What group of people do you think is more likely to have heard of Freakonomics, top bridge players or top poker players? Far and away it is bridge players. We ran some experiments at a big bridge tournament last week and used the Freakonomics name to help recruit volunteers. Many of the bridge players had heard of or read the . . .
I’m curious who is standing out in Times Square asking people if they know who I am. I am even more skeptical than Dubner regarding the methodology in his post below. Four out of ten? Forget about it. Just for fun, how about we do an experiment. I will give $100 (or all the money I have in my wallet . . .
The February 5, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine isn’t really a Freakonomics column, and it’s not really in the New York Times Magazine, either. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Big poker tournaments are a zero-sum game. The competitors pay to enter and those entry fees are returned as prize money. It is common practice for a player to be sponsored by someone else, i.e. a third party pays a player’s entry fee in return for a share of the profits earned. This is true in professional golf as well. . . .
I’m undertaking a project on poker. I’ve set up a website, www.pokernomics.com, for people to download their hand histories. Using these hands, I hope to study what differentiates good and bad poker players. The response has been overwhelming. I think we’ve got over 7 million poker hands already. (For those of you who sent hands, but don’t have your Freakonomics . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
A question for the baseball experts: has any team in history ever been as bad as the A’s were early in the season and done as well as they are doing now? It has been an amazing run. Interestingly, the market at tradesports is still giving the A’s no respect. The bid-ask spread on total wins this season for the . . .
All economists love markets. Most economists hate gambling. So I don’t know whether or not to be surprised by the fact that my friends at tradesports are offering a line on which economist will be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve. (At Tradesports, go to the trading screen and search under “Current Events – Federal Reserve.” Consistent with the . . .
My Preakness picks were not as terrible as usual – I correctly had Afleet Alex to win, but missed my exactas. I guess they were good enough that some readers wanted my Belmont picks. Well, actually only one reader, but I’ll take that as a mandate. Anyway, I like Afleet Alex. I think he will be an odds-on favorite, like . . .
In a comment to our last post, Keg277 wrote: Now, I’ve got a question…whether it classifies as one that can be Freakonomically answered, I don’t know. I was watching a movie yesterday on Stu Unger, who was a professional poker player. In one scene, he mentioned to an opponent (played by Pat Morita) that when he had a good hand, . . .
I’ve gotten a reputation — totally undeserved — for being able to successfully pick winners at the race track. When I protest and tell people who approach me about it that I have absolutely no talent or secret, they never believe me. (Perhaps rightly so — if I really did have a secret, pretending I didn’t would be the right . . .
I spend much of my time trying to find cheating where other people don’t suspect it. So when I heard about a strange happening in Powerball — 110 people picking five out of six correctly when statistically you would expect only 4-5 such winners — I began to fantasize about a big cheating scandal. It had the appearance of the . . .