Erez Yoeli - Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior

FOR MANY OF US, IT MIGHT BE HARD TO IMAGINE THAT THE COVER OF Sports Illustrated , which we are used to seeing adorned by athletes and models sporting bats, balls, helmets, and bikinis, once featured the laughing, square-jawed face of Bobby Fischer. The 1972 cover, now a collectible on auction sites like eBay, celebrated Fischers unprecedented twenty-game winning streak, not in baseball, basketball, or footballbut in chess. Fischers performance in the game, and his dominance over Soviet rivals, had catapulted him into the public eye like no other chess player before or since. Many of the games greatest players considered him, and still do, to be the greatest of all timethe GOAT, to use the term usually applied to the likes of Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Tom Brady.

How did Fischer, who grew up in Brooklyn in a cash-strapped, single-parent household, become so great? The answer is no different from the one that might be given for the likes of Jordan, James, Biles, Ledecky, and Brady: a touch of luck and a ton of practice, motivated by an obsessive passion. Frank Brady, Fischers longtime biographer, reports that by the time he was nine, if Bobby wasnt playing chess then he was studying it, bent over his board or book in such a rapture that he wouldnt pause to turn on the apartment lights when it grew dark. To coax him into the bath, his mother would lay a cabinet door over the tub and place his chessboard on top of it. (Getting him to then leave the tub was another challenge.) He certainly couldnt be bothered with school, which he quit as soon as it was legal to do so.

Indeed, an obsessive passion is a key ingredient in the success of so many greats.

When Itzhak Perlman, the virtuoso violinist, first asked to play after hearing classical music on the radio at the age of three, he was denied admission to a local conservatory on the grounds that he was too small to hold a violin. So, the sickly boy, who soon contracted polio and today is still bound to crutches and a wheelchair, taught himself to play on a toy fiddle. By the age of ten, he was giving critically acclaimed recitals, and at nineteen, he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the second timealongside the Rolling Stones.

The mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was, in his short thirty-three years, so prolific that today an entire peer-reviewed journal is devoted to publishing results that derive or otherwise relate to those that he had claimed or proved. Like Fischer and Perlman, Ramanujan developed his passion at an early age, absorbing all he could from the college-aged lodgers who stayed at his mothers home and reading math textbooks cover to cover. One, a collection of five thousand theorems that is particularly credited with elevating his genius, would be impossibly tedious even to the most enthusiastic participant in a high school Olympiad. As an adult, his work engrossed him so fully that he neglected his wife and even his own health, dying from complications of dysentery that doctors now think could have been cured had Ramanujan bothered to take a break from work to receive care.

Or what about Marie Curie? Shes still the only person to ever win two Nobel prizes in science. As a student in Paris, she was so engrossed in her studies that she often forgot to eat. She would remain so engrossed until her dying day, eschewing prizes and awards because they took her away from scientific pursuits. She even failed to acquire the funds from her (second) Nobel Prize out of what she termed sheer laziness. (She finally picked up the award money during World War I so she could contribute it to the war effort.)