Radiolab - Games

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

In this episode, first aired in 2011, we talk about the meaning of a good game — whether it's a pro football playoff, or a family showdown on the kitchen table. And how some games can make you feel, at least for a little while, like your whole life hangs in the balance. This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert wonder why we get so invested in something so trivial. What is it about games that make them feel so pivotal? We hear how a recurring dream about football turned into a real-life lesson for Stephen Dubner, we watch a chessboard turn into a playground where by-the-book moves give way to totally unpredictable possibilities, and we talk to Dan Engber, a one time senior editor at Slate, now at The Atlantic, and a bunch of scientists about why betting on a longshot is so much fun. And finally, we talk to Malcolm Gladwell about why he loves the overdog. CITATIONS: Videos -  The Immaculate Reception (https://zpr.io/izhV3Sm88SWF) by Franco Harris on December 23, 1972. Harris was the Pittsburgh Steelers’ fullback at the time. Books -  Stephen J. Dubner’s book, Confessions of a Hero Worshipper (https://zpr.io/iQUwfF8vGArj) Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. Ugh. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio.

From W and Y. Hey! Hey! Three, Why? Okay. Three, two, what?

Hello? This show we're about to do, it began. Hey guys, how's it going? Okay, three, two, what? Hello. This show we were about to do, it began. Hey guys, how's it going? With a conversation that we had with Friend of Isaac Eric Simmons. And he told us about this moment that was kinda strange. This is the San Jose Sharks actually,

who is this a hockey team or a, yeah, hockey team? Okay. And like I'm pretty strongly identified with hockey to begin with. I play hockey, my dad has played hockey's entire life. And the sharks started in the Bay Area like when I was 10 years old, sharks are my favorite, favorite creature by a long way. And so I've rooted for them forever.

And for the last six years, they've been really good. Every year they're picked at the beginning of the year to go to the Stanley Cup, maybe to win the Stanley Cup, and every year, they fall short. And so, in 2007, they were in the playoffs, the sharks to the top seed, they're playing the eight seed, which also is Anaheim, which is probably their biggest rival, and they lose.

Oh. And I remember driving home from the ice rink. It's probably about midnight. And it was a really pretty night out. Like the city lights and they're like shimmering on the water. And there's always these tankers out, like parked in the bay. There's like the silhouettes of the boats and the Oakland coastline and the San Francisco shoreline.

And like this is everything that makes me happy in the world. Eric says usually when he sees that view, no matter how he's feeling, he's like, okay, everything's gonna be good, it's gonna be fine. Because that is one beautiful city. But that night, I was so angry that I remember noticing this, like this like beautiful scene and thinking, burn. I hate this. I remember noticing this like, thising, savage, angry beast. I don't like that.

You know what I love about that story? Is it so typical? You know? Almost every sports fan has had a moment where you're like, I cannot believe my own emotions right now. Are you a burner? I mean, do you want sports? I mean, I watch sports, but I don't get into that.

I don't get into a darkness. I do. There have definitely been times I wanted to burn down New York. And if you ever asked yourself, like, why? Well, that's the question. Right? Yeah. For this hour, anyway.

Like, why is it that something as trivial as a hockey game can feel like life or death? Which probably doesn't happen to a lot of public radio people but hey. Well it could. You shouldn't think that. Yeah all right. Alright. You know when I'm in the chatroom. And if you widen the category a little bit and just said games, well then you didn't include everybody. Very games. Everybody. So then what is it about a game that makes it more than a game? Yeah. Well let's find out. This is Radio Lab.

I'm Robert Groicz. I'm Chad Abumrod. Stay with us. Sports to me as a kid were vital. Sports were like if everything else on the planet had disappeared except for sports, I would have been fine. If the church had gone away, if school had gone away, even if all my brothers and sisters had gone away, I liked them fine, but sports was the only thing

that I really loved as a kid. Can you introduce yourself? My name is Steven Dubner. And Steven is the author of Freakonomics. The books, the blog. And I've got my own ISD Online. It's kind of an inside joke. It's a fancy piece of studio equipment

because now Freakonomomics is also a radio. Are we talking to you in your living room? In the reason we call Stephen up, and this is the honest truth, is that Sorn Wheeler, one of our producers, overheard Stephen telling this story in the men's room. That's where I do most of my research for the show, actually. That's Sorn's where I look for friends. In a case, Sorn overheard Stephen in the stall got him to come into the studio and tell to us.

This is a story about a boy, a hero, and a dad. And how those three things can get a little intertwined. I don't really know what happened. What I know is that when I came into being in 1963, I was the last of eight kids. And Stephen says already at that point, sports was family law. In fact, when it came to baseball, no two people in the family,

including my mother and father, so there were 10 of us. No two people rooted for the same team. And as it turned out, there was even a rule. No two people were allowed to root for the same team. Now, he says his dad actually assigned each of the family members their own baseball team

and told them, this is your team, only you get to root for this team. Now, he says his dad actually assigned each of the family members their own baseball team and told them, this is your team. Only you get to root for this team. So my dad was a Metz fan. My mom, I don't remember. But I had a sister who was a Red Sox fan. There was a Cardinals fan. A San Francisco Giants fan. And LA Dodgers fan. That was my brother Peter. And I have no recollection of a time before I was a Baltimore Orioles fan So I think what happened is Stevie was born. Here's another kid. We need another team. Who does he get? How about the Orioles? Well, and I was just like the tooth fairy sticking a dollar under your pillow. Yeah, how did he assign the Orioles to you? Okay, so first of all I should just say like a lot of things in life as a very young, very obedient Catholic boy,

