The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Maria Konnikova
- Publish Date: June 23, 2020
- Language: English
- Genre: Business Decision-Making
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 368
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 052552262X
A Prelude
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Las Vegas, July 2017
The room is a sea of people. Bent heads, pensive
faces, many obscured by sunglasses, hats, hoodies,
massive headphones. It’s difficult to discern where
the bodies end and the green of the card tables begins.
Thousands of bodies sit in seeming disarray on chairs
straight out of a seventies dining room catalogue—
orange-and-mustard patterned upholstery, gold legs,
vaguely square frame. Garish neon lights suspended on
makeshift beams make the place look like the inside of a
hospital that’s trying a bit too hard to appear festive.
Everything is a bit worn, a bit out-of-date, a bit frayed.
The only hints of deeper purpose are the color-coded
numbers hanging on strings from the ceiling. There’s the
orange group, the yellow group, the white group. Each
placard has a number and, beneath it, a picture of a
single poker chip. The smell of stale casino air fills the
room—old carpet; powder; a sweet, faintly sickly
perfume; cold fried food and flat beer; and the
unmistakable metallic tang of several thousand
exhausted bodies that have been sharing the same space
since morning.
Amid the sensory assault, it’s hard at first to pinpoint
why something seems off. And then it comes to you: it is
eerily quiet. If this was a real party, you would expect the
din of countless voices, shifting chairs, echoing footsteps.
But all there is is nervous energy. You can smell, hear,
taste, the tension. And you can certainly feel it making a
nest in your stomach. There’s just one sound left in the
room, reminiscent of a full-throated courting ritual of
summer cicadas. It’s the sound of poker chips.
It’s the first day of the biggest poker tournament of
the year, the Main Event of the World Series of Poker.
This is the World Cup, the Masters, the Super Bowl—
except you don’t need to be a superhero athlete to
compete. This championship is open to the everyman.
For a neat ten grand, anyone in the world can enter and
take their shot at poker glory: the title of world champion
and a prize that has been known to top $9 million. If you
happen to be British or Australian, you even get it taxfree. For professional poker players and amateurs alike,
this is the career pinnacle. If you can win the Main
Event, you have guaranteed yourself a place in poker
history. Sit down with the best and have a chance at the
most prestigious, richest prize in the poker world. Some
people in the room have been saving for years to take
their one shot.
It’s near the end of the day. Of the several thousand
people who’ve entered today’s starting flight—so many
want to play that starting days have to be staggered into
flights to accommodate everyone; the dream is
expensive, but it’s awfully alluring—many are now out,
having gone bust, in poker speak. The ones who remain
are concentrated on making it through to the second day.
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