was bad.

And then it ends up, and then he by mistake flashes one of the cards and he realizes that he made a bad fold and it puts him on mega tilt and he ends up losing tons and tons of money.

That is sometimes one of the worst things that you can do, which is actually an interesting consideration for this award. When you are capable,

when you give other people too much credit sometimes,

you can be

nittier than you should be and so that's why you know for good decision making you really need to be accurate in your evaluations not only of yourself but of other people and that can be really difficult in the absence of data right like if you don't have enough data points how do you how do you make those determinations and obviously some of it comes from experience but then you fill in the blanks with biases, with you know what you what you're kind of

you try to fill in the blanks as best you can.

Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're just absolutely wrong and sometimes nate have you i mean i'm sure you've been in this situation um both in poker and not in poker i've had situations where i have folded huge hands um both literal and metaphorical because i've read the other person as being incredibly strong and i was right in that they thought they were incredibly strong but they actually weren't so the read was correct but they didn't realize where they were relative to me in that situation

and so that's something that I've been doing.

Just a narrow piece of actual poker advice for listeners, right?

Because Marie and I both have this experience of playing an extremely wide range of game textures from the toughest opponents in the world and high rollers to the worst people you've ever seen play poker in like charity events, right?

And when you get in that really bad section of the pool, then

you have to give some consideration to your absolute hand strength, right? Like that, I have a flush.

There may be better flushes and full houses on the board, but like, but the fact is this opponent might think top pair is a good hand. They don't know how to read the relative strength of hands.

And so, you know, so yeah, don't don't fold

good hands for cheap against bad opponents who you don't have that firm a read on. Yep.
Right. We really, and we really stereotype bad players based on, you know, one or two pieces of information.
And

yeah, it's just a matter of hedging a little bit more. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Staying on the poker note, Risky Business Bracelet.
Which host was the better poker player this year?

I have no idea, Nate. I don't actually.
Well, you won a tournament. Yeah,

I think it has to be you, right?

Right?

I had a better World Series. I'm pretty sure.
You had a better World Series than I did. But I think winning a tournament makes up for that, Maria.
Well, I appreciate that, Nate.

But, but, risky business listeners, the year is not yet over. We still have a few weeks to go.

I am in Vegas playing the World Poker Tour

win championships. And Nate is heading to the Bahamas to play in the WHO.
Tomorrow, I'll be in the Bahamas

playing this 25K, 60 million guaranteed tournament. And it sure is going to be nice.

Maria, when I win that tournament.

And that will actually, I'm going to have to give my risky business bracelet to you, Nate. I'm going to have to give it back.

Unless I win the $10,000 main event here at the win, in which case we can just agree to split the bracelet.

No,

I think the paradise

would still outweigh there. It's a $60 million guaranteed price pool.
I understand, Nate, but I've already won a tournament this year. So I'm just saying.
Okay. Okay.
Okay. Maria.

That will be putting me into two wins.

But when you win, not looking forward to that problem where we've both won these

amazing bracelets,

it's going to be a great problem to have. We're going to have to cut the risky business bracelet in half, I think, in that situation and share it.

I'm not going to take it for myself because you will be worthy of having the bracelet as well. Or maybe we get a second one.
Maybe we

go all out on the budget

and get two bracelets.

Look,

I'm looking forward to my new vacation home and Aspen them in a buy with this, with this. Oh, Aspen.
Interesting. Yeah.
Are you, are you a skier?

No, skiing seems like a terrible idea. I'm not, I'm not a knit.

It just seems like, don't people get injured all the time when they're skiing? They do. Yes.
Yeah.

That seems crazy. Like, it seems like everyone you talk to because he's like, oh, yeah, I broke my collarbone once.

You know, it's like, it just seems like a very, very, very, very high rate of injury risk. Yes.
My family is a family of skiers.

And I started skiing when I was, I think,

five years old

and

I don't really ski much anymore because you know I don't live near a mountain and at some point like after college I just kind of stopped skiing everyone else in my family continues skiing I am the only person in my family who has not gotten a serious injury from skiing yeah because I stopped everyone else

broken bones, torn ACLs, concussions, and other

traumatic head injuries. Like

you don't have to be a knit to be afraid of injuring yourself.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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All right.

We've got two awards from the podcast, The Town, about Hollywood that we awarded last year as well. So those two are the Mia Cupa I Was Wrong Award and the Sucket Haters I Was Right Award.

So what do you have for those? Is there anything that you think you were wrong about or you were right about?