I accepted this mystery without question. But here's my hunch. My father, I think, felt that it was a shame that he couldn't give more to his children, materially more and even more of himself. And so in my mind, the greatest gift he could give to each of us was our own baseball team. But this is ultimately a story about more than just baseball. My parents were

both Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of typical second generation American, who before they met each other, while they were in their 20s, they both converted to Roman Catholicism. What was the reaction from their parents? Oh, that was bad. That was bad. The way that my grandfather discovered that my father had converted was when some rosary beads slipped out of his pocket and fell onto the floor. So it was like my grandfather basically

threw my father out of the house, literally declared him dead, set ship before him. And so he says when his dad met his mom, it was another Jewish convert to Catholicism. They were like two refugees who'd found each other. Exactly. Together they left Brooklyn, went up state,

spent all their money on an old farmhouse in the country, leaving behind a past that was toxic. But then when they got up state, they found themselves a past that was toxic. But then when they got upstate, they found themselves a little out of place. We were these kind of farmers, Jewish, Brooklyn, Jewish city people who are now upstate Catholic farmer survivor types. We had no money, a lot of kids, and my dad,

he said his dad would often be upstairs. Quote lying down for hours and hours, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to him at the time. He thought, come on, why is he down here with us? But now as an adult, he understands that his dad was not well. In fact, he was depressed. Yeah. Really depressed.

And how much did you know about your parents' backstory when you were growing up on the farm? Can my knowledge be measured in negative terms but it was plain to me that my father was a kind of diminished man that he wasn't capable of doing all the things that other men were capable of doing so Steven says he would go outside to the backyard and spend time by himself pretending to be the orals recreating the games that had been played the day before in real life. And here comes Frank Robbins. He still spearheading the oryel.

You know, one game could last me six, eight hours. And I would literally play 162 game seasons. I would be every batter on both teams and the announcers. What's Robinson completes his home run trial? And you know, this thing about ownership and whether my dad did that on purpose or not, he did make me feel like if they failed, then they needed me to boost them up. I'm that kept him busy for a while.

But then the play happens and everything changes. To explain somewhere along the way when he was 10, Steven discovers football. Football was considered barbaric, worst of all, it was played on the Sabbath. But regardless, you fell in love with it. I love the brute force of it. Defected all these guys were helmets. They made him look kind of like knights. And almost immediately, he latched on to a particular running

back from the Pittsburgh Steelers. And that was Franco Harris. Get out of Franco! Get out of Franco! Get out of Franco! I discovered Franco Harris in his rookie season, read about him and sports illustrated. And from the beginning, everything about him just made sense.

I came from a big Catholic family, he came from a big Catholic family. His family was kind of mixed, so was Franco. His dad was black, his mom was Italian, he was very unusual guy, very kind of thoughtful and quiet, and I became a big Steelers fan because of him. Which brings us back to the play. Saturday, December 23, almost Christmas, 1972. The Steelers were about to lose to the Raiders. 40 seconds left on the clock.

We had the ball on something like our own 35. Fourth down and ten yards to go. Last gas. Hang on to your hats. Here come the Steelers out of the huddle. Very Bradshaw at the control. Bradshaw drops back to pass. Bradshaw running out of the pocket, looking for somebody to throw to fires it downfield.

Bradshaw throws and just as the receiver is about to catch it, he gets crushed. The ball pops up, goes falling through the air. And right before the ball hits the ground, Frank Goher is his guy, zooms into the frame out of nowhere, and catches it in here. Here's his boyfriends. Push down for Pittsburgh. Franco runs 60 yards into the in zone. Time runs out. The Steelers win. I don't even know where it came from.

There are people at the end zone. Shortly thereafter, this play was dubbed the Immaculate Reception. We're talking about Christmas Miracles. Here's the miracle of all miracles. For me, as a kid watching it, were my team one and my guy. It was like, I was sealed for life. In fact, this guy was so much his guy

that when Steve would write his homework papers, he began signing the papers. Franco Dupner. Wow, and I thought of myself as Franco Dupner, which I mean, I know it sounds funny now, but it's very natural. Like, we're all named for saints to start, which I mean, I know it sounds funny now, but it's very natural. Like, we're all named for saints to start with. I mean, my oldest brother is named Joseph.

My oldest sister is Dave Mary. So, you're named for saints. Lately, Franco was my saint. The following Thanksgiving, Stephen's parents drove off to a prayer meeting. It was part of this religious offshoot that they participated in called the Charismatic Christian Renewal. Very fervent group. Lots of speaking intungs. It was strange and a little scary to me to see my parents speaking intungs.

Even when sometimes go, but this time we did. So his parents drove off to the meeting. In Albany. Kind of far from our house. And a few hours later, only his mother returned. My mother comes home and tells us, Dad had an attack. She told him, in the middle of the meeting, he just fell over. He was in the hospital now, but...

It would be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. So, that's all I heard. I was a 10-year-old kid, like, oh, my dad's coming home for Christmas. Cool. Great, and the football playoffs are coming up. Month later, it was 21st of December. Almost exactly a year after the Immaculate Reception. It was the last day of school before Christmas break.

It was a half day. We had grab bag. Christmas gift exchange at school. Stephen Raceshome from school pretty excited. Playoffs are coming up and my dad's coming home and then my mother comes in and says, uh, dad died. I'm going to go upstairs to lie down. And that, that is when the dream began.

