#19 - Marcus Daniell - The Hyper-Competitive World of Pro Tennis

0:00To me, tennis is one of the most zero sum games. I know there's the superficial layer of friendliness and civility, but damn, it's like once you get below that, it's very competitive. I've been on tour for, I don't know, close to 20 years now. There are very few people who I feel like I have a deep, genuine friendship with because there's always that layer of tomorrow I'm going to be doing everything I can to take food off your family's table. And that's actually one of the things I've struggled with the most in sport.

1:00who use both their voices and platforms, but also their own money, to donate to highly cost-effective charities. So as you can imagine, we have lots to talk about. We actually spend a lot of this conversation digging into the many sort of similarities between the pro-tennis world and the pro-poker world. We also hear about the many pressures that the tennis world is facing in this modern-day age of technology, social media, and shortened attention spans. And last, but certainly not least, we hear many of his insights into how we can harness the power of seemingly zero-sum sports and turn them into clear win-wins for the world.

1:39So, all my favourite things, let's dig in.

1:54so marcus what i'd love to dig into first of all is understanding what sort of strategies pro tennis players use to and you know to ensure peak performance uh like when i when i played poker professionally, I got a mental game coach for a little while. And because poker is such a sort of noisy game, there's so much luck and randomness. It seemed like the best type of mindset a poker player can adopt is one that is just focused entirely on process and not really looking at results. And I remember even developing like a mantra that I would say to myself before a big tournament. It's like, focus on your process and the results will take care of themselves.

2:36so does that relate to tennis at all like is there much like what's your pre-game process before a big match yeah I think there are huge similarities uh and I think I imagine in any sport it would be the same thing where uh as soon as you get results focused you get out of the present moment and if you get out of the present moment then it's much harder to perform because you're not you're not there um my my pre-match routine is really quite different to a lot of people's because i i always found i i got over aroused too easily and so i needed to try and bring myself down so what i would actually do is about 30 minutes before i'd gotta go out for a match i'd do a five minute meditation and and try to really sort of sink into my body that same concept of not being future thinking, not thinking, okay, what's going to happen in the match?

3:33How am I going to deal with things that happen in the match? Rather coming back to the present, coming back to my body and saying, okay, what am I feeling right now? What's going through my head right now? And just sort of sinking into it. And I found that that helped me hugely. Are nerves quite a big problem for tennis players in general, or is it really varies from person to person definitely and actually another thing you said there like so with poker you've got luck and randomness i think in tennis the luck element's probably a lot smaller but the randomness is huge because you've got a person on the other side of the net who's who's giving you whatever they decide to give you in the moment um so yeah you you have to be able to deal with randomness and so again going back to that that process piece like how do you deal with that randomness how do you deal with being in the moment and, you know, being in that flow state where you don't have to think about your responses because you don't have time to think.

4:26That's another piece where, you know, if you're in the future, then you're, if you're in the future, then you're thinking too much. And if you're thinking too much, then your body can't react the way that it should react if it's just like that, that natural flowing thing. Do you have any hacks to get you into the flow state? I'd like to say yes, but in all honesty, I have various protocols that I use if I feel that I'm not in the flow state. One that I've really enjoyed more recently is, especially if I feel nervous, which like it's so normal. It must be the case across every sport, across everything competitive that you get nervous.

