How Did You Learn That?: The Art of Poker
Andrew Barry and Chris Sparks talk about how Chris intentionally built his skills to become one of the best poker players in the world, the importance of paying attention and staying present, and how to increase the power of the feedback loop.
Audio recording below (1h20m). Show notes and full transcript following.
Resources mentioned:
Experiment Without Limits (workbook)
Performance Assessment (identify your biggest opportunities for growth)
Team Performance Training (Chris’s Group Coaching Program)
Show Notes
Chris’ systematic approach. (2:24-4:19)
What got Chris into poker? (4:20-11:39)
Moments of conscious and unconscious incompetence. (11:40-14:36)
What makes a good poker player. (14:37-18:18)
Introducing the concept of a range. (18:28-22:04)
Game theory optimization. (22:05-28:41)
What does it take to be in your prime for poker. (28:42-31:35)
How to stay competitive. (31:36-34:00)
The blue oceans theory applied to business. (34:06-38:29)
Learning by coaching others. (38:30-43:45)
What coaching sessions look like that are more about decision making within the hand instead of the outcome. (43:46-49:32)
How Chris uses the beginner’s mind to play the devil’s advocate role. (49:35-51:44)
How to generate the willpower to follow a process and dedicate yourself to learning. (52:08-55:27)
It is possible to make something feel like play in an instant? Like turning on a switch. (55:28-56:40)
Gaging our curiosity. Chris Sparks: “The only thing that is limiting is our ability to go deep” (56:41-57:33)
The power of the ‘why’ questions. (57:34-59:47)
Why do we struggle so much with slowing down to be able to speed up? (59:48-1:02:38)
The criticality of feedback. (1:02:40-1:04:26)
Lessons learned. (1:04:34-1:06:17)
The OODA loop. (1:06:20-1:08:35)
O – Observe. (1:08:35-1:09:49)
O – Orienting. (1:09:50-1:11:34)
DA – Decide and Act. (1:11:35-1:13:44)
Chris: “Learning how to learn is the meta-skill”. We can accomplish anything that we want. (1:14:35-1:16:05)
Podcast Transcript
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris: I like to say that learning how to learn is the meta-skill, because I believe that we can accomplish anything that we want. That what we do while we're on this earth is only limited by our imagination.
Andrew: And welcome back to another episode of "How Did You Learn That?", a show where we hear from people who have spent years intentionally pursuing mastery in a skill. We unpack how they learned it, and we uncover lessons you can apply at home. I'm your host Andrew Barry, and joining me this week was Chris Sparks. Chris was one of the twenty best poker players in the world. He's also the CEO and founder of Forcing Function, a consultancy and coaching business for high performers. Chris's approach to mastering the art and the meta-skills required for poker was incredibly deliberate and rigorous, and he has taken a lot of those lessons now and applies them in his business. He started his career—his poker career, that is—back in 2001 when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, for all you pokerheads out there. And in our conversation, we go through how Chris intentionally built his skills to become one of the best poker players in the world. We talk about the importance of paying attention and staying present. Taking on the feedback you're getting from the actions you get out into the world. Being assertive in your decision-making based on that feedback, and then taking action so that you can increase the power of that feedback loop.
I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot from Chris, and I hope you do too. Enjoy.
All right, Chris. Thanks for coming on the show.
Chris: Pleased to be here, Andrew. Thanks for having me.
Andrew: I've been really looking forward to this conversation, and have been reading a lot of your stuff and listening to a lot of your conversations over the last two, three years, I think. You have a fascinating story, which we'll get into in a second, how you became a top 20 professional poker player. But I want to start with—right now you're a professional poker player, but you're also a professional businessman. You're just very professional in everything that you do. When do you think you decided, intentionally decided, to become professional?
Chris: I can't but help but think of the Steven Pressfield designation between an amateur and a professional. And I think of it—I know you talk a lot about deliberate practice, and I think that's a good distinction: I try to be very systematic in everything I pursue. I view—in a large part thanks to poker—the world through a game lens, and any game that I want to participate in, I want to win. Whether there's an external competitor or I'm just competing with the ghost of myself. And I always try to deconstruct my goals into those critical subskills or mindsets or network—what is that leverage point which allows me to maximally move forward towards this North Star? Because something that I've realized that there's generally a most direct path, and that's what this approach allows me to discover.
Andrew: So have you always thought like that? Like back in college . . . I know your story kind of starts in college, around 2001, I think, when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker. But like even before that, were you always thinking like that, or was it something that you made a switch?
Chris: You know, I think it was always there, but it's definitely strengthened over time. So maybe I'll start with what got me into poker in the first place, and that might demonstrate—
Andrew: Yeah, great.
Chris: So I think like many young men, I was very drawn to games. It started as video games, whether, you know, Super Nintendo or later on computers. And then Xbox-type stuff. But I had my early success in this game called Microsoft Ants, where I was the best player in the world. Which . . . It sounds a lot more impressive than it really was, 'cause it's a pretty small player pool. Maybe a few hundred players at its peak. But Ants is a kind of early version of Starcraft with very kid-friendly . . . Like, you have real-time action where you're trying to coordinate many actions, macro and micro, at the same time, against other players. So, accumulate resources, stop other players from accumulating resources. And that's when I really started to apply this systematic approach to games, because there were clearly things that allowed someone to win even if they wouldn't be directly characterized as 'skill.' Just every game, due to the finite nature of its rules, have certain things that can be exploited in order to come out on top. And so I was always trying to discover these hidden exploitations.
After Ants, I started playing on the Yahoo suite. So some dabbling in chess, which I've honestly never been that good at. But I had the most success in gin rummy, where once again I achieved a perfect rating in the gin equivalent of ELO. To my knowledge, I'm only one of ten players who's ever done that. And that was a game where you're playing one-on-one against another player, where you have cards in your hand that are held the entire time. That's the difference between traditional rummy, you never put down your hand. And so there's a lot of incomplete information. You're trying to guess what your opponent has in their ten card hand based on the cards they pick up and put down. And there's a large amount of luck that's in gin, so being one of the top players, I still only won about sixty-five percent of the time. And the big part of what I took away from gin is the deception element, that I'm telling this story based on the cards that I pick up and put down, and so if I can change that narrative, I can get my opponent to hold cards that I don't need and to discard the cards that I need.
