Sports: Inside the minds of professionals

By Ryan Gamet

A brief introduction

Before we get started, there are a few things that I need to clear up.

Although there are hundreds of sports that I could choose to talk about, I’ve decided to limit it to just 3 today. This presentation will cover general aspects of professionals across different sports, so don’t expect many similar sports.

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All right, with that out of the way, let’s get started!

Magnus Carlsen: “The Mozart of Chess”

Chess is a very interesting sport, as it combines the elements of strategy and memorization, and at the competitive level, it introduces a move timer, which makes it a game focused on making excellent decisions quickly.

Magnus Carlsen started off at the young age of 5 years old, and at that time, his father said he could name every country in the world, their populations, and their capitals. Furthermore, the father has attested to young Mangus having a generally outstanding memory. Surprisingly, to-be professionals starting at young ages (between 5 and 7) is pretty common among those who rise to chess prominence.

As magnus grew up, he learned to play chess with his big sister, who he quickly began to demolish after a short time, and upon entering a few tournaments with great results, that's when he began to gain fame and popularity, partially due to how unorthodox a Norweian chess prodigy seemed.

Magnus Carlsen Continued

Among his stellar memory, he also possessed the ability to concentrate for long periods of time without fatigue. These were both amazing traits for the sport of chess, due to both how much memorization it requires, and how prolonged each game can be, let alone hundreds in a few days.

Though he became the best player at the time by the age of 19, the most fascinating part about Magnus has to be the fact that according to Frederick Friedel: the word “lazy” is impolite, but accurate. Magnus hasn’t fully devoted himself to chess yet, according to Frederick, and isn’t completely focused on it, despite being described as, “A culmination of genius, raw talent, and understanding”, and has worries about the tolls of the intense concentration that he exerts, fearing that he may end up going mad like a few other grandmasters.

Overall, chess is a game that seems to reward hard work and intense concentration, but raw talent and genius are assets as well, and can make it a little easier, though even in magnus’s case, it seems like he’s worried about the pressure of succeeding.

Speedrunning: (SM64)

Although it's not discussed horribly often, speedrunning is an esport that can get pretty intense. In hugely popular speedrunning games like Super Mario 64, the competition is often pretty steep, with records sometimes testing the theoretical human limits, and other game requiring immense amounts of luck just to get a chance at a fast time.

WIth a sport as ambiguous as speedrunning, for players to consistently stay on top, there’s a particular level of adaptability, dedication, and memorization that goes into making world record speedruns. For example, in a run where people begin to reach times that people believe are as good as it gets, someone can make a discovery that completely changes the way a game is played, in a way that other sports like soccer or football, or even chess just don’t see.

Speedrunning Continued

In SM64 specifically, the game saw great record improvements as a result of new discoveries that allowed you to beat the game progressively faster and faster, though the World Record grind became more and more difficult due to the increasing skill that some of the tricks required to successfully pull of. The cycle that the game’s speedruns followed for around 2 decades after its release were as follows: Someone gets an amazing time -> Competition rises because of this person's time -> A new strategy/glitch/route is found that allows for potentially faster times -> People practice the new trick consistently, then grind for a WR-> Someone gets an amazing time.

Though I can’t name runners, Speedrunning definitely challenges your skill and understanding of the game you’re playing (in most cases), but can also require a great deal of practice, and a large amount of time to practice in order to both get and keep a record.

Poker (Poker Brain Documentary)

From what I learned from the Poker Documentary, poker is a game of limited information, blended with luck and decision making, and can turn into complete psychological warfare when you get into the higher levels of the game.

Similarly to chess, there are multiple effective paths to victory, and between some of the best players out there, they all take very unique approaches that range from clever strategies, to heavily relying on statistics, to flat out waging psychological warfare on everyone else at the table.

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In this documentary, there were three pro players that were extensively studied to figure out what made them different from the rest. As a control group, they had multiple amateurs join in, and simply waited from there.

