Word: pokerful
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...learn a lot about gambling if you're willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don't have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you're likely to lose - and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards...
Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling - and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record. (See 10 things to do in Las Vegas...
...unlike the risks at the poker table, where your losses are just yours, in the larger world, you can take down a lot of other people with you. "Organizational malfeasance in general depends on this kind of risk analysis," says Siler. "Look at a place like Enron. People took a lot of small chances and won, then took big chances and lost big." Indeed, Siler points out, during the recent financial crisis, an entire nation - Iceland - went bankrupt in a similar way, trusting high-risk, high-reward investments that quit paying...
While walking away from the poker table can be easy, walking away from life - and all the risks and rewards it presents you - is not an option. But in both venues, the rule should be the same: gamble only what you can afford to lose - and know when you're approaching those stakes...
...very convoluted game of poker that goes on—rarely do any of the elected councilors want to show their hand publicly," Winters said. "Honestly, it's just a little extra cash and a little bit of honor over their colleagues...