The Candidates Bet

Obama is a low-stakes poker nerd, while McCain lets thousands ride on the craps table, Time says. There are certainly better ways to select a candidate than extrapolating governing ability from gambling tendencies, but I am surprised I've never heard more about McCain's craps habit, which sounds like it could turn into something of a liability.

Noam Scheiber says:

A few thousand dollars at a time?* Wow. That's more than borderline unseemly, I'd say--easily several hundred thousand dollars over a period of 5-10 years if McCain plays regularly. It's certainly a far cry from the $1-ante games Obama played in Springfield.

Then he updates:

*Of course, if by "a few thousand dollars at a time" Scherer and Weisskopf mean "a few thousand dollars a hand roll," then we're potentially talking millions of dollars over a period of several years, not hundreds of thousands. We'd be in real pathological territory--nothing particularly borderline about it.