25 min
The Key to Being Contrarian: Think Like a Kid Lucky Maverick: The Art and Science of Betting on Yourself
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- Entrepreneurship
About Lucky Maverick
About Jonathan Bales
If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.
- Kurt Vonnegut
I used to play this iPhone game called “Fun Run.” It’s sort of like Mario Kart in that you race and there are question mark things you can get that have weapons to kill your opponents (lightning, a bear trap thing, a sword, etc).
When I first started playing, I tried to move as fast as possible and finish the race with the quickest time I could. Seems logical…faster is better in any race, right? Maybe, maybe not. You need to perform well to win a race, but the goal isn’t to have the fastest time you can; it’s to have a faster time than everyone else. Those are similar ideas, but not exactly the same.
Once I started playing Fun Run more and more, I did the most psychopathic s**t you can imagine and began charting all of the details of the game in Excel—my time, the course, kills, deaths, etc. I was doing this to see which courses were my best because players got to vote on one of two before the race, so I thought that optimal selection would slightly improve my win rate and also I wasn’t a virgin at this time if you can believe that.
As I tracked the data, I noticed that while my win probability improved, my times barely got better. Why? It was due to the recognition that, while fast times and wins are correlated, the former is really just an effect of the latter, not always a cause of it. There are many times it benefited me to reduce my expected time to increase the odds of winning, such as going out of my way to obtain an additional question mark, using a super low-variance strategy late in the race if I’m winning, taking more risks when I’m losing, and so on.
In all games, you work within the confines of the rules to find edges and increase your chances of winning. Sometimes, though, specifically as you become well-versed in a game and begin competing at the highest level, you realize world-class performance requires a completely different way of thinking. Why is it that in so many areas—from poker to business to video games to chess—the greats seem to be playing a fundamentally different game than their opponents?
The path to greatness starts with learning the rules of the game and figuring out how to play within the rules to win. But it eventually transforms into breaking all those rules, approaching problems from a distinct viewpoint to play a game—one I’ll call the “hidden” game—that’s fundamentally different from others.
Speedrunning
This article was inspired by an email I received about something called “speedrunning.”
Hi Bales,
When reading Lucky Maverick articles, I find one area that continuously applies these concepts: speedrunning. If you're unfamiliar with speedrunning, it is a community of gamers that attempt to beat video games as fast as possible. For example, the current world record to beat Super Mario Bros on the NES is 4:55.314. Speedrunners are fighting over frames and fractions of seconds to secure world records, which is why they have to apply some of the tenets of the Lucky Maverick posts.
The two main strategies that are applicable in speedrunning are taking ideas to their logical extreme and playing the game by different, hidden rules. A great example of this is in the speedrun for Wii Sports Resort Golf. The main strategy that runners realized after thousands of attempts was that they were able to manipulate both wind and cup position by intentionally failing the first hole. This is counterintuitive to conventional thinking of “the fastest way to play Wii Golf is to just get the ball in the cup as quickly as possible.” By finding these hidden mechanics of the game, and taking them to their absolute extreme, these runners were able to take the world record down multiple minutes from the early days of running.
I really enjoy your newsletter and would be happy to discuss speedrunning further if you'd like. F
About Lucky Maverick
About Jonathan Bales
If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.
- Kurt Vonnegut
I used to play this iPhone game called “Fun Run.” It’s sort of like Mario Kart in that you race and there are question mark things you can get that have weapons to kill your opponents (lightning, a bear trap thing, a sword, etc).
When I first started playing, I tried to move as fast as possible and finish the race with the quickest time I could. Seems logical…faster is better in any race, right? Maybe, maybe not. You need to perform well to win a race, but the goal isn’t to have the fastest time you can; it’s to have a faster time than everyone else. Those are similar ideas, but not exactly the same.
Once I started playing Fun Run more and more, I did the most psychopathic s**t you can imagine and began charting all of the details of the game in Excel—my time, the course, kills, deaths, etc. I was doing this to see which courses were my best because players got to vote on one of two before the race, so I thought that optimal selection would slightly improve my win rate and also I wasn’t a virgin at this time if you can believe that.
As I tracked the data, I noticed that while my win probability improved, my times barely got better. Why? It was due to the recognition that, while fast times and wins are correlated, the former is really just an effect of the latter, not always a cause of it. There are many times it benefited me to reduce my expected time to increase the odds of winning, such as going out of my way to obtain an additional question mark, using a super low-variance strategy late in the race if I’m winning, taking more risks when I’m losing, and so on.
In all games, you work within the confines of the rules to find edges and increase your chances of winning. Sometimes, though, specifically as you become well-versed in a game and begin competing at the highest level, you realize world-class performance requires a completely different way of thinking. Why is it that in so many areas—from poker to business to video games to chess—the greats seem to be playing a fundamentally different game than their opponents?
The path to greatness starts with learning the rules of the game and figuring out how to play within the rules to win. But it eventually transforms into breaking all those rules, approaching problems from a distinct viewpoint to play a game—one I’ll call the “hidden” game—that’s fundamentally different from others.
Speedrunning
This article was inspired by an email I received about something called “speedrunning.”
Hi Bales,
When reading Lucky Maverick articles, I find one area that continuously applies these concepts: speedrunning. If you're unfamiliar with speedrunning, it is a community of gamers that attempt to beat video games as fast as possible. For example, the current world record to beat Super Mario Bros on the NES is 4:55.314. Speedrunners are fighting over frames and fractions of seconds to secure world records, which is why they have to apply some of the tenets of the Lucky Maverick posts.
The two main strategies that are applicable in speedrunning are taking ideas to their logical extreme and playing the game by different, hidden rules. A great example of this is in the speedrun for Wii Sports Resort Golf. The main strategy that runners realized after thousands of attempts was that they were able to manipulate both wind and cup position by intentionally failing the first hole. This is counterintuitive to conventional thinking of “the fastest way to play Wii Golf is to just get the ball in the cup as quickly as possible.” By finding these hidden mechanics of the game, and taking them to their absolute extreme, these runners were able to take the world record down multiple minutes from the early days of running.
I really enjoy your newsletter and would be happy to discuss speedrunning further if you'd like. F
25 min