And I started to—I think I was about fourteen at the time. I started to make friends within the gin world, and a couple of them tipped me off to poker, which was very much in its infancy. The first sites were popping up. And I started playing free roll tournaments on my parents' dial-up internet where it blew me away that, wow. I can invest nothing, and if I outlast these ten thousand players, maybe I'll win a hundred dollars. Which is a lot of money when you're fourteen. Until someone calls in, and I was kicked off of the tournament, because there was only one phone line and only one computer. And yeah, I played these for fun. I made a little bit of money, nothing crazy. But I really started to get serious about the game and get very interested.
And everything really, really accelerated. I think a lot of luck is timing, and happening to be paddling before the wave comes. I started college in 2004, right after, as you mentioned, Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker. And so poker was everywhere. It was on ESPN, seeing it like 24 hours a day, Travel Channel, et cetera. And if you were going to hang out as a college male in the dorms, you were playing poker. And so I already had a little bit of that games background, and it allowed me to have a little bit of a head start. But that's when I really started playing, particularly in-person underground campus games, and when I found out that some of the players who I thought weren't particularly good were making decent amounts of money playing for real money online, it's like, "Oh. Well I'm better than them, of course. I should be making money."
So I started playing some sit and go, which is like nine-player, one-table tournaments. And then multi-table tournaments. Started having some success my sophomore year, where I would finish my last class on Thursday and essentially just play from Thursday night until Monday morning straight, with you know, some naps in there. And a lot of weekends I would put in a hundred dollars, and I would wake up on Monday morning with twenty thousand. And it wasn't so much ability. It felt like, if you had a pulse, you could win money at this point, because there was such a boom, there were so many new players, there was no information out there other than what people saw on ESPN, so no one knew what they were doing. And it was very much a golden age where, despite being way over-committed as a college student—in terms of being ambitious in school clubs and stuff—I was able to do pretty well and, you know, start to pay off my college tuition.
I switched over to cash games, and my junior year, after I had had some big success in tournaments, I wanted a new challenge. Cash games are where you can buy in with money and you can cash out at any time. So you're playing with the money in front of you. And this is what I'm primarily known for these days, is cash games.
Andrew: Building a pot.
Chris: Building pots, exactly. And I immediately jumped in and started playing twenty-four games of low-stakes cash games at a time, which is about a decision every one to two seconds. And didn't win at first. I was 'paying a lot of tuition,' as I like to put it, up front. But just through the really tight feedback loops of playing lots of hands and figuring out what other players were doing that was working, I quickly got to the point that I was making a decent income from it.
Fast forward, I graduated at a pretty unlucky time to graduate. 2008. I was going into the auto industry, which put me in a hiring purgatory. So I had accepted a position, but the position wasn't ready for me. And so for the first time, I was able to dedicate myself to poker. I asked, "What would it look like to treat this as a full-time job?" And so the ten to twenty hours a week around classes became eighty hours a week of intense study and practice. And within about a year and a half, you know, with the help of other players, that's when I reached that point of being ranked in the top twenty.
Andrew: So, when you were on that journey, did you have moments of conscious or unconscious incompetence? Were you able to identify the things you needed to work on and be deliberate in that?
Chris: I think poker by definition is primarily unconscious, and I . . . I think a lot of the inflection points in my game were usually brought about by someone doing something that either really annoyed me—they made a play against me that I didn't know what the correct response was and it put me in a difficult position—or I just stumbled upon something by accident that worked, and the opportunity was trying to deconstruct why it worked and seeing if that tactic extended to other situations. There's a lot of trial and error that needs to happen, and so there's really no substitute for just playing lots and lots and lots of hands. At this point in my career, I have played over two million hands. And the key is . . . I touched on this notion of a feedback loop, is to really close that loop. A lot of players I see don't have that meta-cognitive ability to . . . they make the same mistakes over and over again, and never try to peel back the onion of really why these patterns are reoccurring, or to just move more towards the exploration, giving themselves permission to do things that they could look really, really dumb, and could be very large mistakes, but through this exploration discovering new branches on the game tree.
Every session that I played, I would review the hands afterwards. My goal was to learn something new every time that I sat down. What a lot of people don't realize about poker, and I think applies to lots of other things in life—although at varying speeds—I mentioned in the early days of poker, you basically needed a pulse. It's like, if you knew the hands to play, you didn't do anything really dumb, it was hard not to make money. But as people got more experienced, as technology progressed, players got better very, very quickly. It's generally an exponential curve, where just in order to maintain your standing, you need to be twice as good every year. And so not only did I need to improve, I needed to improve faster than the other people I was playing against. I think this was a really big part of it: I was making adjustments to my game on a daily basis.
Andrew: Yeah. So we're gonna get into some of that rigor that you've put into your poker career, and I think is a big part of your performance coaching business, Forcing Function. Before we go to that, before we start to like put a structure around all of this, I want to talk about what makes a really good poker player. And I want to start with . . . you've written, you will be releasing soon a blog post which I've had the privilege of reading a draft of, which is amazing, and I'm super excited for people to get to read that. Before we go into some of those points in there, I want to touch on one that you mentioned a little bit already in your gin rummy career. You talked about this before, this idea of cultivating a persona of crazy, and the unpredictability of it. Tell me more about that. Why is that important?
Chris: Sure. So I think I can summarize it by saying the less predictable you are, the less others will try to predict you. So poker and gin rummy, as we are discussing before, are games of incomplete information where we are holding cards in our hand that the other players don't know. Even if they are able to play a "perfect strategy," if they don't have a good sense of what the cards in my hand are, they can't play well. And so I like to refer to it as playing well—playing a good technical game. Right? You have the mathematical side, probabilities, et cetera. That is table stakes. Like, that is just a requirement to sit down. If you're making mathematical mistakes, you're going to lose. The assumption is you understand the technical parts of the game as far as which hands win at showdown, what your percentages are to connect with the board if you have a drawing hand, et cetera. Where all of the edge or advantage takes place is both in your ability to discern what cards your opponent is holding, and your ability to tell a story about the cards that you are holding, which leads your opponent to do something that you want them to do.
