I recently read that Colin Cowherd was leaving ESPN radio after being a personality there for 12 years. His morning show aired from 7 a.m. – 10 a.m. in Las Vegas. I’m not always up at that time, and I don’t always listen to the radio when I am, but I probably caught 5% or so of his broadcasts over the past few years. I enjoyed them.
Cowherd is not your typical sports radio host. He would often go off on tangents that were thought-provoking. Sometimes related to sports, but often not.
(This article was written before I knew Cowherd made some comments to the effect that baseball is simpler than other sports. His evidence of that claim was that MLB has so many talented but uneducated players from the Dominican Republic! I’m embarrassed for him that he said this. I believe it came out much more racist that he intended. It doesn’t eliminate the admiration I’ve long had for him.)
A recent topic of his that interested me dealt with that fact that most guys think they are not that much different from professional athletes. Colin said that most of us think that if it wasn’t for our high school coach who was blind as a bat and benched us way back when, we could have made it in college and then in the pros.
That’s just not true. Colleges play maybe the best 5% of high school athletes. Pros use less than 1% of college athletes. The 12th man “bench-warmer” on a National Basketball Association team was an all star back in college. Back in high school, this guy was one of the best in the state. And now he’s barely in the NBA. The stars in the league are that much better still.
What makes them that much better? It’s a combination of size, speed, strength, fast-twitch muscle fibers, pain tolerance, and work ethic, plus the ability to succeed under intense pressure, bounce back from various setbacks, and a bunch of other things. Being in the right place at the right time can help, of course, but most of us couldn’t take advantage of such an opportunity even if it presented itself.
After listening to Colin’s rant (or at least the part of it I heard), I began to muse on whether this was also true for professional gamblers. I’ve come to the opinion that a very similar phenomenon exists in “my” world.
There are a number of players who come to my classes and really struggle learning strategies for the various games. That’s not a slam on them. Each of us has difficulty learning certain things. But the fact remains that learning the strategies for playing the various hands is the simplest part of succeeding at video poker. Learning the nuances of slot clubs, promotions, comparing casinos, keeping your welcome, choosing which drawings to enter and how many entries to earn — these are all much more difficult things to master.
There are people who come up and ask me, “On Video Poker for Winners I can play 9/6 Jacks or Better with 98% accuracy. Is that good enough?” I struggle with my answer. If Richard Munchkin asked me that (in addition to being my co-host on Gambling with an Edge he’s a successful gambler in many games), it would be easy to tell him, “100% accuracy should be your goal. It’s a simple game. Don’t bug me with such stupid questions.” He has the potential to get the game down perfectly. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.
But if someone I don’t know asks me the same question, I’m not sure if they have the same potential. While the game is simple for a gambling professional, mastering it is beyond the skills of many people. How many? I have no solid number. I don’t know if 40% or 60% or some other number of people have the potential to succeed, assuming they apply themselves. I do believe that more than 75% of wannabes have the potential to play video poker well enough to earn cheaper-than-retail vacations. But the number who could support themselves at an enviable level? Probably fewer than 5% have that potential and less than one-half of one percent actually put in the effort to end up there.
At the same time, if somebody used to be at the 96% level and has now studied long enough and hard enough to be at the 98% level, that’s progress deserving of praise. I wouldn’t want to criticize such an improvement.
I usually give a vague answer such as, “My personal goal is to learn the strategy 100% accurately. Not everybody is as obsessed with the level of accuracy that I am.” This answer tells them that if they want to “be like Bob Dancer” they need to keep studying, while at the same time, it gives them room to forgive themselves if they don’t want to (or can’t) get that good.
Professional gamblers do not have to play all games at the elite level. Michael Jordan, in the discussion for “greatest basketball player of all time,” didn’t do so well at baseball. He rose to the high minor leagues (which is better than 99+% of other people ever achieve), but since he was in such a lofty position in the basketball world, “only” getting to the 99+% level is considered a failure for him. Those are tough shoes to walk in!
On a personal note, I probably studied backgammon for 10,000 hours way back when. I was a very strong intermediate player, but I just didn’t have whatever it took to be elite. I was technically proficient enough to make a living at this game if I would have had the social skills required to keep getting into games with less competent players. Unfortunately, my technical skills were better than my social skills. Also, the less competent players largely drifted away from the game as the better players consistently cleaned their clocks. Fortunately I was able to recognize this and not keep pouring money into a bottomless pit.
There are gamblers at every game imaginable that don’t have what it takes to be a successful pro. Many of them keep playing anyway. Sometimes at great expense. They love the game and think that they’ve just been running bad and that some day it will all turn around. Unfortunately, the games are getting tougher. If you can’t make it today at video poker, I don’t like your chances at all in two or three years. My crystal ball tells me that being successful at video poker will continue to get tougher, not easier.
My crystal ball also tells me that the ones who have been studying hard at video poker will be the ones most likely to succeed at this game down the road.