Now he's not exactly sure if it was that night or maybe the next, but when he went to bed and closed his eyes, this is what would happen. I would go to the VFW Hall in Albany. This is a place his dad had taken him. We're Franco Harris was giving a talk, and I would invite him to come back to my house way out in the Boondocks for spaghetti and meatballs. In my dream he would come back, he would eat the spaghetti, it wasn't terrible, then I would say, hey, you want to go out in the yard and play some football. And we would go out and it's dark.

And it's just me and him were the stealers against some other mythical team in the darkness. And we're playing on our field in our backyard. And I'm kind of embarrassed because our backyard is all lumpy with frozen cow hoof prints. Because sometimes we'd stake the cow back there. And on the second to the last play of the game, it's like we're behind by three points. Franco would turn his ankle in one of these cow hoof prints and then you'd hand the ball to me and you'd say kid you have to take it from here yourself.

What was the look on his face when he'd hand you the ball and give you the kids speech? You know Jesus on the cross face? Jesus on the cross. Because he's in pain, he's got a beard, he's kind of sweating and dripping and crying a little bit. And then I'd have to run it in for the winning touch. And the dream, but the dream would always fade there. I'd never knew if I made it or not. And he says the next night, he had the same dream.

Exactly the same. In the next night. The same. In the next night. The same. In the next night. The same. Almost every night for about three or four years.

In the next night. So I had that dream several hundred or maybe a thousand times, yeah. And every time you woke up from that dream, I'm just curious, how did you feel? What I remember feeling is that Franco Harris came to see me and that he couldn't win the game for me, but that he was on my side and he wanted me to win. Kind of period. So if we were to stop this story right now, this would be a story like many others you've

heard. Boy falls in love with athlete, dreams of athlete, grows up with athlete behind. But this is a different one. Eventually, after a few years, Stephen stopped having the dream, he moved out of the house, went off to school, got married, became an adult. Pretty much forgot about Franco. But then, something happens. Purely by accident, living in New York, maybe, I don't know, 15, 18 years ago, I caught

sight of him on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Franco had become a very successful small businessman and my heart just started to thump like I had when I was a kid and I thought, I gotta get to know Franco. So he tracked down Franco's address, wrote him letters, then more letters, and to make a long story short, one day the phone rang, and it was him.

He did agree to meet with me. Right. I told him I'd like to write a book about a boy getting to know his childhood here and trying to figure out what that person is like in reality, and I was also interested in that. I was very careful in my mind, that first day that I met him in Pittsburgh, say don't tell him in Pittsburgh say don't tell him the dream don't tell him the dream because he will think that you were a

Frickin lunatic, right? That first day I told him the dream I couldn't it's like This is a reaction was he well-rified he doesn't show horror. He's a very interesting fellow. He's got a really He's got a really interesting manner He's a very interesting fellow. He's got a really, he's got a really interesting manner. Very low key. They did end up meeting a few times as Stephen wrote his book, but he says Franco was always really careful to keep him at arm's length, I would say. In any time they kind of got close, Franco would sort of disappear a little bit.

And in fact, toward the end of the book project, they make an appointment to meet. I get to Pittsburgh a couple of days early, typical. And Tranko's not there. Actually, Stephen ends up standing in a parking lot, waiting for him and waiting and waiting and waiting. And then eventually, he heads back to New York. And I guess I thought that somehow he had a lot to teach me, you know, about being a man,

being in a real, a real grown-up, being a father, and he was polite and just not really that interested. And it was around this point that Stephen decided, you know, maybe that's what he was trying to tell me in the dream, and in real life too. That no one can save you but yourself. Part of his Messiah job was to persuade me that you know, everybody's gotta be their own Messiah. That was the message. But isn't that disappointing to you? This guy was your hero.

You wanted him to be all these things and he didn't wanna be those things back. I mean, that must have hurt a little. You know, look, Franco Harris didn't fall in love with, you know, he didn't wanna be my best friend, friend, but that aside, he is an exemplary human being. He's a really, he's a good human being. I think you can easily go too far. I think you can put too much of your emotional life in the hands of people who have, you know,

who don't know you and have no responsibility for you. But I think sports fandom is a fantastic gift with almost immeasurable value. And my... Wait, but why? I mean, really? I mean, I love sports, but I mean, it's just a running back.

It's not the same. What exactly about sports, it gives it an immeasurable value. Yeah. It's a proxy for real life, but better. You know, it renews itself. It's constantly happening value. Yeah. It's a proxy for real life, but better. You know, it renews itself. It's constantly happening in real time. There are conflicts that seem to carry real consequences, but at the end of the day, don't.

It's war where nobody dies. It's a proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes. I mean, heck, what's not to like about sports? And there you go. You just sort of, you know, just wrapped it all up in a little bow right there. That was awesome. Stephen Dubner is the author of Confessions of a Hero Worshipper and he is the host of

Freakonomics. Check them out at FreakonomicsRadio.com. We will move on to other heroes, other sports, and other puzzles in just a moment. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollbitch. This is Radio Lab. We're talking about, well, what are we talking about? Sports.

Games. Games. Yeah, you know what? What we're really talking about is a fundamental behavior of everyone on Earth, including like wolves and cats. Wolves and cats. That was broadening more than I would broaden, but that's, you know, going. Well, come on.

Like, what little wolves do? They don't play football. No, but they tussle. Yes. Do you mean like like they play? Yes, like human babies Yeah, okay babies and young children spend almost all of their time playing seems so natural We don't even think about it. So let's just go with that thought. This is Allison Gothnick She's a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley big sports fan. Yeah baseball Oakland fan professionally though at the University of California at Berkeley. Big sports fan. Yeah. Baseball. Oakland fan.