So that skill development began for me in gin and extended into poker. I realized there was a lot of power in understanding human psychology. Being able to tell a story that got my opponents to do what I would want them to do. They would walk into traps. And at the same point that even though I was playing through a screen, right? All I could see was someone's avatar, what they type into the chat, the numbers they bet (if they bet 450 or 456) or the timing with which they click, do they bet quickly or do they hesitate before clicking, there's a lot of noise in this data. But at this same time, there is a person on the other side of the screen. This person has deep psychological needs. They have a varying emotional state. They have mental models, ways of looking at the world. And if I could find signal in this noise with what they were telling me, both consciously (the story they were trying to tell, the deception) and subconsciously (the things that they were revealing without even realizing it) I would be able to accumulate an edge, in that I would be able to see through the screen and have a good idea of the cards they were playing.
Andrew: That's amazing that you can do it without body language. So you were able to, just over repetition know . . . Let's just go into the whole bit. So were you sort of like creating assumptions on how people would respond and then seeing if that reflected in the data that you can see?
Chris: Exactly. So this is a good time to introduce the concept of a range. And so, most beginning pokers think that you're trying to put your opponent on a particular hand. Like, "Oh, I think he has a flush,” or “oh, I think he has ace/king.” These types of very exacting predictions. When in actuality—
Andrew: Your hypothesis, right?
Chris: A hypothesis, correct. But in actuality, you're trying to place your opponent on a range of hands. Or this is the set of possible hands that your opponent could have based on the actions that they've taken throughout the hand. And so obviously some of those hands in the range are more likely. Either they occur more often . . . So, example. Like, unpaired hands happen more than paired hands. That type of thing. Or based on the actions they've taken in the hand, certain parts of the range become less likely. Right? If they play in a very strong way, lots of bets and raises, that makes complete garbage hands less likely, so you weight those less in their range.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And so what I'm able to do by understanding their psychology, the patterns they do, the way that they like to play certain hands, I'm able to weight their range in such a way that I have a very good idea of where I stand. And it really reduces down to, "Are they weak, or are they strong?" So by developing these patterns . . . And your question around testing assumptions, because there's a range here—if they show up with a hand that is inside of that range that I assigned to them, that actually doesn't tell me all that much. It tells me a little bit if they have a hand that I thought was really rare, that it was a low-probability event, but what tells me a lot is if they show up with a hand that I didn't even think was possible for them to have. And that's the clue that my assumptions are incorrect.
Andrew: Right.
Chris: And so either my . . . generally it means that this player is thinking differently about the game, at least at this particular moment, than I had thought. Revealing this invalid assumption, casting some light on it, becomes a learning opportunity. What could I have known before the hand that would have allowed me to include this as a possibility?
Andrew: And the outcome there is to try and . . . It's a binary outcome, I suppose, in a strong hand or a weak hand, you're trying to get closer and closer to a tight conclusion around this binary outcome. And it's relative to your hand as well. Or does that—
Chris: Yep. And so this is where it gets slightly complicated. There are levels to this. So not only am I trying to predict what range of hands my opponent can have, I'm trying to predict the range of hands my opponent thinks that I have. My actual hand is less important than my opponent's perception of my hand. A lot of my actions are determined by, "Does my opponent think that I am strong or weak?" And my range: “How does it compare to my opponent's range? Is it stronger or weaker?” And so in that way, I have to tell a story that is in line, that is consistent with our shared knowledge.
Andrew: So this reminds me of something you've been talking about recently, I think. This idea of . . . I think it's called "Game Theory Optimization." So like, memorizing optimal plays. Basically people becoming machines. And I think you see this as well, in chess, where you've got some players who, you know, that's what they do, and you've got Magnus Carlsen, who relies on intuition. And you talked about intuition being internalized experience. So, is this kind of how you would encapsulate what we've been talking about now? Is this a deliberate process of developing intuition?
Chris: Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. So the first . . . I think let's use chess as the example that you brought up. So, what you're seeing in the chess world today (and this is second hand, I'm not a top chess player) is that the first—A typical chess game goes, say, sixty to a hundred moves. But the first twenty moves of a high-level grandmaster chess game is essentially what you call "solved," in that the “correct” response to the previous move is known. And so it's almost like the game starts at move twenty-one. And where Magnus Carlsen has really distanced himself from the field of late is that he has been playing positions that are believed to be losing positions . . . Your goal in the end of this twenty-second early-game sequence is to be up one point, which is the equivalent of one pawn. And he is playing an early sequence, where the computer (which has essentially solved the game, because it's a perfect information game) says that he should be down half a pawn. And so no player would ever play this position. But the advantage that he has is that he's played this position so many times that from move twenty-onward he has a large advantage. Because his opponents haven't studied these "losing" positions, they find themselves making mistakes.
And this is a bit of what's happening in the poker world. There's been this progression of technological innovation which is really forcing players to adapt. So, in the early going of poker, it was very much intuitive. And you just tried things, and see what works, and you just figure things out over time. You had this first generation of players—I would count myself in the second generation that followed—that essentially were just very good at figuring things out on their own. And second generation, you start to have more sharing of information. So high-ticket courses, E-books, coaching becomes prominent. There's a lot more of this acquiring information that others have discovered. By triangulating this, you start to converge on best practices. And so everyone's style starts to become a little bit more equivalent. There's less making very-obvious mistakes. And so the third . . . Sort of the third generation of poker is you have statistical tools, where you're able to input hands into a database and discover both how players play on average, so you can craft your style against that, but you can also see, "On this flop, in this situation, players have top pair or better x percentage of the time." And so the game became much more about who has done more study, either statistical or modeling situations?
And in this most recent generation, which I think of as the game theory optimal approach, you have the game tree being solved, where you input a situation into a computer, and it tells you what the game theory optimal or "most correct" approach is. More and more what you're seeing is that the top players, or even players at the mid-levels, are playing a theoretically unexploitable or "perfect" style, that they cannot be beat. They're not necessarily making the most, but this style is “unbeatable.” It's really, really changed the game, because you know, obviously there's less advantage to be had if the people are making less mistakes. But the piece that you referred to—"Play To Win: The Meta-Skills of High Stakes Poker"—is an exploration of . . . I am a bit of a dinosaur in poker terms. I have never used any of these game theory tools that I know a lot of my younger peers spend hours a day literally memorizing the solutions from these tools. What I believe is that these tools have become a crutch for these players. And similarly to what we've seen with Magnus Carlsen and the chess world, these players are extremely comfortable in these situations that come up very often that they've studied, but this becomes a crutch for them and they lose the ability to think critically. They have no intuition and become very uncomfortable outside of these spots which I call very 'central.'
