Ego kills you

[The following is an exceprt from p.225-229 of The Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith (2007).]

Some people may find this hard to believe since trading seems like a very exciting job to outsiders, but most of the time when we were trading we did absolutely nothing. We are bored. The markets were quiet most of the time. In short, the turtles had a lot of free time on their hands.

Fortunately, we had a ping-pong table, and so ping-pong was our game. Almost all of us plated it at least once a day. We played so much that one day we had a note posted to our door from some one in the large insurance office adjacent to ours threatening our deaths because they did not like the fact that we got to play games all day while they had to do work (presumably they did not like their work).

I had never played the game seriously before, but I soon developed reasonable skills and started beating some of the better players after a few months. I adopted the Chinese style pen hold grip, which allowed me to switch between forehand and backhand more easily – that was better for my aggressive spin-filled style.

But there was one Turtle who was much better than any of the rest of us, one we all knew we could not beat. He had been playing for a long time, and we all watched in awe when he played. He generally had no problems beating us 21 to 10 or by an even larger margin, and we knew he was just toying with us. He beat us without breaking a sweat.

After a few months of play, one of the turtles suggested that we have a tournament. In a group full of competitive traders, this was serious stuff. We all felt that tournament probably would really be about who was second best since there was no doubt who was the best player; however, we wanted to see who would be champ. When the tournament began, the weaker players were weeded out one by one until we were down to the strongest eight players. With the exception of the best player, we were all pretty close in skills.

I decided to change my style for the tournament. Instead of going for the kill shots whenever I had a chance the way I normally did, I played conservatively. I even changed my grip from the pen hold to the more accurate traditional style (the way one holds a tennis racket) and my paddle from the spongy ones that give losts of spins to the sandpaper ones that are better for defense since they are less responsive to the spin of the opponent. I know that the best player had superior spin technique and would not have any problem handling my comparatively feeble spins so if I were to do well against him I was better off with a paddle that weakened his advantage of superior spin technique.

My strategy paid off as I slowly beat my next two opponents in close and exciting matches. That meant that we were now down to two players and I would be playing in the championship round against a much superior player, the one we all expected to win the tournament. I would have to play my best game and he would have to break me to win, and we all knew it. All the Turtles were present for this final match, which pitted youth and energy against experience and skill.

As we started to play, I noticed something: my opponent really wanted to win the match; he was taking it very seriously. It was obvious that it was very important for him to win. He had much to lose since he was already considered the superior player, already counted as the best. In contrast, I had nothing to lose. I already had won the tournament as the rest of us saw it. No one expected me to win or even thought that I could win.

He won the first few points pretty easily, in fact so easily that I began to worry that I might get shut out, skunked. But as I adapted to his superior speed and shot placement and played extremely defensively, I started to wear him out. He was playing more aggressively than he normally would have because he wanted to finish me off quickly. I was playing more conservatively because I know it was my only chance. I started to get longer volleys before he won the point, and then I finally started to win points – not many at first but just enough to keep me in the game. As I began to win more and more points, my opponent’s play suffered. He started to become angry with himself for letting an inferior player gain any sort of advantage.

Slowly the advantage tipped in my favor, and I started coming back in the second game of the match. I clawed my way back to even and then went on to win that game. So at the end of the first two games we were tied one to one, but the momentum was in my favor with one game to play.

The final game was a battle. We fought back and forth with the game tied and with each of us being one point from victory on several occasions. Finally, I hit the last shot and he missed. In the end, the pressure of the tournament, of proving that he was the better player, got to him and he cracked. He was assuredly the best player. I know it and he knew it, but in the end that didn’t matter, and he lost because he couldn’t handle the pressure. The win meant too much to him, and that affected his play.

My superior opponent was also not successful in the Turtle program. I believe this was the case for the same reason he lost the Ping-Pong tournament. His ego was too tied up in his own trading for him to be able to see that reasons for this poor performance were inside him. Not coincidentally, the Ping-Pong expert was the same Turtle who believed that Rich had given me secrets that he had not been given. It was too hard for him to see that the reason I was making money when he was losing was that I was trading better then he was because I was focusing on the rules and blotting out any ego issues. He blamed it on not having been given the secrets. He did not want to face the truth.