Professionally though, she studies kids, and she's got an interesting idea. She says, if you look at kids, how they play over time, you see that at the center of their play, there's this really interesting tension to take place. Well, tension of what kind? Well, you can actually hear it. So we'll get back to Allison in just one moment.

Here's a four-year-old girl named Rosa. She's been busy. Yes. Listen to named Rosa. Thank you, thank you. Yes. Listen to her describe her imaginary friend to her dad. And how does Hermione know Antarctica? She was in Antarctica for the people she moved. Oh, what was she doing in Antarctica? In Antarctica.

Do you know what to use to keep warm? To keep what? Warm. You know what? No. She got, she got leopards. She was skinned for to make her cold. And then put back the music.

And what prompted her to move from Antarctica to the moon? Did you want to go to the mountains higher? And now she's thinking she wants to move back when it all took back. In preschool children, you start seeing this wonderful flowering of pretend plant. The children are becoming ninjas and princesses and superheroes. At first says Ellison, this is what plays all about inventing, making up crazy psychedelic connections, complete improv.

You get this period just explore, just innovate. Head down from the ceiling. Hey. What did you do, don't you? How spice? How spice? How spice? How spice, of course.

But if you fast forward just a couple of years, so not four anymore, but six, six year olds. Divide totally changes, because now, it's all about rules. The first thing it was to be, is to freezer. But they, it's a tackered, it, the freezer, tacked, you're frozen. But then it's somebody else, tacked you.

Yaaah! You're unfriended. And like, these two are faces. Okay, so let's play. She did. And she freezes. Freeze. That's how you play.

Freeze. With six year olds, it just sounds really different. You hear a lot of this? No fair! A lot of yelling about what's allowed, what isn't allowed. I started out with this. I started out with this last time. I started out with this. I started out with the last time you started out with the ball.

In some ways I think the school age children are practicing being in a society. They're practicing having laws, they're practicing having rules. Not you'll know you don't, not anymore. They're sort of developing a theory of sociology. Yes, I do. So you got these two modes of play. You got the three-year-old inventor, who's like, okay, I'm just going to make this happen, I'm going to create something new in the world. Then you've got the six-year-old enforcer, who's like,

you can't just create what you want. The world is bigger than we are. We need rules! And one of the things that's really interesting about the games that seem to stick is that the greatest games like baseball are games that let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. In other words, like a good game is a kind of weird constantly shifting war between the three-year-old and us and the six-year-old. I think she's probably correct because there are games which suffer from a lack of the tension she's describing. There's one game in particular. Okay. I don't know whether you've played it lately,

but we heard about it from this guy, Brian Christian. A writer, yeah. He was on a recent show talking about robots, but he also mentioned this little moment. Yes, it's a moment. So yeah, at the World Checkers Championship in Glasgow, Scotland in 1863, it is James Wiley against Robert Martins. The two best checker players in the world. Wiley, Wiley. Playing a 40 game series, all 40 games opened with the same three or four moves, and all 40 games were draws. Really? Yes. Not only that. games opened with the same three or four moves and all 40 games were draws.

Really? Yes. Not only that. 21 of the 40 games are the exact same game, meaning that move for move for move. They were precise duplicates of each other. Start to finish every single move is the same. Yeah. You know, can you imagine it's like a month of checkers? How exactly does that happen?

Well, see, these guys were professional checkers players. Yes. So, they studied moves that other competitors had made. They would write them down, memorize them, and they became a kind of catalog. So at a certain point, every move you saw on the checker board, you'd think, oh, yeah, that one. Checkers had hit this point where the conventional wisdom about what was the proper move to play had gotten to this point where there was now basically a perfect game of checkers and with

the world title on the line. Both players played that perfect game over and over and over. They stuck to the script. So this was really rock bottom for the checkers community. I mean, yeah. So there you go, that's why I know I'm playing checkers anymore. Well, some people play checkers.

I play checkers. What? No, you don't. Checkers is fine as long as you don't play it for too long. No, no, no. If you were a lame checker player, you could play checkers forever. Well, then what's the point?

I mean, why would you play a game that's been gobbled up? Instead. By the way, this thing that you just said killed checkers forever. Well then what's the point? I mean why would you play a game that's been gobbled up? Instead. By the way this thing that you just said killed checkers? Yeah. This concept. Has a name. It's called.

The book. The book. The book. The book. The book. The book. The book. The book.

The danger is that the entire game stays in book the whole time. And that danger has Brian is not specifically confined to checkers. Occasionally, very rarely in the chess world, you'll see two grandmasters play the exact same game that another pair of grandmasters played, you know, a year before. And they'll get booze and jeers all over the internet as a result. Now chess, let me talk about Chess. Okay. Chess, the book in Chess is huge.

It started in the 16th century and for hundreds of years, players were keeping track of moves, encounter moves, and counter-counter-counter-counter moves, until by the 1950s... I was like a library. It actually was a library. In the Moscow Central Chess Club. And who's this? I was like a library. It actually was a library. In the Moscow Central chess club.

And who is this? This is a Fred Friedel. He's a chess analyst and one of the few non-Russians to have seen this room. Yes, the huge, musty room. All these shelves and there were little boxes and the boxes contained little cards. Index cards.

