Well-known poker players Maria Konnikova and Nate Silver are coming together to host Risky Business, a new podcast that promises to use the analytics and nuances of poker to better understand other aspects of life.
Konnikova, a former New Yorker contributor and author of the The Biggest Bluff, and Silver, the founder of political-analysis site fivethirtyeight.com, both garnered their initial fame outside the poker arena, then found themselves drawn into the high-stakes poker world.
"Risky Business" will be a weekly podcast dedicated to the science of making good decisions... in poker, in politics, and throughout everday life. “We’ll talk about the probabilities as well as tactics and strategy around politics and current events,” said Silver, in a promotional release for the podcast, which will debut on May 16. “How do things like expected value or game theory affect the decisions that impact all of our lives?”
Silver back after FiveThirtyEight sale
Silver brings a deep poker background into any analytic discussion he joins. He was an online-poker grinder for several years before his concept for a stats-based political analysis site, FiveThirtyEight, caught fire and brought him fame and wealth. Silver eventually sold off FiveThirtyEight to ABC but promised to return with a new project at a later date, and the Risky Business podcast appears to part of that endeavor. Silver has returned to playing poker regularly -- if still on a part-time basis -- and has logged over $800,000 in live-tournament winnings, including a runner-up showing in a 2021 WSOP fixed-limit that he led into the final table.
Konnikova's route to poker fame took a different form. What began as a fling with the high-stakes poker tournament world became something more lasting when she found both success and at the table and love for the game. As recounted in Biggest Bluff, she parlayed some training sessions from one of the game's best players, Erik Seidel, into an unexpected victory in a 2018 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure preliminary event. Just this past January, she landed her second major win, capturing her first WSOP Circuit ring in an online tourney, and she's earned more than $625,000 to date.
“When you play high-stakes poker you don’t just learn how to play cards, you learn how to think about the world,” Konnikova said, when describing the basis for her Risky Business podcast partnership with Silver. “You learn a clear, useful framework for making all kinds of hard decisions. In Risky Business we’ll help listeners understand this framework and learn to apply it to the decisions in their own lives.”
