Introduction The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, features one nightclub, seven pools, fourteen restaurants, a thirtyfoothigh indoor waterfall, dozens of pieces of bedazzled rock androll memorabilia, two hundred gaming tables, 1,275 guest rooms, three thousand slot machines, and a glimmering guitarshaped hotel that shoots beams of neon blue light twenty thousand feet into the sky. Like most casinos--and like most things in South Florida--the Hard Rock is designed to overwhelm your senses and undermine your inhibitions. Picture a casino in your head. If you haven''t been to a place like the Hard Rock or the Wynn in Las Vegas, you''re probably thinking of a dingy "slot barn" full of cigarette smoke and mazelike rows of chirping machines. Indeed, those can be some of the most depressing places on Earth. But at highend resorts like the Hard Rock, the mood at busy hours is exuberant . Few places in American life attract a broader cross section of society. There are adults of all ages, races, classes, ethnic groups, and political orientations.

There are senior citizens hoping to hit a slot jackpot; groups of bros and gaggles of girls; and attendees of thirdrate trade association conferences compensating for the awkwardness of it all by overindulging in booze and blackjack. I spent a lot of time in casinos over the course of writing this book. Needless to say, even the most glamorous ones eventually become tiresome. I sometimes had the feeling of being a professional wedding photographer: everyone was having the time of their life, their very special day. But I knew all the tropes, all the recurring characters--the dude trying to hide from his buddies at the craps table that he was playing beyond his means; the BFFs from the bachelorette party jockeying for pole position when a hot bachelor walked by; the friendly couple from Nebraska having the night of their life playing blackjack before giving all their winnings back twice over. It was April 2021. I was in Florida for the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, the first really big poker tournament in the United States since the pandemic. For better or worse, I''d been pretty careful about avoiding crowded indoor spaces until I got vaccinated for COVID19.

I hadn''t even been on a plane since March 11, 2020, when I learned midflight that Tom Hanks had gotten COVID, that the NBA had suspended its season, that President Trump had shut down travel from Europe--and that my fellow passengers and I had landed in a riskier universe. But it was a year later, and it was time to gamble. Judging by the crowds at the Hard Rock, a lot of other people were in the same frame of mind. Despite their reputation for risk tolerance, casinos mostly did shut down in the early days of COVID. Even the Las Vegas Strip--which I''d always as sumed would continue to operate even in the event of a nuclear apocalypse--was closed for two and a half months. During this period, casino gaming revenues across the United States were down by as much as 96 percent from a year earlier. But they rebounded with a vengeance. Somehow, between the anxiety caused by the unprecedented mass death of COVID and the boredom caused by the unprecedented lack of social interaction, Americans'' appetite for YOLO (You Only Live Once) behavior exploded, manifesting itself in everything from illegal fireworks displays to traffic accidents to cryptocurrency bubbles.

(Bitcoin prices increased roughly tenfold in the year after the WHO declared COVID19 to be a pandemic.) And so in April 2021--even as schools remained closed in parts of the country--American casinos won a staggering $4.6 billion in gaming revenues from their patrons, 26 percent higher than in the same month two years earlier, before the pandemic. Poker players came out in a show of force at the Hard Rock. In April 2019, the last time this particular tournament had been held before COVID, it had a respectable 1,360 entrants. The 2021 version drew almost twice as many--2,482 entrants--despite still being in the middle of a pandemic and a travel ban affecting most of the pokerplaying world. It could easily have been more: demand was so overwhelming that there were hourslong waits to pony up $3,500 and register for a seat. Still, this was the largest ever number of entrants for a tournament on the World Poker Tour, which sponsored the event.

Appropriately enough, the tournament was eventu ally won by an ICU nurse from Grand Rapids, Michigan, named Brek Schutten, who had done his time in COVID wards. We played through unusual conditions. There was a mask mandate, which I''d expected to be an enforcement disaster: poker players are both individualistic and irascible, not the types to quietly follow orders. But most of them were so damn happy to be playing poker again that there were relatively few complaints.* A bigger constraint was that, as a COVID half measure, the poker tables were equipped with kludgy octagonal plex iglass dividers. This made for one entertaining wrinkle: whenever a player got knocked out of the tournament, the floor staff would squeakily eulo gize his departure by wiping down his section of the plexiglass, like an NBA towel boy wiping the sweat off the court after some hapless forward had just been dunked on by Giannis Antetokounmpo. However, the plexiglass had the effect of funhouse mirrors, making it hard to properly view your opponents. Sure, I could see the other players well enough if I concentrated.

But contrary to what you might have heard, most poker tells aren''t given away by blatantly staring at an opponent and getting a "soul read." Instead, it''s subtleties on the boundary of conscious observation: a flick of the wrist here, a quickening of the pulse there; an opponent you spy, out of the corner of your eye, looking more erect in her seat after she first peeks at her cards. (She probably has a strong hand.) Poker is mostly a mathematical game, but the edges are so thin that you''ll take whatever reads you can get. Between the plexiglass, the masks, and being out of practice being around other people, I felt like I was playing poker underwater. My body betrayed my anxiety. Not only was I feeling my pulse when I made a big decision, but for parts of the tournament, my hands even began trembling when I bet chips, something that''s almost never happened to me before or since. When I reviewed a few hands later with my poker coach--yeah, I have a poker coach, like some people have a personal trainer--they nearly all featured me overplaying and overthinking situations as though mak ing up for a year lost during the pandemic.

The Hendon Mob Poker Database says I eventually finished in 161st place in the tournament for $7,465, but I actually lost money on the trip. And yet, it was a great experience. After an isolating election year in 2020--isolating because I was working remotely during the pandemic, and because for reasons I''ll explain to you later, I find presidential election years to be alienating--I felt welcome in the poker world. The World Poker Tour even tweeted congratulations to me from their @WPT account, not something they''d usually do for the 161stplace finisher. I''m not sure I fully recognized it in the moment, but the tournament was the first taste of several realizations I''d have in the course of writing this book. One was that something important was happening , something that went beyond poker. That the tournament had drawn a record number of players--that people were so aggressively "returning to normal" in the hyperreal and obviouslynotCOVIDsafe environment of a casino--that seemed significant. People have always had different risk tolerances, but they''re often hidden from public view.

If the person standing right in front of me in the grocery line is planning to spend his evening curling up and watching Netflix, and the person right behind me is planning to go on an allnight cocaine bender at a strip club, I don''t really have any way to know that and I really don''t care. But COVID made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces. For a lot of folks, COVID was the Wild West, forcing them to confront risk and reward with little precedent to rely upon and expert guidance that changed constantly. My experience in writing this book is that people are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance--and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote. Maybe Netflix Guy and Strip Club Guy aren''t even shopping at the same grocery store anymore; Netflix Guy moved to the country now that he doesn''t need to be in the office, and Strip Club Guy moved to Miami--and was probably playing against me in the poker tournament. I want to be careful here. In any statistical distribution, you''ll find some people on either end of the bell curve, and this book often focuses on people on the extreme right tail of risk. But risktaking is an understudied personality trait, and the academic literature is divided over the extent some people are generally more risktaking as opposed to taking risks within specific domains.

My favorite example of a domainspecific risk taker is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who served on President Biden''s COVID19 advisory board. In a May 2022 oped, Emanuel said that he was avoiding eating indoors at restaurants because he was worried about long COVID, but also bragged about riding a motorcycle. That seems like an insane p.