Are poker players liberal or conservative?

They became more Trump-curious in 2024. But mostly, they’re anti-establishment types who dislike politics until you threaten their livelihoods.

Poker pro Justin Bonomo sporting a pink haircut. Upswing Poker.

Much like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with his taxi drivers, I’m at risk of overindexing on political opinions that I hear at the poker table. You’ll certainly encounter a wide cross-section of views. Poker players might be guarded when it comes to revealing information about their hands, but they sometimes take a no-fucks-given attitude toward the rest of their lives, including often violating the dictum not to talk about politics around strangers.

However, I know that poker players are not a representative sample of pretty much anything. Although the industry is diverse in some narrow ways, attracting people of all ages and nationalities, poker is a highly unusual profession. My guess is that there are only a few thousand professional poker players in the United States, some of whom are fooling themselves about their abilities. Poker is also notably non-diverse in other respects: typical tournament fields are about 95 percent male.

Nevertheless, as one of the few well-known people in the overlap in the Venn diagram between politics and poker, I feel like it’s my duty to Silver Bulletin readers to address a minor controversy on Twitter. So, instead of trying to rush out a longer item I’ve been working on about AI on the day before Thanksgiving, let’s tackle a question that I’m perhaps uniquely qualified to answer.

Yesterday, Josh Barro expressed surprise that NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a poker player, at least according to comments made on CNN by Mike Lawler, the Republican Congressman from New York’s 17th Congressional District. “Poker is not very left-coded,” Josh wrote.

I’m a big fan of Barro and his newsletter, and had a lot of fun recently on his podcast with cohosts Ben Dreyfuss and Megan McArdle. And what he says dovetails with the thesis from my book. Occupations associated with what I call the River — so analytical, competitive, risk-taking professions — have become more conservative-coded in recent years.

This perhaps even creates political problems for Democrats. In 2024, they lost a lot of ground with young men, who are often the primary customers for crypto, poker, sports betting, day trading, prediction markets, and other pastimes where you put money behind your opinions. Democrats may also alienate other constituencies like small-business owners when they behave like nits who take an overly prescriptive approach toward government and don’t respect American values like entrepreneurship.

Still, I think Barro is more wrong than right about the political predilections of poker players. For one thing, it’s not hard for me to think of well-known poker players with outspokenly progressive political opinions. There are people I know (or knew) well, like my late friend Steve Albini, the music producer who won two World Series of Poker bracelets and also famously turned down a huge corporate paycheck for his work on Nirvana’s In Utero. Or turning to people I’ve never really gotten to know personally, there’s Justin Bonomo, the 5th-highest-earning poker player of all-time, who was nearly disqualified from a $25K WSOP event in the Bahamas last year for wearing a keffiyeh in an expression of support for Palestine. Or Isaac Haxton (just behind Bonomo at 6th in lifetime earnings), who referred to companies including Facebook and Google as “just the absolute most destructive forces on Earth” in an interview I conducted with him for On the Edge.

To be sure, you’ll also encounter plenty of conservatives at the poker table, from libertarian types to Trump supporters. I also know poker players who are so disillusioned with politics that they never even vote.

But let’s at least try to ground this in some numbers. Below, I’ve collected data from every presidential cycle since 2004 on individual political contributions made by people who included the term “poker” in the occupation field of their donation forms. (Excluding poker dealers and floor staff, who are often unionized workers making relatively low wages.) This data suggests that poker players generally don’t take much interest in politics. But fittingly, they are highly tactical with their contributions when they do:

What the hell happened in 2008? Well, in 2006, the outgoing Republican Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which essentially banned payment processing to online poker operators. The UIGEA, added as a rider to an unrelated port security bill, was part of a last gasp of the Reagan/Bush GOP’s “family values” agenda.

It didn’t help Republicans. They lost both chambers of Congress in the 2006 midterms, with Jim Leach, the lead sponsor of the UIGEA and a 15-term congressman from Iowa, losing his seat to Dave Loebsack, a political science professor with no political experience who benefited in part from contributions from poker players.¹

Plus, Barack Obama himself was an enthusiastic poker player. However, during his first term in April 2011, the feds unsealed an indictment against the largest online poker operators that had continued to offer games to Americans using workarounds to the UIGEA. “Black Friday” killed what was left of the online poker boom that had begun in 2003.² Not only were there fewer people left who identified themselves as professional poker players: the remaining ones weren’t about to donate to an administration that had threatened their livelihoods. Although, the overwhelming majority of contributions to Republicans in that cycle were to libertarian-ish poker supporters like Ron Paul and Joe Barton rather than Mitt Romney.

Even considering that poker is an uncommon profession, the donations made by poker players since the UIGEA have been paltry: under six figures in every cycle to candidates from all parties combined, less than the buy-in for a single player at some high-roller events these days. Without wanting to open up a whole can of worms, I think poker players are basically rational about this. Candidates for president and U.S. Senate raise far more money than they can put to good use, and I think you’re generally better off donating to charity or to candidates for lower office.