So that's how I believe I'm able to maintain an advantage over these players: over the years I've seen so many of these long-tail events which don't occur very often, but I have more experience, I've actually studied them more. Where it gets really interesting is I am in control of the frequency of these long tail events. And so something that doesn't occur very often in the wild, I can play in such a way that I have home field advantage more often. That Magnus Carlsen example is a good one, in that a “losing play”—or at least what can look like a losing play—becomes a winning play.
Andrew: Yeah. You've talked about it as being a defensive strategy, and you've called it "the illusion of knowledge" as well. This idea of being the best technical player, versus actually just winning the next hand or the next tournament. And so . . . You touched on this a little bit now as well, but we were talking before, and you've also written about this, how you're kinda . . . You're past your prime as a poker player. You say the prime is your early twenties, you're in your early thirties now. So I guess two questions come to mind there. What is it about that age, those early twenties, that make you primed for poker, and then how are you managing to still stay competitive at, you know, ten years along?
Chris: So it's hard to quantify this, but we see in a lot of technical fields such as mathematics or physics or chess that a lot of careers peak early. In mathematics it's, you know, the age of like eighteen to twenty-one. Chess players generally are pretty young.
Andrew: Okay.
Chris: And I don't know where that is with poker, but I do see a decline in ability to think really, really deeply. I also think another factor is just both a much higher risk tolerance. Risk tolerance tends to go down as we get older. Part of this is just becoming more worldly, more aware of risks, less naïve. Or perhaps we have family considerations or we've learned the value of a dollar, what have you. But young players tend to be much more fearless, which is quite an asset in the poker world. I think another factor is just lack of distractions. So when I was that age, early twenties, my life completely revolved around poker. I had poker dreams. All of my friends were poker friends. I spent all of my time thinking about ways to improve my poker game. And as I get older, accumulate other interests, a more diverse friend circle, become a little bit more balanced, poker takes up much less of my mind space, and thus I . . . It's harder to . . . I get more stuck in the shallow, and it's harder to go really deep into things.
So I think those are three factors that contribute. First, just plain cognitive brain power, ability to think really deeply about puzzles. Risk tolerance, you know, willingness to put lots of money at risk or to look really dumb. And you know, less stuck in more habits. And then finally just pure mind share.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a great summary. How have you managed to stay competitive then, knowing those advantages that others may have over you?
Chris: I think that there's a strong experience component. As you said, I believe that intuition is really internalized experience, and so just having five to ten years of experience on these players . . . You know, the old dogs know some tricks. And I think I often win the mental game. I often see these players where on their best day, they are clearly better than me, and I'm happy to admit that. I think I play at my best more often than they do, both that I'm more disciplined, but also I'm aware when I'm not at my best, and I don't play during those times. There's a little bit of a selection bias—if I'm sitting down at the table, it's because I think I have an advantage.
I also think that at this point I'm very, very aware of where my edge comes from and when I have an edge. Poker players talk a lot about game selection, but I think a lot of up-and-coming players have a little bit of an ego and they play in games against really tough players where their edge is marginal or nonexistent. And this can be definitely a way to improve, but you know, variance is a very cruel mistress. I only play in games where I have an edge. That allows me—on average, the hands that I play I'm making more, and a lot of my how I craft my life around the game is geared towards getting into good games, which is . . . At the end of the day, it's a relativistic skill game. I like to say, "If you're a Little Leaguer playing tee-ball, you can be the MVP every year." All I need to do is be better than who I'm playing against. I think this is a good takeaway for entrepreneurs and investors as well: understanding the market you're in, understanding who's on the other side of the trade, that it's generally beneficial to find a blue ocean somewhere that's not as competitive, where you can have a relative advantage.
Andrew: Yeah. So that idea of blue oceans, you talk about that in the upcoming piece. There's this fascinating concept to me in poker of picking the right table, right? Where you need . . . You called it a 'recreational player.' Kind of the fish amongst the sharks. And if there's nine seats and you're all sharks, no one's really making money, but if there's at least one fish then the flow of money can go to the sharks. And you talk about being in trading, investing . . . Any other ways that you see this apply in life or business?
Chris: I think business is a good application. This is something that I talk about with my performance clients pretty often: recognizing where they have a personal advantage that matches up with an opportunity. And I think there is too much emphasis on ideas and "what do I want to do? What interests me?" versus "what am I uniquely positioned to do, and what is the opportunity which is not being served?" There tends to be a lot of groupthink, and everyone converging on the same opportunity. I've seen this a lot, very interestingly, in the coaching space of late. Which . . . I don't know how I got in early to coaching. I think when I started, I was a little bit embarrassed to talk about myself as a coach, in that, hey. It's like a those-who-can't-teach type of thing. And that was about four years ago, where . . . You know, the idea of a coach was like a life coach who's going to talk about your limiting beliefs and was just a highly paid therapist who's gonna reflect things back to you.
I made very much an effort to distance myself from that, both in terms of identity and positioning, in that everything that I do is very quantifiable. We set metrics and milestones together, and my value is determined upon my ability to accelerate the achievement of those milestones. And what I've seen which is very interesting—and this is in the about the past six to twelve months—is you have a lot of successful founders and investors now moving into the coaching world. Which I find very interesting. And it kind of tips off that everyone tends to see the same opportunities. Right? We're all within the same filter bubble, and if you're reading the same things as everyone else you tend to think the same as everyone else, and so the conclusion here is to think a little bit differently and to look for this blue ocean, which is what is that opportunity which is not being served, and where does that intersect with my unique experience?
When I talk to someone like David Perell, I love the way he puts it, of a "personal monopoly." What is it that you're most uniquely qualified to do that no one else can do? And I've really modeled my consulting practice and my classes around, "there is no one else out there who can talk about what it takes to perform at the highest levels of a cognitive sport such as poker but has also read every book and taken every course out there on productivity and team management and performance.” That intersection is uniquely mine, and thus I can have a completely unique offering or interface to give value to the world in this form of service.
