Scientific American Article: The Expert Mind

[maurile]

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Harrington and Hanson are great backgamon players. Lyle Berman and Ely Eliza are top business people. Raymer is a successful lawyer. Malmuth was a statistician. Brunson and Strauss were athletes.

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Very true.

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There is a lot of transference.

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That doesn't follow -- not in the sense that "transference" is meant in the article. Raymer didn't become good at poker by studying law. He became good at poker by studying poker.

Some people are more competitive and more intellectually curious than others, and will therefore put greater (or more efficient) effort into whatever they do -- but they still have to put the effort in to each unrelated endeavor separately.

[jackaaron]

If you don't have bills, mortgage, people to take care of, getting that 10k hours comes fairly quickly. Say, for example, from age 15-18, 9-10 hrs/day.

[joeg]

One of the interesting points it makes was that it wasnt how much time you spent playing but how much time you spent studying the game, the actual play time is of most use to provide food for thought for further study, the actual quote is below.

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It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

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I definately aggree with this, I find if I stop reviewing my sessions afterwards and start to just play instead of study then my results sufffer, an interesting articly, thanks for posting the link.

[CrayZee]

Interesting article.

It's funny, I just debated last night this exact observation, and I generally agree:

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highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees.

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It's amazing how people have such a strong authority/credential bias. But then again, I've always felt contempt for authority figures and generally unimpressed with most people I've met that have advanced degrees (other than their dedication to education, which is a good quality).

[Jordan Olsommer]

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Also, playing 16 tables at a time doesn't count.

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Although I generally agree with this, I think that if you are biased toward study, that multitabling (I'm thinking 4 or maybe 6 maximum) can be quite helpful in that it can turn up more situations where you are unsure what to do, and you can then analyse those things away from the table. I think that it's possible that multitabling a reasonable number of tables can help you to identify areas where it would be fruitful to study. Obviously if you're just playing on autopilot you won't notice those things as they happen, hence the limit on tables. I am wondering what others think about the idea.

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I agree with this, but I don't think it's an exception to the idea that playing 8/12/16 tables at a time doesn't count toward your "expert quota" of hours, even if you're only multi-tabling to essentially mine for interesting situations that you can use in your study. To put it another, less controversial way, you wouldn't count toward your "dedicated practice" hours the hour you spent going to the bookstore to purchase Harrington on Hold'em.

[chezlaw]

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Interesting stuff but is it convincing? There's no theory of a chess in the way there is with poker/blackjack and many other activities.

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The only thing that changes this is good books written by the very clever that explain how to play to the less intelligent.


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Sure, but the very clever don't just instinctively 'know'
what a good poker strategy is either. They become expert
and are able to write the books that they do because they
study as well.

The difference is that they have to study much more widely
in order to make the necessary theoretical leaps. So while
those of us with access to 2+2 texts may have to put in
our 10,000 hours to become expert, Sklansky, Malmuth, et. al. probably
had to put in twice that or more to provide us with material to actually study..

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Okay so the article basically says that if the intelligent can transform the game into one that requires less intelligence (via books) then the advantage of being more intelligent is removed and experience/study becomes more important.

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chez

[gergery]

I thought it was a pretty interesting article. A few things struck me:

1) Competition seems to be much less important as a way of improving. Look at professional muscians, bicycle racers, soccer players, chess players, etc. and the vast majority of their time is not spent competing, but instead training (ie. not playing. Poker seems fairly different in this regard.

2) Experience is just another name for building a large database of experiences in similar situations combined with correct solutions. So its new experiences, combined with correct solutions that is the key.

3) The Effortful study seems to be the key. Not just study. it talks a bunch about beginners who try hard then plateau, which i definitely think applies to poker multitablers. Getting in lots of hands can often just give you the same experience repeated rather than new experiences,and no solutions with it.

4) Motivation is really importnat. the study about pro soccer players' success linked to entering youth soccer with advantates was interesting. An argument for not killing off your confidence by playing too high stakes.

5) I'm not sure i agree on the transference thing. Other fields don't give you the experience set, but they often make aquiring the experience set much easier.
-g

[chicagoY]

Awesome link, I thank you.

[OrianasDaad]

I haven't read the article yet, but I'm reminded of ex-world chess champion Emanual Lasker's claim that he could turn an average chess player into an expert chess player in 100 hours. This claim was sometime in the 1920's, I believe, but I can't find my copy of his Manual. The article should be an interesting read.

[skillzilla]

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax


thats my biggest leak right there, i get semi good at something and then i relax and fail to reach the next level of skill