What Game Are You Playing?
Capital Thinking · Issue #975 · View online
We often focus on trying to be brilliant, yet many great people get far more mileage out of avoiding making stupid mistakes.
Amateurs win the game when their opponent loses points, experts win the game by gaining points.
Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance
Shane Parrish | Farnam Street:
Scientist and statistician Simon Ramo wrote a fascinating little book that few people have ever bothered to read: Extraordinary Tennis Ordinary Players.
The book isn’t fascinating because I love tennis. I don’t. However, in the book Ramo identifies the crucial difference between the Winner’s Game and a Loser’s Game.
Ramo believed that tennis could be subdivided into two games: the professionals and the rest of us.
The game looks the same from the outside. After all, players play by the same rules and scoring. And they play on the same court. Sometimes they even share the same equipment. In short, the essential elements of the game are the same.
Sometimes amateurs believe they are professionals, but professionals never believe they are amateurs. Professionals know they are not playing the same game as amateurs.
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. -Charlie Munger
Winning or Losing Points
Professionals win points whereas amateurs lose them.
In a professional game, each player, nearly equal in skill, plays a nearly perfect game rallying back and forth until one player hits the ball just beyond the reach of his opponent. This is about positioning, control, spin. It’s a game of inches and sometimes centimeters. This is not how amateurs play.
In his 1975 essay, The Loser’s Game, Charles Ellis calls professional tennis a “Winner’s Game.” While there is some degree of skill and luck involved, the game is generally determined by the actions of the winner.
Amateur tennis is an entirely different game. Not in how it is played or the rules but, rather, in how it’s won. Long and powerful rallies are generally a thing of the past. Mistakes are frequent. Balls are constantly hit into nets or out of bounds. Double faults are nearly as common as faults.
Amateur tennis is an entirely different game. Not in how it is played or the rules but, rather, in how it’s won. Long and powerful rallies are generally a thing of the past. Mistakes are frequent. Balls are constantly hit into nets or out of bounds. Double faults are nearly as common as faults.
The amateur duffer seldom beats his opponent, but he beats himself all the time. The victor in this game of tennis gets a higher score than the opponent, but he gets that higher score because his opponent is losing even more points.
Losing Less
Ramo found this out because he gave up trying to keep track of conventional scores — “Love,” “Fifteen All,” etc. Instead, he simply looked at points won versus points lost.
In expert tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are won; in amateur tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are lost. In other words, professional tennis is a Winner’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the winner – and amateur tennis is a Loser’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the loser. The two games are, in their fundamental characteristic, not at all the same. They are opposites.
After discovering that there are, in effect, two different games and realizing that a generic strategy will not work for both games, he devised a clever strategy by which ordinary players can win by losing less and letting the opponent defeat themselves.… if you choose to win at tennis – as opposed to having a good time – the strategy for winning is to avoid mistakes. The way to avoid mistakes is to be conservative and keep the ball in play, letting the other fellow have plenty of room in which to blunder his way to defeat, because he, being an amateur will play a losing game and not know it.I
If you’re an amateur your focus should be on avoiding stupidity, not seeking brilliance.
Investors Bet on Someone Else’s Game
This brings to memory something about Warren Buffett and Ben Graham.