Andrew: Yeah. Curiosity, man. Like that . . . So much of it comes down to that, right? Just being insanely curious and then following that desire and that pursuit to learn as much as you can. And then, like you say, share that with the world. You talked about—
Chris: I think that intelligence is curiosity, really.
Andrew: Yeah, I agree. I think that's a great, yeah. I really like that. And you can cultivate it, right? To me there's a jump as well from that curiosity and then being able to share that with others, and you sort of . . . You know, there's that well-worn phrase that if you can't do, teach. But you talked a lot about how you actually learned a lot by teaching others. Even in your early poker days you were a poker coach, and became a bit of an expert on a certain type of game and was sort of a go-to person for that. Talk a little bit about how coaching others with their game helped you learn the game yourself.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I do think the best way to learn is by teaching, and that was a really big motivator for me to start Forcing Function: I thought that was the best forcing function or accelerant for me to determine what the commonalities of achievement are. This is something that I'd stumbled upon in my poker days. I know you talk a lot about the importance of mentors, and I think there's this misnomer that your mentor is this grey-haired long-bearded guru who has retired from the top of the business ladder or is sitting cross-legged in a cave somewhere.
Andrew: Right.
Chris: But I believe that the best mentors that we have generally take the form of peers. This was the biggest accelerant for me, and where I saw myself start to take off in poker: when I started to take on coaching clients. So I ended up coaching about a thousand hours across over a hundred players over a few years, and the thing was that I learned almost as much from those who I was coaching as they learned from me. So I had this broad sample size of what other players—who were also very similarly intelligent and successful—were doing, right? I was identifying lots of my own blind spots and unknown unknowns, discovering new ways of approaching the game that I would not have come across on my own, but also by needing to distill and apply my core principles of how to play a hand and how to conduct yourself as a poker professional, I made these principles very accessible for me when I needed them most, to the point that I could call them up at will, so that they've been just honed and compressed so often that my game just sharpened over time.
So yeah, I really do think that is something that should be incorporated into any learning pursuit, whether that's learning of knowledge or development of a skill, is finding a way to teach it to others. There is no other way to illuminate the gaps in your own understanding than being forced to explain what you understand to someone else. And so, so often when I was talking about a hand to a coaching client, I would realize I was just talking in thin air, here. I don't actually know what I'm talking about here. That was an opportunity for me to solidify my understanding in this situation. Both the immediate motivation of, you know, "I'm being paid a lot of money, I don't want to look dumb or make this guy feel like he's not getting his worth," but for myself, because I know I'm gonna be facing this situation as a player, and when there's thousands of dollars on the line I don't want to be sitting there thinking, "Oh, well, I have no idea what to do. Okay. I'm just gonna click a button." I want to know what I'm going to do before that situation comes up.
So, yeah. I think that becoming the mentor yourself is actually the best accelerant.
Andrew: Yeah, I love that. Realizing you're bullshitting someone—the conscious incompetence that you uncover from that is incredibly powerful, and it's then figuring out what to do with that. Maria Konnikova talks about this in her book as well, the process that she went through in working with coaches to learn poker, and how important it was to focus on process, not results. And I know you've talked a lot about that as well. Can you talk a little bit about what a coaching session looked like that you were giving that did that? That was more about the decision-making in the hand as opposed to the outcome of the hand?
Chris: Yeah. And first, I highly recommend Maria's book, The Biggest Bluff. Short version of her story is she was a psychologist by background, had never played poker before, and with the help of mentors went from being a complete beginner to a pretty good player who had some success in the tournament arena in a very short time. In about twelve to eighteen months, which is very fast in terms of a poker trajectory. And so it's very illuminating to see both how her theoretical understanding—of how we think about risk and how we perceive ourselves and our own biases as well as take advantage of the biases of others—that that theoretical understanding did not immediately translate to the table, but I think she does as good of a job as anyone I've seen to communicate the lessons that poker has to teach to a player who is less proficient. Much better than I could. So I highly recommend the book. What I have seen in those terms of thinking about process rather than result is that most pursuits in life are incredibly noisy. You know, we touched on a few. Business, investing. Obviously any relationship. Our day-to-day performance.
There's a lot of noise and a lot of luck, and so society tends to reward those who have good outcomes. This is the classic Buffett talks about: "Would you rather be the world's best lover but everyone thinks that you're the worst, or would you rather be world's worst lover and everyone thinks that you're the best?" If you're a part of something that is successful, all it really proves for effect is that you're pretty good at picking winners. And even that can be a lot of luck and circumstance. Poker is a constant inquiry process. And it's important to separate when an inquiry happens. When I'm playing, I want to be a hundred percent confident that what I'm doing is correct. While I'm making big decisions for large amounts of money is not the time to have an existential crisis, is not the time to question whether I know what I'm doing. You know, I have my best guess, and I'm going to act as if I have a hundred percent confidence.
But the key, and where a lot of people skip in their development, is taking that time outside of a session to question everything. To assume that every hand that I'm playing I can be playing a little bit better, and that any decision that I made might be wrong and trying to uncover that. To, in a programming term, to reward myself for finding a bug in my own thinking. And she really describes this process of constant inquiry into . . . The results of this hand don't matter. Don't even tell me who won the hand. Talk to me about your thought process. And so this leads me to what a coaching session was like: it’s just me asking very annoying questions which are usually some form of "why." Anything can be correct if the thought process is right. And a lot of times making a move in poker, a certain tactic, can look correct, but then a player describes the thought process behind it, what they were trying to accomplish, and it's obvious that what they were doing is completely wrong, because while it may have worked, it did not work in the way they were trying to make it work.
The most common question that I would ask is, "Why?" "Okay, you are betting. Why are you betting?" And they would say, "Oh, I want them to fold." "What hands do you want them to fold?" And they would say some hands. "Well, you beat all those hands. Why do you want those hands to fold? You should want those hands to call." And just by unpacking the rationale behind these decisions, I'm able to subtly mold, over time, those questions that a player asks themselves internally during a hand. And that's that leverage point that I apply today with clients: if I can get them to think about their work differently, how they structure their day, how they make decisions, how they choose what is important, what to prioritize, if I can get inside their head a little bit and reshape those questions that they ask themselves, they start to have better answers. And this starts to create positive feedback loops: now because their thinking process is more correct, or at least they're asking themselves the right questions, this creates a virtuous cycle of they start to have better results, which reinforces this better thinking process ad infinitum.
