The American Physical Society—the largest professional organization for physicists in the United States—once held its annual meeting in Las Vegas. From the city’s perspective, the meeting was a fiasco. The assembled physicists shunned the usual casino delights: showgirls, blackjack, roulette, craps, and copious amounts of alcohol. Plus they were lousy tippers. Vegas made so little money, legend has it, that the society was asked never to come back. The physicists could do the math, you see: They knew the odds were stacked against them in the casinos. That’s why physicists aren’t the gamblin’ kind.
Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom hasn’t met my husband, Caltech cosmologist and poker fiend Sean Carroll, who happily spends hours on end in poker rooms. It started in 2004 after he readPositively Fifth Street, James McManus’s account of covering the World Series of Poker (WSOP) for Harper’s Magazine. McManus got so caught up in his reporting that he entered the tournament on a lark and ended up winning $247,760. Intrigued, Sean began lurking around poker rooms to watch the play, becoming a “railbird,” in poker parlance. He bought a few instructional books and played a bit online before venturing out to the Hollywood Park Casino just outside Los Angeles.
Hollywood Park has a seedy, vaguely disreputable vibe. The occasional fistfight breaks out late at night, and the fast rate of play can be intimidating for a new player (a “fish” or “dead money”). But there are also plenty of unskilled (often inebriated) players whose strategy seems to be “Call everything—you might get lucky!” That first night, Sean walked away $250 richer, and hooked on poker.
