Luca: What's the optimal level of risk taking to maximize your wins? And the answer depends how long do you want your career to be? Let me make a very concrete example. Imagine that my cousin is an excellent skier and wins 20% of the races where he participates. If he does one single race, the average amount of races that he wins is 0, 2. But if he makes two races, during the second race, he can only participate if he didn't break his leg during the previous race. Luca: You have no chance of getting to the average reliably if you're not allowed to play the game. Talib says, you need to avoid ruin.