Andrew: This is good shit. This is getting into your system and your process, which I want to dive into in a second. But you . . . So you talk about those coaching moments. Have you been on the receiving end of that as well, where you . . . Cause it almost sounds like what's happening is you're applying a beginner's mind for people.
Chris: Yes.
Andrew: As almost a Devil's Advocate kind of role and helping them come to that conclusion themselves, right?
Chris: A hundred percent. Most of the advice that I have given over the years is a reminder to myself to apply this in the moment. You know, I see things that tend to generalize across, whether that's in poker or in performance, but the meta-skill is a self-understanding. A lot of that comes from the process of inquiry, of going deeper, beyond symptoms to core causes, which you know, if you think about this in terms of leverage points in a system, it's not just, "what actions am I doing?" It's, "What am I trying to achieve by taking these actions, and why is this outcome important to me?" And you keep peeling back these layers of the onion to both understand what we're trying to achieve, maybe we can find a more direct path that has less pain, less effort to achieve that same outcome, or we can identify places that the actions that we're taking are out of alignment, are irreconcilable with our goals.
Andrew: Yeah. So this is a big part of I think what I've seen as your journey through poker, and now you're applying it in your business and helping others in their businesses. And you know, a couple other things you talked about, for those listening as well, it's this idea of systems thinking. Important points there being leverage, bottlenecks, feedback loops. You mentioned a lot of those already. The concept of deliberate practice you've talked about as well. I think having habits and developing habits and this idea that nothing that isn't measured will ever improve.
And by the way, for those listening as well, Chris has got a great book on his website. You can download it for free, I think, called Experiment Without Limits, and a lot of this thinking is captured in there in a very actionable way. But my first question, before we get a little bit more into the specifics of that, and feel free to use the book as a reference point, is how do you generate the willpower to do all of this? Cause it's an incredibly rigorous process, and it can be quite frustrating to have to do these things which don't have immediate sort of signs of success, but it's, you know, these little things that add up. How do you generate the willpower for that?
Chris: I think my short answer is I try to minimize the amount of willpower necessary, because willpower is not a reliable source of motivation. It waxes and wanes. So thinking about this in a poker study context, obviously there are large financial incentives as well as peer validation incentives to improve, but still many players fail to put in the gym time required. And so for me that's turning that study into a routine or ritual that can be followed with minimal effort, with minimal maintenance costs, and to try to optimize for the interesting parts of that process so it feels a little bit more like play rather than work. And I think this applies to a productivity context: if I can solve for sitting down in my chair and opening up my web browser or the Word document or my task manager, I've already won. That ability to look into the void or to avoid flinching is the hardest part in all of this, because we're so geared towards what's comfortable. Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable is that meta-layer skill.
I honestly think that my levels of willpower, compared to the population at large, are probably pretty strong. But compared to those who I see as peers, those who I'm comparing myself to—for better or worse—or who act as a baseline for my trajectory and how I'm progressing, I think my levels of willpower are embarrassingly low, which anyone who's spent a weekend with me can attest to. What I'm very good at is making what I want to do as automatic and systematic as possible, so I'm not relying on motivation. I have put things in place that make what I want to do easier to do. And this is a concept that's so near and dear to me that I named the company after it. This is what I refer to as a forcing function. The thing I put in place one time that changes my default infinitely into the future. I'm trying to pay the cost once, making that one-time heavy lift, so that I don't need to make that effort every time that I want to try to do something.
Andrew: Yeah. And you also talked about and you mentioned that idea of making it fun, making it seem like play. And I'm wondering if that's possible. Do you think it's possible to do that, to turn that on like a switch, or that you . . . It does require some preconditioning, or . . . I don't know. Something that already exists there, that makes that thing fun to you? Either you're really good at it, you just get joy out of it. What . . . Do you know what I mean? Like, do you think it is . . . Can you turn that on, to make things playful?
Chris: I believe so. I believe so. And again, I think that if you ask people who put in what looks like superhuman levels of effort, you often find that it doesn't feel like a superhuman level effort to them. It's something that comes a little bit more naturally. That's what we were talking about before, of leaning into the things that come naturally to you, but you don't realize until you talk to other people . . . It's like, "Oh, other people have a hard time sitting down and doing this, other people find that frustrating, but I don't find it that difficult." I think recognizing and leaning into that is really important, but also it's possible to find the fun aspects in anything that we're doing. We mentioned this earlier as far as engaging our curiosity, that reality has infinite levels of depth. The only thing that is limited is our ability to go deep. To be aware, to pay attention. That's something that I put a lot of thought into: how can I engage my curiosity? How can I maintain awareness? How can I find the hidden aspects of what I'm doing, whether it's playing a poker hand or just washing the dishes? There's a level of depth that is up to me to discover and to enjoy that process of discovery.
Andrew: To understand the true nature of something, right? And the power of those "why" questions that you were talking about. I mean, we use this a lot at Curious Lion with our clients, to really understand what it is they're trying to teach. And just a simple framing of "Why? Why? Why?" It sounds like you guys use that a lot at Forcing Function.
Chris: Agreed. Agreed. Like I said, I do think everything kind of reduces down to awareness. So if you can be aware of the current reality, and you can be aware of what is your vision of where you would like things to be, that creates what I refer to as a "creative tension" that has to be resolved. Either you bring that vision more in line with the reality, or you bring your reality more in line with that vision, but either way something has to give. The first step for making any life change, whether that's installing a new habit or removing an old one, to upgrading the way that you prioritize, to finding the leverage point in your career or business, begins with that awareness of, "Where are things at this moment?" And I do think that that future flows logically from what I refer to as a "hypothetical present." That the hardest part is getting a clear picture of where things are now. And a lot of that is because we're so future-oriented, we're so myopically focused on the next thing. I try to get clients to slow down, take more time off, be more intentional, spend more time planning what you're going to do than you actually do doing it.