And each of these cards, documented a particular game of chess from the past. And for a while, this was all a secret. There were about three or four players in the world. All Russian. Who had access to them. When one of these guys had a big game, they would go to this library and say,

all right, I've got this opponent. He's a Polish guy, Prisbeorka, something or other. Give me all his game. From suddenly you have a few hundred cards. Which you and your team could study. This is how they prepare. By memorizing literally thousands of moves. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.

But where Fred comes in, is in the 80s, he convinced the Russian Federation to put this online. Where anyone could study it and add to it, and suddenly this book explodes. Which is for some people, distressing. People tend to boom me sometimes when I come into the chess tournament today. They will point to me and say, that's him, Frederick, the man who ruined

chess. Because here's the modern game. When two players sit down at one of these tournaments to face off, they've already consulted Frederick's database, which he's named Fritz. The chess player is all called Fritzy now. And because of Fritzy, they walk into these games with so much of the book in their heads. That whole portions of the game are very checkers like, very wrote. You'll see this if you watch Grandmasters play Speed Chess. That's Brian Christian again. They'll just hammer out the first dozen or so moves. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,

with barely any thoughts. Out of memory, it used to be two, three, four, five, six moves. No, we do. Nowadays, it is 16 be two three four five six moves. No, we do nowadays. It is 16 moves 20 moves There does seem to be a kind of creep that's happening the book is getting bigger bigger and bigger but Inevitably in every chess game there is a moment which puts the book in its place and if you watch a game Is there a chess tournament coming up that like a bigger one? Yes? watch a game? Is there a chess tournament coming up that like a big one? Yes, next Thursday I'm going to Romania where some of the top players are playing. If you watch a game, is that able to do? Because you can watch these games online.

Okay, yeah, we're going to watch a chess tournament online. You will see that moment. A chess. That's. And it's not like you know Jordan scoring 40 points while he has a fever. It's not like that. But if you know what to look for, it's quite profound. Okay, it's 8.30 AM, I'm here with my little man. They high.

And somewhere in Romania, two grandmasters are about to sit down at a table to do battle, and I will watch it virtually. The match I watched was Magnus Carlson, the world's top player, versus a Kuro Nakamura, the US champ. I call up Frederick. Hello, it's Frederick.

To give me the play-by-play, because I actually don't know much about chess. Oh, OK. Well, his program, Frisk, can tell you how many times each move has occurred in the entire recorded history of chess. What does that mean? It's like his computer can look at the board and say, yeah, that move you just made.

That's has happened before, and I will tell you exactly how many times before. Hey, it started. Here we go. Move one. White. Move. It's d4 to d5. White on two squares forward.

My database tells me that there are 1,775,000 games in which this occurred. Then move two. Black counters with its pawn going from C4 to E6. Now we've got two pawns facing each other, middle of the board. And according to Fred's database, this exact configuration has occurred in... 514,518 games. So a million and a half down to a half million? Smaller.

Yes. Move three. White moves another pawn. 335,000. Black another pawn. 1435,000 black another pond 149,000 smaller Yep, white moves. It's nice 114,000 black moves its bishop

91,000 less again white pond takes a black pond Just have our first casualty people 2428 game What was that again? 2400 oh the black pond response 2613 games. White Bishop flies across the board. 2125 games.

Black moves another pawn up. 1,200. White Queen does a little thing. 381 games. 381. Getting lower. Yes. Black Bishop retreats.

19 games. 19. 1 9. White moves another pawn. Which has occurred in 11 games. Gay Black Bishop retreats. To 11 games. White Bishop advances. We're has a good in 11 games. Gay Black Bishop retreats to 11 games. White Bishop advances. We're down to 10 games.

10. Woo! Black Bishop falls back even further. And we have 9 games. Black Bishop takes White Bishop. 5 games. White pawn retaliates taking Black Bishop. Still 5 games.

And then... White rook and White king switch places. Now there are no more games. You have a position which has never occurred before in the universe. Ever? No. In the universe? Not in the history of this universe.

And this is what is known as the novelty. The novelty. The novelty, you. And in chest notes, if you read chest notes, you will see. The shortly after this move, the annotator writes out of book. Out of book. Yeah, out of book. No, no, no. Bye bye book. Out of book. Yeah, out of book. No, no, bye bye book. Which means no more book. No, no, no. Budsides now are on their own.

And everyone we talk to, plays chess, told us that when you get to that moment, you feel you're alive in a way that you're not normally. That's Frank Brady. He's an author and a professor at St. John's. An international arbiter of the world's exploration. You're totally in it. Your mind is in some ways not even operating.

It's like you're back to being three again. Well, what do you say? I'm saying this is one of the reasons we watch sports for these kinds of zero moments. Position which has never occurred in the universe. The same time, the zero is happening inside all of these rules which are like our lives. And this is what Alice was saying.

Games let us experience the world in both those ways at the same time. The Pacers can foul. For example, here's one, 1999 Nix Pacers. Larry Johnson has the ball, nixer down by three, final seconds. He has no shot. Best you think he could three, final seconds. He has no shot. Best you think he could do is tie, but he has no shot.

And then somehow he twists the shimmies, he moves to the left, throws it up. Awesome. It's fouled. And he's hit. And that was like, what? What? I mean, that's in the rules, but nobody could have imagined that.

The position which has never occurred in the U.S. Man, I don't know about it. Never. You want to know mine? Sure. This is a hockey moment. It's Wayne Gretsky early 90s. He's playing shoots for the globe. The puck hits something somebody and starts flying through the air like a tennis ball. Wayne Gretsky turns around and lacks the flying puck out of the air. And up in the air, Gretsky scores! What a shot that way! Is it smacked it up in the air. Prince of Wales! What a shot, Bobby! Is it smacked it out of the air?