Still, there have been some fluctuations. What few contributions there were from poker players went overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2016 and especially 2020. But in 2024, Republicans and conservative causes raised slightly more money than Democrats and liberal causes. That reflected broader trends within the River, perhaps including how Democrats³ became the party associated with greater prudishness, something poker players instinctively abhor.

For what it’s worth, although the Trump administration has been relatively friendly to some adjacent fields like crypto and prediction markets, it hasn’t been a good year for “traditional” professional gamblers. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed along partisan lines, included a provision to cap the deduction for gambling losses at 90 percent of gambling winnings, which is potentially devastating to tournament poker players who operate on thin margins. To be fair, there have been some bipartisan efforts to reverse the provision. But in general, the alliance between Trump and the Trump-curious factions of the River has not gone well for the latter group.

What makes poker players tick

To pull back a bit, poker players have some characteristics that don’t neatly map onto either of the major political tribes. On the one hand, this is obviously not a risk-averse group. Risk tolerance didn’t used to have much political valence, but it’s become more conservative-coded in recent years.

Poker players are also archetypically both entrepreneurial and self-reliant, although these aren’t quite the same thing. Back in the poker boom days, poker was one of the few professions where you could truly be a lone wolf, waking up in your pajamas and making money based on your analytical wiles. Now, that’s much harder. High-stakes public cash games have dried up, so you usually need social skills to talk your way into the best lineups. As opposed to public cash games, live tournaments are still theoretically +EV — you’ll encounter plenty of mediocre-to-worse players — but at the cost of extreme variance. Based on the analysis I conducted for On the Edge, even a skilled tournament pro playing at high volume has almost a 50/50 chance of losing money in any given year. Except for perhaps literally the few dozen best players in the world, to make a good living as a professional poker player these days requires some steadier, supplemental sources of income, such as coaching or sponsorships — and this will become even more true if the new tax treatment of gambling earnings remains in effect.

On the other hand, poker players tend to be highly anti-authoritarian. The abilities required to make a good living at poker — a heavy dose of applied analytical skills plus at least enough people skills to make some competent reads of your opponents — are generally highly rewarded in River industries like hedge funds. To have these abilities and not go into finance, which would usually offer both a higher financial ceiling and a much higher floor, is a conspicuous choice. I mean this in an extremely respectful way, but people like Haxton and Bonomo don’t want to “work for the man.”

Also, while there’s plenty of sexism and other -isms at the lower levels of poker, professional gambling is fundamentally an “alternative lifestyle”. Poker players tend to be suspicious of wokeness, but they are often relatively tolerant people by necessity. They’re going to gravitate toward whichever political constituency they think will leave them alone.

One other thing that might surprise you is that many modern poker players are relatively principled thinkers in the following sense. Under game theory, exploiting others comes at a potential cost. For instance, if I start bluffing every hand against a particular opponent (let’s call him Zohran M.) because I think he folds too often, he can cost me a lot of money by adjusting and calling me down instead. Poker players at least have to think about the equilibrium: what does the world look like if there’s fairness and reciprocity because everyone is “playing their hand” optimally?

In contrast, the actual lived experience of being a poker pro can be soul-draining. As you advance in stakes, the accommodations become more luxurious, but poker is not exactly an altruistic activity. And people-wise, it’s high-variance. Some of my favorite people in the world are poker players, but spend a lot of time in casinos, and you’ll also encounter some of the worst aspects of humanity.

Sum all of this up, and it often leads poker players to gravitate toward more abstractly principled politicians and causes, whether it’s Bernie Sanders⁴, Ron Paul, or effective altruism. The mainstream party brands and the normie politicians like Kamala Harris and George W. Bush don’t offer so much, by contrast.

Furthermore, poker players and other professional gamblers are a tiny constituency — too small to have much influence — and also one that tends to lack organizational skills. So, as much as I’d like to say that whichever party leads the charge to overturn the tax treatment of gambling in the OBBBA will benefit electorally, it’s probably not even among the top 100 issues that will affect next year’s midterms.⁵

Still, it’s good to know that Zohran M. is a poker player. It’s a strong suggestion of pragmatism over dogmatism, and a tradition among a bipartisan set of political leaders that spans from Truman to Nixon to Obama.

1. Including some of my own money; I don’t make political contributions now, but I did back then.

2. Although this wasn’t the only issue: the games were also drying up as the UIGEA discouraged new players from entering. Without a fresh supply of fish, poker games can get tough. Going from a substantial winner to struggling to make money at online poker was part of what gave me the time to found FiveThirtyEight.

3. In contrast to the Bush/Family Values Era.

4. Sanders considerably overperforms in the poker-player donation data relative to Hillary Clinton.

5. Although the low stakes are also helpful in some ways. Few people are going to care if the law remains in effect, but perhaps even fewer people will care if it’s overturned.