Right? When you have limited time, the leverage from deciding what you're going to do increases exponentially. The more you are able to step outside of things, take that outside view, the more you have a clear picture of reality, the more your next action is likely to be the right action. So, yeah. That's why I say that awareness is that critical skill.
Andrew: Why do you think we struggle so much with that, with slowing down to be able to speed up?
Chris: One answer that comes to mind is—the more that I learn about psychology, it's that so many things that are evolutionarily adaptive aren't evolutionary optimal. You know, if we think of ourselves as these ten-thousand-year-old machines . . . We're working off of ten-thousand-year old software but we're in a world that is completely different from that environment that that software was created for, and that a lot of our cognitive machinery is actually dedicated to reassuring ourselves that we are doing just fine. So this makes it very easy to rationalize anything that we're doing. And I am really, really conscious of this, because the more rational I become, the better I am at telling a story that makes sense to myself that justifies what I'm already doing. We tend to, in my experience, avoid the pain of admitting that we're wrong. That's how we persist with the sunk cost of continuing on the same path, because that pain of persistence is less than the pain of admitting that we made a mistake.
So you know, it gets back to what we were talking about, of this constant process of inquiry and putting systems in place for reflection, to make sure that if we can solve for continuous improvement (and these improvements can be very small and incremental, but happening at a high frequency), then that's what we need to solve for: this improvement, this ability to reorient to new realities that are ever dynamic and shifting. So I think that the challenge we have is that everything can be justified, and with work we have all of these cultural notions that have been created in a previous age that followed the Industrial Revolution of, "How do you treat humans as machines and fit them as cogs into the system?" That's how you get concepts like eight hours of work, where we measure productivity by the amount of time that we sit at our desks rather than what we accomplish while we're sitting at our desk. The more that we can reveal these invisible paradigms by which we shape our behavior, that way we're able to subvert those paradigms and realize, "Hey, what actually works for the population as a whole, and what conditions actually work best for me?"
Andrew: Yeah. And so much of that actually comes back to what you were saying about being honest and real about documenting what's happening now. And so many of those examples you just gave are ways that we tell lies to ourselves about what the actual reality is now. We sort of . . . We hide it and create some kind of fake alternative to what that is. And that's the starting point. If you don't have that in place, you can't make the improvements that you're talking about over time.
Chris: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the criticality of feedback. So I like to think that any project, any pursuit, is a race to feedback. How quickly can you get to the point where you can show something or discuss something with someone else and get feedback on your blind spots or the interesting parts that practically you want to go deeper on and scrap everything else away? And that's a key part of productivity in my experience, is to externalize. To get things out of our head. Not only in a literal sense, in terms of our goals and to-dos and our habits, but in a sense of, the more that we can show and discuss things with others, the more we can get feedback on our assumptions on what we're doing, and thus accelerate the process, because we do more of what matters and less of what's irrelevant.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. And just hit 'publish.' Like get work out there, get feedback. I think that's such good advice in general for me.
Chris: I give the advice that I so sorely need sometimes, you know?
Andrew: Exactly. I'm like internalizing so much of this. So, Chris, we're coming kind of up to the end of our time here, and one of the things of this show is to share lessons with listeners, and I think this particular episode has just been jam-packed with those. And I had made a little list of some of the things that you talked about, and we've actually covered so many of them. So I'm just gonna go through that, and if you . . . Feel free to pick one, or pick something else as kind of a way to end it off. What you've learned about this concept, maybe drawing on your experience in poker or your experience coaching, and how you see things differently now, related . . . Because of this. So a couple of things. You earlier mentioned incomplete information.
This is just this list I wrote pre-what-we-talked-about. It's amazing how many of them we've already covered. So incomplete information, long tail risks are the only risks that matter. Definitely touched on that. This idea of immediate feedback in consequences, and you talked about how that means you need to be assertive. Poker gives you immediate feedback and consequences, so you learned that you had to be assertive. The gambler's fallacy. This idea that success makes you think you're controlling it, which fascinates me. The description experience gap. We tend to undervalue what we don't experience firsthand. Another fascinating concept. And then what I know is near and dear to your heart, a favorite of yours, the OODA Loop, John Boyd's philosophy or framework that he used to teach the US Air Force fighter pilots, and has now got so many different applications. Anything out there jump out at you that . . . Some story that you'd like to share?
Chris: Oh, I mean that was an incredible summary. Thanks for sharing that. It's cool hearing things I've said, like, "Oh, that's a good idea, I didn't realize I'd said that."
Andrew: Yeah, like, "Two or three years ago I said that."
Chris: You know, I . . . You mentioned the OODA Loop. I think that's a cool one to share, which kind of leans into some of the things that we've talked about, and I think is a big part of the way that I think about poker and decision-making at large. So those of you guys that are unfamiliar, the OODA Loop originates from a fighter pilot and military strategist by the name of John Boyd, and the question that he was looking to address is, "How do two pilots of equal skill—how do you know who is going to win in a firefight?" And what he stumbled upon was that it came down to either the plane or the ability to reorient to one's environment. That because in a firefight and a lot of times in life circumstances are changing so quickly, it's his ability to adapt to changing conditions that allows a pilot of either equal skill or a more maneuverable plane, or in the same plane or just more experience to draw upon, thus able to change more quickly, this allows that pilot to win an inordinate amount of time. He was finding it, you know, eighty, ninety percent of the time, which is kind of unheard of in a pursuit that's so noisy as a firefight. Obviously, there's lots of luck involved.
And so, O-O-D-A. The first "O" is for "observe." And this is what we've been discussing, is your ability to be aware both of current reality (how are things now in this moment?) and being aware of changing conditions (how things are changing from moment to moment). And this is usually where I like to talk about the concept of signal-to-noise, which for those of you who have discovered the little that we know about consciousness, is that consciousness is primarily the discarding of information. That we are taking in millions of times more information subconsciously than we can actually process consciously.