Yep. The universe would have to be extremely old to have a previous version of that. Frank, do you have a number one favorite novelty in chess? Well, my number one favorite would be Bobby Fish's Game of the Century. And when did that happen? When jumping to 1956, Bobby is 13 years old. And you see the Bobby Fischer of Legend at this point? Just a 13 year old kid.

He got invited to this tournament. It was an all adult invitational tournament. And Frank says all the worlds best were there. And this was kind of Bobby Fisher's first official match in the Big Leaks, so to speak. Exactly. And as I've seen, it was October. Warm, Indian summer.

We're at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, which is this big staggy brownstone with lots of mahogany. And Bobby Fisher in his t-shirt sits down to play a fellow named Donald Byrne, a guy who looked the part. A very urban sophisticated jacket bow tie. He always had a cigarette between two fingers. Imagine it would have been hard for him to take this kid seriously. Yeah, and he was not doing all that well.

From the beginning, Bobby Fisher was making what looked like dumb errors. He was losing. For example, midway through the game. Bobby made this move where he moved his knight to the rim of the board, which is usually strategically speaking, is not the greatest place to move your knight. Because you know if your knight's shoved against the edge, it's boxed in. And the knight could be taken and people said, what, what is it, that he blunder? Come on kid.

Yeah, this is crazy. But then Bobby Fisher does something, truly crazy. What? He leaps so far. Out of the book in a fence. The people are still talking about this move 50 years later. On the 18th move, he allowed Burn to take his queen. He just said, here, take my queen. Now in chess, that's like crazy. Yeah, in chess, it's almost impossible to win a

game if you lose your queen. It's like, what? That's gotta be wrong. There must be a stupid blunder. It seemed like maybe he was thrown in the towel. So a crowd gather. It's grum of people hanging around. To watch this kid get put in his place and burn did what anyone would do in that situation. He took the queen. But maybe four moves later. Just at the moment you would think he would have Bobby Fisher in a stranglehold. Bobby started checking the king. He was chasing Bern all over the board. People began to see that there was some combination, but it was a long combination.

And you know, twenty moves later, Bern was done. Nothing could do. He was check baited. And Frank says if you analyze the game, you see that it all began, and in a way ended, when he sacrificed his queen. It was a lost game from that moment. If Bern didn't take the queen, he was lost. If Bern took the queen, he was lost.

Wait, are you saying he essentially checkmated him 20 moves ahead of time? Yes, it was unstoppable. It was forceful. So it's like he wrote a new book. He stuck the guy in his book. Haha, I love that. So it's kind of interesting like you can start the game in book, so to speak. And you're kind of locked into a set of moves.

Yeah. The game ends. Kind of the same way. Same way, that's destiny. But then in the middle, you just get a peak. That's something infinite. Although we were wondering, like, is that middle space really infinite?

By applying the rules to the... I mean, we ask Frederick, if people played chess for hundreds and hundreds of years inventing new moves into that empty space. Would they ever fill it up? And he said no because the number of chess games that are possible is. Vastly more than the number of atoms in the universe. That is a silly little number compared to the number of atoms in the universe. That is a silly little number compared to the number of chest games. What kind of a number is that? How many atoms are there in the universe?

Or what? 10 to the power of 82, the last time I counted up. No, 78. 82 zeros. 10 to the power of 78, I think. I think we're accurate. And there are more possibilities within a 40 move chest game.

10 to the power of 120 approximately. And he says, if he were to try to get all that information into Fritzi, his database. We would have to dismantle an entire solar system just to store the information. And he says you'd have to dismantle another one, just to plug it in. And what he says about chess, you could say that about hockey, you could say that about

baseball, you could say that about curling, but you could not say that about checkers. So checkers aside, every game has this kind of strange thing, it has a feel to play, a small little box to be a board, it could be a field, whatever. And then you step into it, and there's like a... A solar system. Thanks to Alison Gopnik, she wrote the wonderful book, The Philosophical Baby, and Frank Brady, who's the author of In Game Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall, and also Brian Christian, who wrote the book The Most Human Human. Hey, I'm Chad Abumran.

I'm Robert Crowley. This is Radio Lab. How was the Tarantella opening? A little. Hey, was it a little? No, it was fine. It was good. I could bring it down. No, no, no, no, we keep going. So we're talking about sports and games and emotions.

And we just did a thing on rules and creativity. And now it's time to add yet another element to the mix. Because what do you get if you put all those three things together? You get it. You get it. Bring it. Do it. Say it. You're energized here. You get a story. Exactly. Really good games are sort You get a story. Exactly. Really good games are sort of story-generating machines. For example, here's Allison Gopnik again talking about a little teeny story that happens

dozens of times a game in her favorite sport. One of the great moments in baseball is always that that ball is going out there and the guy is going out there with the glove and it might end up in the glove and it might not. And he backs up against the stadium wall and he either he gets it or he doesn't. That wouldn't be nearly as much fun if he was just playing catch, right?

That's a fantastic human drama. So the question we want to explore now is what kind of drama do you want? What kind of drama do you want? What kind of drama do you want? Is most fantastic. Thank you, I want the headphones the other way around. That's our producer, Sorry, Wheeler.

Has that? Something like that. Who is out of the bathroom and seems to have made a new friend. So set that up. Who's that guy? So that's Dan Engber. Senior editor at Slate Magazine. And I brought him into the studio because he told me about this thing that had happened to him.