5:10And if you're not feeling nervous, I think that's a sign that you either don't care or the stakes aren't high enough. For me, I really like focusing on a specific body part. So in tennis, the thing that's an absolute killer is if your hands and arm get tight because power relies on fluidity and sort of like a whip mechanism and you can't get a fast end of the whip if your arm being sort of almost the end of the whip, the end of the racket being the end of the whip if the arm's tight the racket can't move fast you mean like the flexibility through the wrist yeah so your arm always has to be loose and flowing and if you're nervous then you get tight yeah and you try and grip harder so I try to take my attention to the part furthest away so I try and think like what am I feeling in my feet right now like is it hot is it cold are they sore um are my feet tired stiff that sort of thing and you know sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't do you actually do that in game like you're caught like in between a point yeah yeah but between points so yeah that's that's one thing another is um is breathing like you know i think that's a very typical thing with the whole meditation piece but like really focusing on breath not only as a way to sort of recenter and take your your brain away from being nervous and being tight but also to recover like you do have a limited time between points to try and get back to baseline and that's part of it so you mentioned there's a difference in your mind between luck and randomness i think that's i'd like to understand how you define them differently because to me they're often sort of synonymous like certainly when i talk about them in poker i see you know there's the randomness in the cards the cards that you get dealt and the cards that come out in the flop the turn in the river um there's also the seeming randomness of the way as you said like your opponent behaves is that the differentiation you're talking about here so like like what would be an example of luck i guess in tennis as opposed to randomness yeah so so the way i think of it is luck would as an example be a ball hitting the top of the net and dribbling over versus dribbling back onto your side so winning or losing a point like that or uh what we call a shank like if your opponent hits a ball not in the middle of the strings and it hits like the sides of the racket and then goes in for a winner like you can't control a shank so if it goes in it's lucky and it goes both ways and you know it's I think it's a pet favorite of of tennis players to consider every opponent's lucky shot lucky or like shank shot lucky and your own was like well I was going to go there anyway but so that's that's the idea of luck for me in tennis and then randomness is more if your opponent does things that you don't expect in the moment and that's always happening to some degree like you can never fully predict what your opponent's going to do um actually i wonder so in tennis you're constrained by by the lines and the net but then within that you've got pretty much anything that you can do including some stuff that's not usually done like underarm serves or you know things that aren't sort of sportsman like um and i was just thinking that those constraints at face value to me are more open than poker with the number of cards that you have.

8:30But would you agree with that? Or do you think there's just as much randomness in poker? If not more. It's difficult because in theory, your tennis is a game taking place in three-dimensional space. So you have all that granularity and it's very dependent on physics, right? Whereas poker, the design of the game in many ways, I mean, there is some physics, like there's randomness that happens, It's like someone walks past and it creates a draft just as the dealer's dealing the cards. And that tosses a card to flip up. That happens? Oh, that's happened. And it actually happened to Igor in a really major tournament.

9:10And it's very funny. I mean, he should tell the story. But he was getting dealt his cards. Slight gust of wind from the AC or something made the dealer just dealt a little too high and it flipped it up. And he was going to end up getting aces, I think. and in the end he got ace king which is still an amazing hand so they put that card away yes you don't yeah exactly that card goes and he get dealt another one and that little tiny thing and then he ended up losing his entire stack and if he had had the aces he would have won the you know the hand and it was it was just really like unfathomably brutal how bizarre yeah so there's there's that physical element that can happen in poker but i i know it's it's like very hard to quantify i mean But poker itself, like it's a core, like intuitively it feels to me that on the scale between, let's say, a game like roulette to a game of chess where there's basically all luck and no skill to all skill and basically no luck.

10:09Poker lies somewhere in the middle and it feels to me that tennis would be closer towards the chess end. I guess actually one the other aspect of luck that probably doesn't get spoken about enough but is actually plays a far bigger role in the success of a tennis player is the luck of being born in the right country in the right town with supportive parents with a supportive tennis federation that sort of stuff like that's yeah actually thinking about it that's that's the pieces of luck that will make or break a tennis career rather than winning or losing one point from a net chord type thing.

10:43Hmm. So it's almost like the meta game of life, basically. Are you born into the right circumstance? And I mean, to a degree, that's kind of the case in poker. Do you have a... Actually, I don't know, because poker is something that has a very broad range of people from very broad backgrounds. And so with internet now, I guess. Yeah, that's definitely leveled the playing field. Yeah, whereas tennis has definitely got this, sort of had this image of, it's quite expensive, right? You need to be able to afford the top coaches. I mean, it's not as extreme as something like equestrianism, right? No, or golf, but still a reasonably high barrier for entry in terms of sport, I guess.