Poker Continued

The first player that they looked at was Alexandre Luneau, someone notorious for his use of statistics. In his own words, “I approach poker like its a scientific problem” “After all, the essence of the game is mathematics” Upon his interview, we learn that he spends hours on end running situations through a machine, practicing his decision making skills.

Looking at some of his responses during difficult situations, he mostly makes the right decisions, though he doesn’t always like some of the decisions he has to make.

As for the testing, the MRI and short term memory tests were passed with truly flying colors (95% accuracy is far above average), when it gets to the slot machine test (impulse control), however, because there isn’t any strategy involved, it heavily influences his decision making, which causes him to gamble way more than his usually strategic mindset would suggest.

Poker Continued (Again)

Our second player is famously considered “unreadable”, and is a master of the patented “Poker Face”. Her name is Gaelle Baumann, and she takes a more restrictive approach to the game than usual. Essentially, the essence of her strategy is to deny the opponent information, which is pretty effective in many cases, seeing as how poker is a game of limited information, and a lack of information can force players into making bad or risky decisions. Additionally, this can even start to make other players more mentally fatigued if she gets a winning streak going. (being constantly outplayed the same way is immensely frustrating)

While there weren’t as many tests done on her to my knowledge, the body language expert was able to read her body language as the time dragged on, but seeing as it took more than a few hours for her to give anything away to a trained professional, that’s no mean feat at all.

Yet More Poker Information

Our final player is some who’s a master of getting inside your head, then completely screwing with it, while being an expert at reading the intentions of other players. His name is David Kitai, and he’s more than infamous for what he does best; bluffing. How he puts his ideology;“I often use my intuition a lot, and I follow my feelings, which isn’t always an exact science, but you can’t always explain it.” While this sounds a little baffling at a first glance, he follows it up by saying, “I’ve played poker since I was little, and I’ve always been a big competitor. I love bold games, and I’ve always done everything to win.” With this sort of outlook, He heavily relies on bluffing and getting a read on his opponents to make his decisions, which is mostly based off of his intuition. The interesting thing about this strategy is that it takes a certain amount of knowledge and understanding to build up this kind of an intuition, with a lackluster intuition, this strategy would fall flat the further up you climb, but David more than has the necessary combination of game knowledge and confidence to pull off some of the most insane mind games that I’ve honestly ever seen.

Last Poker Slide, I promise

An example of just how far the mind games go, amateur Robert, who was confident in his hand, and definitely had the card advantage, gets scared when David aggressively raises by a high amount, and after observing the sudden drop in confidence, he puts the nail in the coffin by saying, “you know, there’s no shame in folding”. Robert lost that hand, and got completely read like an open book.

Moving on to the tests, instead of the usual tests, he travels to the University of Colorado, and is tested instead by being pitted against a computer and a human simultaneously, in a much more simplified version of the game. Basically, he can either get a card with an “H” which is high value, or an “L”, which is low value. The goal is for him to choose between bluffing or folding, while the human and computer on the other side are trying to virtually call his bluff. After hours of testing, they seemed at a loss, he appeared both near-uncallable, and unbluffable at the same time.

Here’s what I found

Overall, I think that the way all of these players play the game is fascinating, and while I could go on for hours about the more detailed specifics, the general gist is that like chess, poker relies on a set of varying strategies, but greatly differs from it in the sense that there aren’t always pre-made plans for specific situations, and compared to speedrunning, depending on the game, both require very similar amounts of adaptability to succeed, and luck can play a huge factor in both speedrunning and poker. But where chess differs the most from the rest is how mentally draining it can be to play for long periods of time. (Look at what happened to Bobby Fischer)

Overall, the best general consensus that I’ve come to is that to succeed across the disciplines, you need to be adaptable, to be able to exploit or use the mechanics to either your advantage, or to your opponents disadvantage, and you need to have an insane amount of patience, endurance, and strategy. Intuition, while important, is something that you acquire over time as you improve at something, and the same can be said for getting familiar with specific situations. But at the end of the day, it’s been proven that there’s always more than one path to prominence, and while there may be some that are seen as more glorious than others, the unique strategies that people devise ultimately shape and evolve the game.