When I was watching the NCAA tournament, the basketball tournament. The basketball. The men's college basketball tournament. This was just last year. And I don't know anything about college basketball. It's a, you know, I have two or three sports that I can pay attention to. Some people have one or two or zero, but college basketball isn't one of them. But there's this tournament on every year

is kind of exciting. So he watches. Yeah. And what he does, since he doesn't really have any loyalty, he doesn't know who to root for. He just kind of, by default. I just pick whichever team has the lower seed, which ever is the worst team.

Why do you do that? I have no idea. And it came to a head when I showed up at a friend's house and they had the game between Butler and Michigan State on. It was a semi-finals. And they were both seated number five. So it's like your little system is? Right, I have no idea which team to root for.

So I just started rooting for whichever team was losing. And was a close game. So... Butler would make a run. Then Michigan comes back. I start feeling sorry for Butler. Every time one would go up, he'd switch to the other. And at a certain point, he's like, wait a second. This strategy guarantees that at the end of the game, when the buzzer goes, I'll have

been rooting for the team that lost. Right. I've actually created a situation where I'm guaranteed to be disappointed. You're guaranteed to be disappointed. So Dan decided to figure out, like, what the hell is going on? Why would anyone do this to themselves? Is that something that's actually been studied? Yeah, so there's a small group of psychologists.

That would be me. And me. Who are interested in this question? Underdogs. Track a couple of them down. My name is Scott Allison. Nadav Goucmi. Two.

University of Richmond. University of San Diego, currently. So they're the studies that are just sort of hilariously simple, where you take a bunch of undergrads and you put them in a room and we give them scenarios to read. Richmond, University of San Diego, currently. So they're the studies that are just sort of hilariously simple, where you take a bunch of undergrads and you put them in a room, and we give them scenarios to read like a paragraph of evolving, say, two competing teams.

And there's almost no information. The teams don't even have names. They're just, it's team A and team B. Team A is playing team B in a game. You don't even have to tell them what sport. Team A is considered the better team and it's more likely to win. Who are you gonna root for?

80% of the students choose the underdog team. 80? In fact, a lot of times it comes out 90%. No, not to 10. Yes. In the absence of any reason to choose one or the other. That's almost universal. And you can do this study in all different ways

and the answer always comes out the same. You can describe it as two political figures. You know, running for election. Or you can talk about two businesses. Mom and pop, electronic store, against Walmart. Or you can talk about two landscape painters who've painted pictures that are now trended. Landscape painters? Yes. We gave participants a painting. Half the participants were told this painting was done by a successful established artist. You know, so it's though, who has a gallery show downtown. And the other half of the participants were told this same painting was done by a starving artist.

First year art student. He was trying to make it in the art world. Who only has one arm. Exactly. And people have this very strong bias in favor of the underdog painter. So what else do we have? We got landscape painters, unnamed sports teams, businesses, politics, politics.

And my favorite, shapes. Shapes. Yeah. What would an underdog shape be? It's just a circle about an ancient diameter moving left or right across the computer screen. Moving up what could be a hill? Exactly.

As the circle moves up, the circle slows down as it goes up the hill. Nudging up and then dropping back a little bit and then nudging up and dropping back a little bit. Quivering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then along comes the second circle that has no trouble getting up that hill Cruises past the slowpoke circles zooms right past it and sure enough people have a real preference in somewhere in other They're really rooting for a circle B the struggling we get people emotionally reacting to a geometric shape when they're sitting there Are they like come on come, you can do it.

Yes. Yes. Pulling forward is gonna be like, Rudy, you know, this is how deeply ingrained the underdog phenomenon is in us. At this point, like my question is, why? Why?

Why not here? Exactly. Why do we do this? Well, I think that there are two different approaches to that, to that Y question. One of them is this kind of what they call an emotional economics argument. And it goes like this. If you know that you have an underdog and you have a top dog, so the top dog is expected

to win, right? If you think of this like the way a gambler would think of it, like if you go with the top dog, they're expected to win, so you're not going to get a big payout if they do win. Minimal, emotional to pay off, but you'll lose a lot if they lose. Meaning you won't feel too good if they win, but you'll feel really bad if they lose. Yes, but if you go with the on the dog, it's the reverse. Right. They're expected to lose. So if they do lose, it's not that big a deal, because you kind of figured that was how it was going to go. But if they win, you feel great.

It's significant, emotional to pay off. So it's like great. So you can do if you can, the emotional payoff. So it's like betting on a long shot horse. You can put in five bucks. You're probably gonna lose it, but if you win, you might get back like a hundred. Exactly. I don't think that's not feel at all like how I watch sports.

Well, there's another argument, which is these guys say that maybe it's something about fairness. Deep down, we wanna live in a fair society where there's an even playing field. And there's research that shows that fairness is a pretty deep instinct in us. But I don't know. I mean, like, none of that seems to... I guess the thing is that this whole thing feels like a lot more basic. If you look back at the stories we tell. This underdog story is ancient. The Iliad, the Odyssey, great epics from Asia, Africa.

That's all the same story. And so Scott says, you know, maybe we love the underdog because we feel like we are the underdog. I mean, in some sense, just to be a living thing is to fight against the odds. Think about newborns. You can't be any more weak and helpless and small. is to fight against the odds. Think about newborns. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You can't be any more weak and helpless and small.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, the baby. I guess that's true. But I don't know. I mean, I don't remember being a baby and feeling like,

but I do remember junior high. You know, and I do remember feeling like, I would never get a job. And I do remember feeling like there's no way that girl's ever gonna like me. We need these stories just to make it through. They're part of who we are as human beings. There's actually a very interesting story about Haruki Murakami, the famous Japanese novelist. He was awarded the Jerusalem literature prize. And this was in the mid-Store immediately after Israel invaded Gaza and there were more than one thousand Palestinian dead. In his delivery speech, he said the following.