11:22So anyway, coming back to this, you mentioned like this role of randomness and you're trying. so it sounds like when you're playing you are trying to be as unpredictable as possible for your opponent right you're using that that feels like the strategy i mean i'm a horrible tennis player but with a few times i've played like i do these very basic ass tricks like oh i i'm gonna look in that direction and hit the ball that way look it's the best i got all right obviously i play against eagle he's a bit better than me and like he's figured that out and has me perfectly But I assume there must be some degree of that going on, right?

11:59Like you want to be as inherently unpredictable, surely, to your opponent. Yes, definitely. There's also an interesting situation where if going into a match, someone has either a weakness that's just known and it's just the weaker part of their game, or during a match, one particular shot starts breaking down and always in tennis, that's the game. how can I break you down how will you let me know that something's breaking down or you're getting uncomfortable about it and then exploiting those weaknesses so there's an interesting case here where if someone has a known weakness do you do the annoying predictable route of I'm just going to go almost every single ball into that weakness so that you know exactly what I'm doing so I try and get into your head being like nah I know I know that this is going to break down eventually um so there's yeah there's like a there are intimidation games that you can play in that style as well and that you know there are a number of people in my head who if i came up against them on a match court that would be the first strategy that i'd go for rather than pure randomness just to be like let's see what you've got with your weakness today and then if it breaks down great i'm going to keep going there and if you if you figure it out if you shore it up during the match then okay, need to change tactics and be a bit more unpredictable but until that happens it's a winning strategy I'd love to understand how the dynamics between players in terms of because I imagine you're on tour right and you presumably develop very deep bonds with some of the other players who you're seeing who are both your competitors but they're also your peers and contemporaries.

13:51So I'm really curious to understand how that manifests because in poker people are often surprised you know like you're literally being out partying with some of your best friends you're talking strategies there's a lot of like idea sharing going on in poker at least there certainly used to be but then you'll sit down at the table and you're literally going after each other's lifeblood you're going after each other's money and poker players are good at sort of separating those two things you know there'll maybe be a few disagree I can't believe you put that move on me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

14:19But basically there is no team in poker and everyone understands and accepts that as part of the rules of the game. And yeah, I can still be very good friends. Is that also the case in tennis? I think lesser. So yeah, it's an interesting dynamic because you see the same people almost every week of the year, right? Like it's a traveling circus. So you get very familiar with people and for the most part, it's very civil and most people are really friendly and you know you you have to practice with other people like you want to practice with people as good or better than you so at the top that that list of people is quite small so you have to be able to cooperate wait wait so you're on tour and you will literally be practicing training against your opponents yeah it'll be a mix like usually when you're on tour you do most of your practice uh with opponents like you know you'll book an hour and each side will have their own coach and be working on their own stuff but to have the quality of tennis ball on the court that you'd face in a match you need to have someone who can produce that and that the amount of people in the world who can do that are very small wow um and then when you go off tour and you have like a week or two weeks of a training block before you go back on that's when you're with your coach doing drills and reps and that sort of stuff um but yeah so there's this to me it feels like there's this superficial layer of friendliness and civility but damn it's like once you get below that it's very competitive and one of the reasons i was sort of excited to talk to you is to me tennis is one of the most zero-sum games i know because for me to win you have to lose like it is it is pure in that sense um and And there are very few people, I've been on tour for, I don't know, close to 20 years now.

