Playing More Improves Ability: Fact or Myth?

When teams do not do very well, what is often touted as the best course of action that leads to improvement is more game time against top opposition.

Looking at the T20 rankings, something struck me. The fact that there are three leagues in the Top 20: the one with the top six, currently led by England; the one that starts at 7th and terminates at 12th, anchored by Zimbabwe; and then the one that comes after that, which has the UAE, Scotland, Nepal and others. I think the third league might be more fluid as the teams there are more or less on the same level.

Afghanistan leads the one that starts at 7th place, and they are quite capable of upsetting a major team (in the top 6) at a major tournament. They have the talent, especially in T20, and especially when they play Rashid Khan. But, they cannot do that with consistency, which is why seventh-place is the highest position that they can command for extended periods.

It really doesn't matter how many more international matches they play against teams in the top six, but they are always going to be outplayed by those teams. The reason is not that they lack the talent to rise further, they have an abundance of it, I just don't think they have the right structures to take them higher than where they are at the moment.

Therefore, for the moment they are at their summit, and it will take a steady decline of one of the top six for them to be a part of that league. And even then, they would need a change in their own systems to be consistently competitive against the top six.

Systems Not Just Experience

The Greek poet, Archilochus, wrote, "We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." This quote was later adapted and paraphrased by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, and he, in turn, says, "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."

I will further modify it to say, "Teams do not rise to the level of their experience, they fall to the level of their systems."

A lot of times when a team struggles to construct decent innings, one of the things we often say is that they need more playing time, more experience and more exposure. This is not a misguided notion, because in gaining experience, teams develop a better understanding of conditions first hand and not just through theory.

But, that experience alone is not going to be of much help. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and others, could play 13 Tests a year against the top teams, but that will not mean that they will improve. If anything, they might just become the go-to whipping boys for the top teams whenever they need feel-good matches where they overrun their opposition.

Checkmate

The thinking that more matches result in better and improved performance is also very common in chess, especially amateur chess circles. And without a shadow of a doubt, chess is one of the very few games where experience is a large determinant of whether one achieves grandmaster level or not. For instance, a 2008 study by Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet found that the chances of a player reaching the international master level were drastically reduced if the player did not start playing chess seriously by age twelve.

Experience matters.

But experience will only take a player so far before they reach a ceiling. A learner-player will get better as they are exposed to better opposition, but only up to a certain level, beyond which it is no longer possible to just improve by playing more.

In the 1970s William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon conducted an experiment grounded in the one that had been conducted by Dutch chess master and psychologist Adriaan de Groot in the 1940s. De Groot flashed chessboards in front of the players of varying skill levels for a few seconds and then asked them to reconstruct the scenario on a blank board. The masters were able to reconstruct the boards while their lesser-skilled counterparts failed.

Chase and Simon took the experiment a step further, they also flashed players from grandmaster level to novice with chessboards that contained randomly placed pieces. Situations that could never appear in a game. The result was that even though the grandmasters were able to reconstruct the real-match scenarios, they were unable to recreate the boards with the randomly placed pieces.

The reason for this being that the randomly placed pieces defied chess logic. A grandmaster is fluent in the language of chess and has a mental database of millions of arrangements of pieces that are broken down into at least 300,000 meaningful chunks which are in turn grouped into mental “templates."

This mental database is not created by playing more matches either against lesser able players or extremely talented players. It is created by regularly studying their own matches against other players, and also contests between other players, past and present, with the help of coaches. This dedicated studying helps them develop fluency and understand the game on a much deeper level.

A player with better coaching who started playing chess later in life will overtake the one with years of playing under their belt.

Experience Is An Unreliable Fortune Teller

Chad Van Iddekinge, John Arnold, Rachel Frieder and Philip Roth collaborated on a study that culminated in the paper, "A meta‐analysis of the criterion‐related validity of prehire work experience." In their study, Van Iddekinge and his colleagues sought to understand the impact of previous work experience on future performance. Their finding was that previous work experience is not a good predictor of how people will perform in a new job.

The same is true for sports, experience is not a very good indicator of how well a team or athlete is going to perform, even though it goes a long way in helping athletes to develop the right mental skills for performance. And while, in addition to this, experience also helps in developing an athlete's adaptability, there is one thing that it does not do, and that is the mastery of skills.

You see, it is gaining real skill in a task, not just doing it more and more, that makes one an elite competitor or elite team. Experience does not guarantee expertise. Certain teams compete against the best in their leagues but do not seem to improve, they remain whipping boys/girls for decades.

This is because there is no substitute for knowledge. Without the right systems in place, suitable coaches, the right equipment and facilities... without creating the right foundations on which to convert information gathered from matches and tournaments into knowledge, then experience is worth nothing.

Experience should not be viewed as a silver bullet, as the ultimate in improving a team's competitiveness, but rather as a tool to be used towards making the right adjustments. At the end of the day, sporting leagues are led by teams and individuals who can make the right adjustments at the right time, not those who have the most experience.

As William Denning wrote, "Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence without theory, there is no learning. Theory is a window on the world. Theory leads to prediction. Without prediction, experience and examples teach nothing. To copy an example of success, without understanding it with the aid of a theory, may lead to disaster."

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