Book Club

My wife and I do a book club together every month. We both enjoy reading when we can find the time and it’s been a nice way to connect on a regular basis about what we’re reading. We’ve suffered through some duds, but that’s a hazard with book clubs and reading in general. I guess calling it reading is a bit of a stretch because I’m often listening to the books, but I digress. Our book this month was How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston. It was a good read and I’d recommend it to anyone. It even had some haunting precognitive familiarity to this election cycle.

I was discussing my book club with one of my students and he told me about a book that he had been reading lately called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. I’m only about 25 percent done with the book, so I can’t give it a full recommendation, but it’s been interesting so far. Coyle traveled around the world to investigate what he calls “hotbeds” of talent. Brazilian soccer players, Russian tennis players, the painters of the Italian Renaissance (If he traveled there, perhaps he’s his own talent hotbed), and even bank robbers were the focus of his research. He concludes that myelin is a big factor in learning actions and that there is a specific way to build up that myelin.

First, he suggests that focused, incremental progress through a process he calls deep practice is important. The example he gives is of a girl playing the clarinet. She finds a mode in her practice where she is progressing through a song and making small adjustments to make sure she hits each note, moving through the song slowly, but starting over each time and improving on the mistake she made the previous time through. By the end of six minutes of practice, she has improved from stilted and off tune to a flowing control of the song.

Then, referring to the Brazilian sport of Futsal, he notes that a high volume of this deep practice is the other factor in building myelin and building a talent hotbed. This sport is similar to soccer but the ball is smaller and heavier, it’s played on a small indoor court, and it’s five players per side. This results in tighter spaces, a greater need for precision passing and dribbling, and many more touches per game. This repeated deep practice is what created the greats of Brazilian soccer, starting with Pele and progressing to Ronaldinho and Neymar.

Like I said, I haven’t read the whole book yet, so I’m not sure I am completely right, but these factors sounded awfully familiar to me. Online poker in the early 2000s was a wonderful place to hone your skills as a poker player. One of the hotbeds of poker in that time frame was the 2+2 Single Table Tournament (STT) forum. Here you found people like Peter Jetten, David Benefield, Andrew Robl, and Phil Galfond. There were others that were well known for a while and got out of poker. I was and still am friends with David, so I had some tangential connection to this group and kept my eyes on them. They were putting in tons of volume at STTs on Party Poker and they were improving incrementally. I remember leeching off of their preflop strategies and them developing at an incredible rate. They developed some ideas about min-raising and limping the button when short in STTs that were tough to deal with for a while. Then they all started transitioning to no-limit cash and then pot-limit Omaha. In every one of these disciplines, all of them crushed. Sure, it’s possible that they’re all just better at poker than the average person. They might have brains that were meant for poker. I think it’s more likely that, as Coyle suggests, they put in a very high volume of deep practice and encouraged each other to get better over lots of volume in a very short span of time.

Here’s the bad news: The vast majority of us will never be as good at poker as David Benefield, Peter Jetten, Andrew Robl, and Phil Galfond. They’re end boss level players, the top .00001 percent of poker minds, and it seems as if they just keep getting better and better.

There’s good news though. If Coyle is right and deep practice and high volume leads to new neurological paths and well-developed myelin, we can contribute to the poker talent hotbed or even start our own new one.

If the book has been good for me in any way it’s this: it has reinforced for me the importance of focused, deep practice and encouraged me to be more diligent about finding some dedicated study time each week to work on some areas of my game that are lacking. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG