How did Voulgaris know that his Lakers bet would come through? He didn’t. Successful gamblers—and successful forecasters of any kind—do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence. Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information. When their estimates of these probabilities diverge by a sufficient margin from the odds on offer, they may
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