Well, you know, I keep track of my sports bets. There's lots of individual things that

I was wrong about, certainly on the sports side.

You know, I'm thinking back on columns. I mean, I read a column early in the year about

how

the market, like the stock market wouldn't

tame Trump or curb his excesses. I think that is more wrong than right because he seems to, he seems to be upset when like the arrows go down in the stock market quite a bit.

I don't know. I mean, there weren't very many elections this year, which reduces the number of opportunities for me to be obnoxiously wrong about things.
I was almost wrong on the shutdown.

I thought that this kind of pretense of shutting the government down for

health care was not a very good plan, right? And then, but then lo and behold, after a couple of weeks, Trump was threatening people's food stamps and he was becoming much less popular.

I'm like, oh boy, I might have to eat some crow on this one. That's fucking cave.
So

I guess I was right.

You know, I, you know, for the other sucket haters category, like there were two or three books about what a shitty condition that Biden was in, which is a point of emphasis for me last year.

Of course, you know, I don't think Kamala Harris comes across very well in her memoir or the campaign trial either. So like the fact is people were fucking idiots.

You know, I don't mean Harris, but like, I mean the people surrounding Biden and Harris, like that, that felt very validated this year, I guess. Yeah.

So for, I'm going to say for the Mia Culpa I Was Wrong award, I think at the beginning of the year, I was underselling some of the promises of AI in a lot of areas.

And I think that it has gotten so much better this past year. Like, sure, it's still hallucinates and like that.
Oh, that's funny. I've kind of, I've kind of

even more bearish. Right.
But you and I started the year on very different, like you were so much more bullish and I was so much more bearish. So I think we've probably like,

we're probably at the same point now, Nate. But for me, it's an I was wrong.
And for you, it was, you know, it's one of these things where we've both recalibrated with the new data.

And I was like, oh, okay, you know, in some of these areas, there's a lot of promise that I didn't really realize. And you, on the other hand, were so optimistic that now you're like, oh,

there's, you've had to calibrate it down, which is kind of funny. So I think we've met in the middle.

The second haters, I was right award.

I'm going to say that the attack on higher education that was orchestrated by Trump and his cronies, a lot of people were like, yeah, fuck Harvard, blah, blah, blah.

But I think that we're already seeing with the cuts in funding and the kind of drain in students and all of this, that this is going to really, really hurt the United States for many, many years to come.

So I think I was right on. Poor Harvard.
Poor Harvard.

You may have to use the endowment.

Yeah, I think they are using it.

Good. Good.

No, like it is bad, but like of all the things Trump has done,

I think higher education, elite higher education, not I'm a big fan of state schools, right? There are some schools like my modern University of Chicago that set up more for free speech. Yeah,

I agree. It's objectively bad.
I'm not very sympathetic. Yeah, but I think that curbing cancer research and all the things that these schools

do. That's bad.
It's really bad. Somewhere in here, by the way, we have not, because this did happen in 2025, right? All these Republicans who confirmed

RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth, right? Like, I mean, you know,

talk about that. Have some fucking, have some fucking spine, right? Like, those are very, very powerful positions that will have, you know, impacts for years to come.

And so they deserve maybe nate of the year, right?

If I had Brad Lander in there for an obscure endorsement, I rescind that award, Brad Lander, and I give it to congressional or Senate Republicans who confirmed, and it's fine.

You're going to have some partisan, very conservative nominees, right? But P. Hike Smith and RFK Jr., maybe Tulsa Gabbard, you know, those three man up, show some spine

and vote against these people that are are not qualified for their champions. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. All right.
So now we've got two awards that only one of us gives.

So we're going to have the Nate Silver Award for Riverian of the Year. So Nate, who are you going to award the Riverian of the Year? I think since we haven't fit it in elsewhere here,

we should probably give it to Michael Mizrahi, right? Winning both the main event and the Poker Players Championship in the same year.

You know, it is this kind of once-in-a-century type of accomplishment. Um, you know, he probably tilts more toward the DGen side of things

than

maybe the pure Riverian side, but like it's a big accomplishment in the poker world. And we often talk negatively about poker on the show, it makes a lot of negative headlines, right?

But that was that was a positive for the game. He's a very popular player.

Congratulations, Mr. Mizrahi.
I'm the grinder.

Congratulations, Mr. Grinder.

And the Maria Kanikova Award for the biggest bluff of the year.