The power of awareness is the discernment of what to pay attention to and what to ignore. That's what I was talking about earlier as far as intuition as internalized experience, is that data set allows me to ignore most of what's going on at a poker table, which . . . You know, these games I'm playing twelve games simultaneously. I've played as many as thirty just to try to stretch this muscle. There are about a hundred players who I'm tracking their mental states as well as all of my hands that are happening. There's a lot that's happening, and it would be very easy to get overwhelmed, but my experience tells me that most of what's happening at the table is something that I don't need to pay attention to, and thus I can divert that limited attention towards the signal of things that actually matter.
The second "O" is for "orienting." And so I like to say, you know, like "ABC," "ABO." Always Be Orienting. Orienting is our ability to change or update our models based upon these changing conditions. Where I see a lot of players going wrong, or a lot of people going wrong in their career, is that they cling to outdated beliefs which are no longer relevant. This comes back to that notion of feedback loops, where you observe something in the environment and you take in that observation and use it to update what you are looking for, and thus closing that loop. What you see is if your loop is tighter, if you are observing and reorienting to that new reality faster to your competition, whether in a macro or a micro sense, you actually get inside of that person's loop. That they start to operate off of outdated models of reality. And that's where gameplay gets very interesting: you manipulate the field of play. That's where you see a lot of businesses start to take off, is their fingertip feel is so in tune with the current state of the world that they are adapting much faster, and thus everyone else gets left behind.
The final "D-A" is for "decide" and "act." With decisions, the critical skill is speed. How do you proceed through the loop the fastest? And the way that you decide the fastest is you know what you're looking for before the decision comes to play, and so you have an opportunity, you're able to act upon it quickly before others are, because you know which opportunities that you're looking for. Recognizing what are the decisions that actually matter, that you actually need to deliberate and spend a little bit of time on, and thus what are the vast majority of decisions that don't matter, where it's best to just make your best guess at the moment. Bezos refers to this as the seventy percent rule. If you're waiting for more than seventy percent of the information, you're likely waiting too long, because most decisions are reversible, and the value coming from a decision is less from the decision itself and more from the feedback that that decision creates, is your decision leads to action. Right? Again, speed. How quickly can you go from deciding a path to acting upon that path, putting that vision into practice? Because that action changes the environment, gives you feedback, which feeds into things that you observe, which allows you to reorient.
So OODA Loops tells us that speed kills. It's a big part of how I think about poker, how I think about performance, decisions whether in investing or a business context, is how can I be aware, be more observant? How can I take those observations into account to reorient to reality? And as my picture of reality comes into focus, how can I use that to quickly make lots of small iterative decisions that lead to small iterative improvements which thus give me more feedback and feedback into the system?
Andrew: And so the loop continues. That's awesome. That's amazing. Yeah. And that comes back to the rigor that I think you've shown and talked about and you applied to your career as a poker player, now as a businessman. Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you about this. I feel like we could go on for many more hours. Maybe we'll have to do another one. But if people want to find out more about these ideas, more about you, where can we point them?
Chris: Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. And thank you again for inviting me for a really fun and enlightening conversation. I love talking about these things and I really love what you're doing around deconstructing and illuminating the ways that we can acquire skills in a very systematic, deliberate way.
Andrew: Thank you, man.
Chris: I like to say that learning how to learn is the meta-skill, because I believe that we can accomplish anything that we want, that what we do while we're on this earth is only limited by our imagination, because all that is required in order to accomplish some super-ambitious goal is becoming a person who is capable of accomplishing that goal. Thus, all that is lacking is knowledge and skills. If you can look across the acquisition of this knowledge and skills, how other experts have approached it, and take away things that generalize in their approach, you can be the person who acquires more relevant knowledge and skills faster, and thus accelerates your path to becoming the person who can achieve your dreams. And so you're really only limited by the scope of those dreams.
That being said, you know, I think that there's so much opportunity to take a conversation like today that can be a little bit abstract and find ways to apply it in the now. To start to internalize some of these principles by putting them into action. And thank you for the plug earlier, Andrew. The first place that I would send anyone who is interested in putting some of these ideas into action would be the workbook that we created last year, Experiment Without Limits, which is my one hundred pages of everything that I've learned across five hundred coaching conversations with incredible investors and entrepreneurs, and a step-by-step format where I walk you through how to put these principles into place in your life.
The other thing that I would mention, I think Andrew talked about the article which will be coming out around the time of this episode called "Play To Win: Meta-Skills of High Stakes Poker." I go a little bit deeper into these ideas of how to apply systems thinking and psychology to a competitive sport like poker. And then finally, that we are offering the second cohort of Team Performance Training. For a number of years, I've only worked with about a dozen founders and investors at a time in a one-on-one context, and so we wanted to try to create a container where we could have successful investors and executives supporting each other and illuminating some of their own blind spots and teaching these principles in a format that allows for taking immediate action. This is a twelve week program that we created last year called "Team Performance Training," and we're offering it again this January. The next cohort's kicking off January 27th. If that's something that interests you you can learn more at forcingfunction.com/team-training, or you can sign up for our newsletter at forcingfunction.com/newsletter.
I always like to conclude this by saying I hope that being a part of Andrew and I's conversation can be the genesis of a conversation between us. So if there's anything that I said which resonated with you, or especially if there's anything that I said today that you disagreed with, I would love to hear from you. I mean I do all this because . . . I hope my passion comes through. I really enjoy, I love help accelerating people putting things into the world. So if you have any questions, if you want to continue this conversation, I would really encourage you to reach out. You can find me on Twitter. @sparksremarks is probably the fastest way to get ahold of me, and we can continue the conversation there.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, Chris, I love the way you think about human performance, and especially love the way you think about human potential. And what you said earlier, that anything is possible, anything can be learned. I want people to really . . . If they take nothing else away from this episode, that they leave with that. You taught this amazing skill of just paying attention, taking on feedback, being assertive in your decisions and getting stuff out there, acting and publishing to create that loop, and install that rigor into your life. Thank you so much for your time, Chris. We will include links to everything that you just mentioned in the show notes. Really appreciate you coming on, and all the best.
Hey, this is Andrew. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. My goal with this show is to interview experts who have gained intentional mastery over a skill. I want to help scale and democratize online education by extracting lessons from these people by going into how they learned what they've learned. If you are an expert in a domain or you know someone who has intentionally acquired mastery over a skill, get in touch. We'd love to have you on the show. Please subscribe, like, and leave reviews to help spread the word here. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next week.