16:14There are very few people who I feel like I have a deep, genuine friendship with. Because there's always that layer of tomorrow I'm going to be doing everything I can to take food off your family's table. Which is weird. Like that's so weird, but that's just the reality of it. and I think the only unencumbered friendship that you can have is with a doubles partner because then you're literally on the same team and it's both of you trying to take food off everyone else's table um and that's actually that's one of the things I've struggled with the most in in sport is that um like it is inherently selfish and and cutthroat and part of me really likes that and likes the competitiveness and like the the fire that you feel from it and another part of me uh feels a bit yuck about it and it's not the type of person that i want to be in life you know and actually so earlier i mentioned you know meditating um before matches and for the last six or seven years part of that meditation like i did some work with with a sports in new zealand part of that meditation was consciously putting marcus the human aside and saying okay this is who i want to be i'm going to put you to the side and get into like marcus the competitor while i'm on the match court like more sort of like wolf-like tendencies you know like real fight and that's who i have to be to win tennis matches and then afterwards having a conscious sort of transition back to okay i'm gonna leave asshole marcus on on the tennis court now and go back to who I want to be in life which is it's quite a weird um thing to know that you have to do to succeed like literally having to fracture your personality and and yeah put aside your your your kinder tendencies essentially to get that killer instinct yeah yeah because I mean that's that's actually really interesting point you say that tennis is the most zero-sum game because I was when you said that I was like no no poker surely is more but actually when it comes to things like friendships because on the poker tour you have the pros but actually the pros aren't it they rarely are trying to feed off each other we have this whole other group of fish in the pond literally we call that you know they're called fish the amateurs who also enter the things and they're really what who you're we're we're trying to feed off and that gives space for pros to actually be more collaborative truly and if you've made it to the top table then like well yeah the final table because i mean this is i mean this is in tournament poker but yeah it's usually a mix of pros and amateurs because it's just there's again there's randomness in any given tournament and sometimes the worst player wins and sometimes the best player loses and but on average the better players make the final table more often so yes typically the cream rises to the top and you'll more often be up against other pros who might be your friends but there's still, I think that allows it for deeper friendships to develop because the, A, there's greater incentives for, for actual like sharing of information and, and having essentially a team and collaborators.

19:32But B, there's just more abundance. Whereas with you guys, there's like real true, strict scarcity. And it's knockout from the start of the tournament. Exactly, yes. It's very much like that. There's not just a bunch of random amateurs also in there who you're taking from. It's just you guys. And there's a smaller number of you, right? How many people's in an average tournament? Usually 32 singles players, 16 doubles teams in the average tournament. Grand Slam's much bigger. One question for you. Do you prefer to play against professionals? like is it is it the case that because amateurs don't know what they're doing so much because they're so unpredictable it's harder and less fun to play against them whereas if you're against equals it's like okay now we've got a real poker game on our hands um no so you generally speaking the reason why an amateur is an amateur is because they just make worse decisions in in every in every spot on average their decision making process is less good and the more decisions you get to make against them the greater your edge you know those those those that delta between their bad decision and your good decision adds up and so typically you just want to while it's true that like real beginners play so crazy it's sometimes hard to get a read on them if you know what the like mathematically optimal plays are then you just you can just follow those and ignore all the crazy shit they're doing and you're they're just gonna be making so many mistakes that you can just play like pretty abc and you'll just be still extracting um now that said it can be a nice challenge like if you're playing it's a bunch of players who are just so bad but they're also predictably bad that i could see that getting boring and so it's nice to have better players to play against so that you can actually improve your own game.

21:27So coming back to your, I think it's really interesting you mentioned like this, this idea of having to separate these two parts of your personality to sort of isolate the cutthroat killer. Do you, did you find that became easier or harder to do as you got older? Like, did you become more or less like classically competitive in that respect? It's like, I must win and ruthless in your competitiveness. I think it became harder because at first I didn't think like that like when I was coming up through the levels I just wanted to get through the levels like I wasn't making a living from tennis I was losing money playing tennis it was like how do I keep the dream alive how do I actually make a living from the sport from something that I'd already you know dedicated 10-15 years too um so at that stage it was just like no i i need to do this uh and then i think it was only when i'd started uh feeling a bit of security in tennis that i started having these thoughts of oh man i'm like i'm playing against guys who had families and i knew their families and i was like oh man that's like they've got two really cute young kids and like you know if they lose then he might drop outside the top 100 and then i don't does he have to quit like how's he gonna keep providing for his family like that sort of thing um that only came later on and so yeah i think i think actually it became harder later and i definitely put more work psychologically into into what i had to do to try and like separate or it wasn't even that that was the result of the work was like okay what do i have to do to feel comfortable doing this and and winning because i even tried for a while um in my mid-20s uh completely removing the opponent from the from the situation so don't think about the opponent it's a faceless formless blob with a tennis ball coming out of it down the other end purely play the ball and play to the best of my ability disregarding everything else which is a beautiful idea right in practice i didn't win a match for like three or four months and the the main reason i can think of for why that's the case is because of how cutthroat it is like at a certain level you win and lose tennis matches based on the tiny little chinks in the mental and emotional armor of your opponent and if you're not paying very deep attention to to those things the little tells that you can see in your opponent and you don't exploit them as they come up, then they've got a chance to regroup and it just becomes a whole lot harder.

