Nate Silver, a former online poker pro, took some serious heat in 2016 because his polling model was off on the presidential election. Entering this year’s Election Day, many called for him to quit his job at FiveThirtyEight on the assumption that he would be wrong again. But it appears that he was, in fact, spot on with projecting Joe Biden to become the 46th President of the United States.

• Casino Season 2019-2020 1A 800/400-800 Jane Hitchcock vs. Nate Silver Main Tour WPT Maryland at Live! Casino Season 2019-2020 1A 300/200-300 The Numbers Add Up for Nate Silver Main Tour WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown Season 2018-2019 2 1,500/1,000-1,500.
• Before FiveThirtyEight’s rise to fame (the website is now owned by ABC-Disney), Nate Silver was a highly successful online poker pro. And he’d probably enjoy today’s game given the newer focus on game theory optimal (GTO) considering he’s big into analytics.

President Donald Trump (Republican) and Biden (Democrat) squared off Tuesday for the right to become the next president. The results, however, are still being calculated, as mail-in and absentee ballots were counted late.

On Election Day, throughout most of the evening, it appeared Trump was destined to claim re-election. He was pulling ahead in nearly every crucial swing state, with huge leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But late in the night, things shifted the other way.

Nate Silver's known for accurately predicting the outcome of the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. This book is about predictions in many domains besides politics. He knows a lot about baseball, and I especially liked his explanation of hold’em poker. The Signal and the Noise Summary. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.

Trump went from a -775 heavy favorite at the online sportsbooks to a big underdog within a couple of hours. That’s because the mail-in ballots, and there were millions of them across the country, began being counted, and they heavily favored Biden.

In Pennsylvania, for example, although Trump led at one point on November 3 by as many as 700,000 votes, many anticipated the mail-in ballots would eventually put Biden over the hump.

Former poker pro sitting pretty

In 2016, Silver gave Donald Trump a 30% chance to beat former First Lady Hillary Clinton. After Trump won, the limit hold’em specialist took a verbal beating from Trump supporters for being wrong (even though he wasn’t technically wrong) and even some Democrats.

This time around, he gave Trump just a 12% chance at re-election. His Twitter feed was flooded with Trump supporters trash talking him, telling him he’s going to have to find a new line of work after his polling model at FiveThirtyEight is again wrong. They continued the harassment during Election Day when it appeared Trump was headed towards re-election.

But now it seems like Silver is the one who will get the last laugh. Biden appears to have the election locked up after mail-in ballots put him over the top in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and he’s pulling ahead in Nevada and Arizona. At this point, as of Friday morning, it appears Biden will have a minimum of 289 electoral votes. To win the election, a candidate needs to reach 270 electoral votes. And that doesn’t even include Biden’s likely wins in Nevada and Arizona, good for another 17 inevitably meaningless EC votes.

President Trump, however, doesn’t appear ready to concede anything. In fact, he may never do so. The former reality TV star has publicly accused the Democrat party of committing voter fraud but without evidence. He claims he won the election fair and square but illegal mail-in ballots at the last minute helped Biden secure a bogus victory. There is no evidence of this claim.

Nate Silver Poker Book

Biden hasn’t officially won the election, so Silver can’t gloat just yet. But with the former vice president taking over the leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia with only a few votes still to count, the path to re-election for Trump appears to be closing. Take a bow, Mr. Silver.

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Have been hearing a lot of folks in the poker world noting with varying degrees of surprise that Nate Silver -- the statistician and analyst who received a lot of attention for his uncannily correct predictions regarding the 2012 presidential election -- is in fact a poker player.

I was vaguely aware of Silver following the 2008 election, having read a couple of articles reporting that his predictions that year had proven accurate. But I admit I didn’t really start paying attention to his “Five Thirty Eight” site (which in 2010 started to be hosted as a blog on the New York Times site) until just after Black Friday, April 2011.

That’s because in the immediate aftermath of Black Friday, Silver wrote what I thought was one of the best and most thorough explanations of what had happened in an article titled “After ‘Black Friday’: American Poker Faces a Cloudy Future.”

The article not only reported on the DOJ’s action (the indictment and civil complaint), but offered a smart overview of the brief history of online poker in the United States. I actually assigned the article to my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class that semester as a way to get them up to speed on what was happening, as Black Friday introduced kind of an unscheduled detour in the syllabus right at the end of the semester.

In the article, Silver mentions his own experience playing online poker, which in a lot of ways mirrored my own. Silver’s best years online came during the “boom” (from 2003-2006), after which he notes how the games became more competitive in the post-UIGEA environment. He even says he earned most of his income playing during those years (never quite the case for me).

I continued to follow Silver’s non-poker writing after that, and thus was aware of all of his different rubrics and methods of compiling poll data as the 2012 election approached. That’s when we started seeing various attacks on Silver being launched by those not in agreement with his consistently maintained position that Barack Obama was very likely to win.

As happened four years ago, Silver’s predictions proved accurate, with Silver correctly forecasting how all 50 states would vote in the presidential race.

Silver has a new book out titled The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don’t which I’m interested to read, in part because the book finds Silver returning to writing about online poker in a chapter titled “The Poker Bubble.” There he apparently breaks down and explains the economics behind the “boom” and how so many players -- like himself, and like me -- were able to be winning players online during that 2003-2006 era thanks to the abundance of losing players then among the player pool.

Now everyone’s looking to Silver for his thoughts on, well, anything he wishes to think about. He weighed in on the whole American League MVP debate a couple of days ago, explaining at length how the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout deserved the award over Detroit’s Triple Crown-winning Miguel Cabrera. (Cabrera won.) He also offered thoughts on various topics in an online Q&A this week for Deadspin, including answering a question about the possible legislative future for online poker.

In his response, Silver said his “hunch is that the poker community probably underrates how difficult it is to get ANYTHING done at the federal level, especially in the near term.” However, he’s more optimistic regarding what might happen down the road, thanks to “the intersection of the need for more tax revenues, poker having become increasingly mainstream, [and] better lobbying efforts on behalf of the poker community.”

Silver also adds how “the demographics of poker tend much more toward people who can ‘afford’ to gamble,” a point he presents as an argument in favor of legalizing poker before things like the lottery or other strictly chance-based forms of gambling.

Nate Silver Wsop 2019

Nate Silver Gambling

Makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Of course, when it comes to making sense, Silver’s been pretty much gold of late.

Nate Silver Poker Tips

Labels: *the rumble, law, Nate Silver, online poker, politics