I am going to go ahead and hand that to the subject of one of our recent risky business episodes, Olivia Newtsi, for convincing people over and over that she's a really good writer and a good journalist and getting hired over and over despite ethical lapses and,

frankly, really bad writing when she doesn't have a good editor, as we discovered in American Kanto. And I, you know,

she, it's one of these things where I wanted to give her a lot of the awards because like, you would think that like, if she could actually write well or took the time to write well, like,

then, you know, it would be a totally different thing. But I think that she has bluffed her way using a lot of different attributes

to a point where people assumed she was a brilliant writer. And the evidence points to the contrary.

And it seems like, as other people have pointed out, the real heroes of the story are her editors at New York magazine who made her writing seem very, very good.

So I'm giving her the biggest bluff of the year. Her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, isn't looking much.

No, he isn't. No, no.
But he's out part five of his Opus, right? And he's like, I came to New York for 24 hours trying to resolve a situation. And I wound up in this hotel with her for five days.

It's like, bro, how the, you did it then? Did she forcibly, forcibly abduct you, right?

And like, I mean, anyway, that whole thing, that whole nexus of events, I, I, you know, yep. And of course, RFK isn't messed up in this.
I, I, I don't know. I don't know, Maria.
Yep.

I, I totally agree with you. I, I don't know is the correct answer.
Anyway, congratulations, Olivia. You're getting biggest bluff of the year.
Um,

so I don't, I don't know, um, because I don't really make bets myself. Um, what do you think?

Do you have most plus EV bet and most negative EV bet of the year where you just couldn't couldn't help yourself? Uh,

I'm trying to think. You know, in terms, again, it's not an election year, so you're kind of not making as many bets.
Um,

I think, uh,

you know, look, my NVIDIA stock has done well.

I mean, actually, okay, so one thing I did is that, like, I don't own that many stocks, but I own some. When I was booking my reservations for Vegas for

a World Series poker and realize kind of how much cheaper the hotel rooms were. I sold some gaming company stocks as a result of that.
I'm like, this seems really bearish for the industry.

And that's trade's gone well. So I'm going to give myself credit for that.
And like

worst bet of the year, I mean, my NFL model really hates the Chicago Bears who are now 9-4, right? So the Bears have, I still think they're bad, but the Bears have cost me a lot of money.

You're still bearish on the Bears, but you have lost a lot of time.

If if i'm like just exhausted at the end of a poker tournament you know i'll kind of like kind of do a little mini punt like i was playing um

i was randomly in florida to give a conference and like played this 5k tournament the last day of the wpt festival right was waiting for cash game

table to open up after i busted out of the 5k and played a 300 tournament right like a bounty tournament i'm like i really do not feel like

like being here knitting it up with five big blinds when the first place is only a couple thousand bucks, right? And I'm not going to win any bounties. And so I don't know.
I overcalled with

10 or Jack 9 of diamonds versus three other players because I could have gotten a bounty from one of them. And I'm like, I have four big blinds.
Actually, it's probably fine. That's probably all fine.

But it felt bad. I'm like, I just want to get out of here.
I want to go. I have eaten.
We've all been there.

Yeah,

we've all been there. When you get tired,

at the end of a long day, like like decision-making quality definitely deteriorates. And it takes real mental discipline to like stay focused and stay, you know, stay with it up until the end.

And self-knowledge to understand

when you're making suboptimal decisions because of that, because of that kind of end of day. Like I've definitely.

had situations where I've been like, you know what? I just want to go to dinner.

Like I don't have that many chips and like dinner break is in an hour, but like I I just want to either spin it or bust so that I have a longer dinner, right?

Like, I've definitely, I've definitely done stuff like that. And I know it's not good, right? That's a horrible, horrible decision.
That is not how you're supposed to be making decisions.

That is not how you play poker. But that happens in real life, too, when sometimes you just like

do a fuck it decision because you're tired.

Hangry is really bad. I figured out, right? Don't try to be

very bad.

Well, that concludes our riskies for the year. Congratulations to all of our winners and our condolences to some of our winners.

And we will maintain that even though for now, for now, I have the risky business poker bracelet, we still have... several weeks to go, several poker tournaments to play.

And, you know, it would be wonderful, Nate, if we both had really strong ends to the year and had to kind of had to reconsider how that bracelet is divided.

That would be a wonderful wonderful way to end the year, wouldn't it, Bernina? It really would. It really would.
Best of luck to both of us.

Let's go crush at the poker tables.

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 Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.
If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.

This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

They may be happening to you without you knowing.

If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com.

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