Word: worldly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
It’s an uncomfortable truth: in any one game, the worst player can beat the best player in the world. “That’s certainly one thing that makes poker sexy to the average guy,” says Matt Hawrilenko, a 27-year-old professional poker player who graduated from Princeton in 2004, where he worked in the dining halls for financial aid. “In any given day, you can beat the best. Or, certainly, in any given day, you can compete with the best. The average guy is never going...
This luck-factor can detract from poker’s meritocratic sensibilities. But the fact remains that there are bad players. And then there are professionals whose faces make repeated appearances at the final table of World Series events. It’s dangerous, many professionals say, for people to play poker with the idea that luck will constantly provide an edge. More than three-quarters of all poker players are losing players (“There are a lot of people playing,” Darkhawk says. “A lot are bad”). In 2007, gambling...
...every tails, you give him $10 dollars. If you had $1,000 in your bankroll, you would be foolish not to take up the deal. The first 10 tosses might not generate any heads, leaving you $100 down—but in the larger scope of things, in a world attuned to the rules of probability, you will leave the game having gained a profit. But now, say the stakes are upped and instead of $11, your friend has to give you $110, and instead of $10, you have to give him $100. You could wipe out your entire coffer...
...different kinds of win-rate analyses and determined that his chance of going bust was “pretty much zero,” which meant that he would win in the long run. And it’s safe to say that he has: at the 2009 World Series, Hawrilenko won more than a million dollars when he came in first place at an event. He took $100,688 at yet another one. But these are just incidental wins in a longer stream of acquisitions...
...mind the drug-user analogy that Darkhawk made as he searched for a way to describe the night he lost it all, a mindset that he associates, pointedly, with “gambling” and not poker-playing. For the pros, the Hawrilenkos and Darkhawks of the world, riding a long smooth curve of expected value and carefully weighed percentages, the adrenaline rush is largely a thing of the past...