I’m quite enjoying Allison Schrager’s accounts of how people navigate risk in their lives. The book is full of stories about poker players and surfers, as well as bankers and bond traders.
Although the framework follows the model of an individual making a decision, in the background there are many communal references. This passage is about the paparazzi partnerships.
Since the best shots come down to being in the right place at the right time, photogs often form teams or alliances to share tips and sometimes royalties to increase the odds or payoffs they’ll be in that place. In 2003, Baez founded a group called PACO, “like the jeans,” combining the words “paparazzi” and “company.”
PACO consisted of ten experienced photographers. They traded tips on where certain celebrities hung out and when. So if Baez spotted a celebrity eating lunch at a trendy restaurant, he would alert the other PACO members. He says, beaming with pride, “Back in the day when we’d show up, the other guys would say, ‘Oh no, here comes PACO, because we were the best.”
Family ties show up in several of the vignettes. Somehow the prospects of his first love trump a degree from Stanford. When talking about the business executive Arnold Donald, she recounts.
It was a way to get both worlds: the liberal arts experience he wanted and the Stanford engineering degree.
During his sophomore year at Carleton, Donald married his college sweetheart, who also received a place at Stanford’s engineering school but no scholarship. Rather than take on the financial risk of student loans, they went to Washington University in St. Louis, where they both had scholarships.
And background players can even accumulate into a whole world of their own. For the poker player, there’s a benefit to syncing with the subculture.
The world of professional poker is a unique subculture-complete with special outfits and lingo-that appears foreign to outsiders. Its obsessive fan base watches games on television or in person for hours, is preoccupied with stats, and gambles on the players and games. Winning at poker comes down to luck and skill. Luck is being dealt a winning hand. Skill is knowing how and when to bet, and having the discipline and ability to infer what other players are doing.
Although not explicitly described or measured in terms of their influence, social relations, network effects, family ties, and workplace mechanics are ever-present in Schrager’s stories on risk.
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