Over the course of reporting his new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver spent several years getting to know pretty much every type of gambler. He met card counters, poker champions, Las Vegas bookmakers, crypto bros, venture capitalists and even people who believed they could guess which pokie (or slot) machines were about to pay out.

These “advantage players” are perhaps the most elusive species within what Silver calls “the River” – the world of professional risk-takers that includes poker great Phil Hellmuth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blackjack team, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and Silver himself, who is best known as an uncannily accurate election forecaster.

Bloomberg Businessweek