Between a high solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong, perhaps time or history will do it but if there were a novelist who for whatever reason wrote works Standing with the wall of what value would such works be Value with these works be Interesting word. It's almost like he's saying like a stories job is Beyond morality. It's beyond truth like it's job is somehow to job is beyond morality, it's beyond truth, like it's job is somehow to tell you that the world could be a way that we know inherently it never will be.

Think that's what he's saying. Or maybe he's really saying that I stand with the powerless and the powerful can take care of themselves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to a little weight to people who have no muscles of their own. I'm going to put a little pebble on the scale. That's the Jowl of the story. And I guess if the scale is always weighted in the wrong direction, then that's why we

love the story because we need more pebbles. Well, yeah, but there's a question we haven't asked here. What is it? Well, four out of five of us root for the underdog or the struggling circle, but that's not everyone. One out of five people, I like screw that circle. I'm excited about the circle, but you could probably do some interesting follow-up studies

on who are those psychopaths. Yeah. And so. Let's see you assume they're psychopaths. I do. Actually, oddly, we ended up bumping into a guy who falls into this group. It's awesome.

Yeah, hi. His name's Malcolm Gladwell, he's a writer. The New Yorker magazine. Dill's written a bunch of best-selling books. And in the middle of a conversation, unbidden, by the way, he suddenly says, Oh, I never ever chair for the inner talk. You don't?

No. Why? Why not? Because I'm distressed by the injustice of the person who should win not winning. The injustice of the, what? Losing for the favorite. That is the most exquisitely painful situation to be in.

So I remember as a kid the first time I ran, I was a huge track and field fan. 76 Olympics, Dwight Stones lost the high jump. Even though he was so far in a way the greatest high jump in the world, because it rained, his technique required absolutely perfect footwork, and he would slip on the tarmac. And I just remember sitting there as a kid

and I was just devastated because I could feel his pain, right? And his pain was so much greater than anybody else's. What's wrong with you? It's too painful if they lose. When Dwight Stun's lose is the high jump, it is literally one of the most painful experiences of my young life. I can't, I thought about it from weeks afterwards. I just couldn't wrap my mind around how he must have felt going home. And ever since that, I was

like, there's no way you could not cheer for the overdub because they will suffer. Like, I mean, it's the only humane position because you were trying to end up human suffering. This is as tortured and twisted the logic as I've ever heard. I mean, I was thought this was some, you know, rare evidence of my empathy that I felt okay. I'm so sorry to brought you the new, exactly. No, it's also, you know, it is, there's another part of this too, and that is that it is that I have a deep distrust and unhappiness with luck. So I do not like it when the outcome turns on an unrepeatable sequence. So Georgetown losing to Villanova in, is it the 82 NCAA College

Basketball Championships? There is no way, you could play that game a hundred thousand times and Villanova would still only win that one time. That game, it did more than upset me, it outraged me. I just thought, it's just not right, it is a violation of everything. You shouldn't be able to shoot 78% from the floor or whatever the, I forgot what the number was. The preposterous number they, and I just, you know, if I had been on Georgetown, I would, to this, I would wake up every night at a cold sweat, to this day just thinking, this is outrageous. Like, what? How did this happen? That's so weird, because you're a storyteller by trade. Like, what are the cons Christian

Anderson? They'd woken up every morning and said, here, I have a great story. There's an ugly duckling and it just stays ugly because you know, why should it get lucky and be a swat? It's just an ugly duckling. Well, we're not talking about stories. I understand stories. To me, a game is not a story.

To me, a game is, it is a contest between two parties, according to certain rules, and when expectations and rules are violated, some part of me takes offense. Well, I'm curious, how do you feel about the people who always root for the unirdog, which happens to be most people? Do you feel like that's the weaker position, morally? Is it weaker morally? I mean, there's a very unflattering interpretation of this, and that is that on some deep level,

I think of myself as a favorite, not an underdog, right? You know, that's like I say, that's an unflattering way of interpreting my motives. But you know, unlike many of my peers, I grew up in a tiny, tiny town and went to a kind of an exceptional high school where everyone left at 16 to go home and milk the cows. It was like a situation where I did sort of grow up as the, if you had parents who'd gone to college, you were the overdog in my universe growing up. So I do sort of, when I was in seventh grade and someone got a better grade than me, it

was outrageous to me, right? Because no one should get her. Only my friend Bruce should get a better grade than me. He's the only other person in the class whose parents went beyond the ninth grade or had books at home or who had left the province of Ontario. So maybe there's something in that that if you grow up in these impoverished environments

where you you're forced into a particular dominant role, right? You just you you come back to it again and again long after those circumstances have changed. That's Malcolm Gladwell. The sender of layers everywhere. I do hate when winners lose. It is true Radio lab was created by Jack Abelrock and is edited by Sorn Wheeler

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-host. Dylan Keefe is our director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brestler, Rachel Kusik, Bakedi Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pasco, D.R.S, Sindu Nhanasambam, Dan, Matt Kewti, Anime Q and Alex Nason, Saurkari, Anna Ruskwek Bas, Saur Sanback,an Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vignales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Pat from San Francisco. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. The foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.