24:16And that in itself was quite a painful realization that I win tennis matches based on doing everything I can to upset you emotionally and mentally and it's not just about the tennis game. Maybe Roger Federer could make it just about the tennis game and still win everything. But yeah, for me it was like, okay, well I have to be that person to really focus on weaknesses and um and yeah then that led to the okay if i'm sort of the acceptance like if i if i have to be that person then at least i should try and not bring that person into my day-to-day life yeah it's kind of like it sounds like kind of like a war game where in many ways a strategy that military generals seem to do is they they want to dehumanize their people so that you can you can channel your inner psychopath basically to be okay with the you know this what you're doing to them essentially what you're taking from them but actually that also comes at a strategic cost by the sounds of it because then you're almost like you're dehumanizing them so much you're losing touch of your own humanity which is noticing how your other human is reacting like i think the the opposite end of that spectrum is some people really lean into the the opponent is the enemy mindset and you know we'll be like swearing at you under their breath the whole match and like just it's it's truly combative rather than a sport competition it's like you know like yeah quite nasty uh but i can definitely understand how that helps people win Is that something all the top players do?

25:56No, no, I don't think so. At least not explicitly. Like there are people who've had extraordinary careers who I've never seen like overt tension or like... Hatred. Yeah. Like the two that come to mind are Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal. insanely competitive people both of them nadal you can see it probably more than than with federer because just the way he walks around and like his facial expression but man the the few times in federer's career especially his later career that that he got frustrated with how a match was going and it slipped through the cracks you saw just like a volcano of competitiveness in there um and but yeah they it was like so that there was something in there but they they never used it as a tool on their opponents at least not explicitly no or not often and i think actually i'm not sure if this was conscious or not from federer but i remember i remember one time specifically i think it was at indian wells and he was losing a match and not playing very well and he was just his normal self like calm and just like flowing around and looked like he'd just come out of a shower with his hair all done and it got to a stage where the other guy who he shouldn't have had any business losing to was getting quite close to winning and point was over and he just screamed like just unleashed and you could see the moment that his opponent looked up and heard it and was sort of shocked and from that moment on he was he he was so shaken because he'd realized at that point i'm about to beat roger federer and that switched the match so if it was conscious it was genius because it's so unusual for federer to to have an outburst or anything like that if he used that as like a okay i'm going to release some of this negative energy and i'm also going to get my opponent off kilter man that's like locker room power at its finest because then the opponent starts thinking oh wow Federer's rattled I'm about to beat him and it's like what I'm about to be and now they're out of the game yeah and then in the moment exactly I'm about to beat Roger Federer what am I going to tell my girlfriend and my friends and oh my god I'm going to have so much attention and then when you're out of the present moment like the game falls apart it's hard to get back into it and federer turned the match around and i i don't i don't think he lost another game might have lost one more game but but won the match it's just like i this is the part of sport that i find so fascinating is those little mental emotional like intricacies that can only exist at the top when technical level was so close yeah it's these little tiny edges have you ever lost your temper yeah yeah it's it's i think it's normal like what's it what's the rate with which like do you do you lose your temper on average is it like every game because like when i play poker i i would get like upset i'll be calling being on tilt i i in any given tournament there'll be a moment where i'm like you know i'll get my ace is cracked or something and I'll feel that like the sense of like injustice or rage now how long it lingers is that's what varies but it's it's I don't think I've ever had a time where I was just like completely zen and was completely impartial to what was actually happening with the cards oh yeah I don't think I've ever had a match in my life where there wasn't a moment or moments that I was frustrated like that's I think that's that's the beauty of tennis is you can even if you win a match like 6-2, 6-2, there will still be moments where you feel the momentum might be switching.

29:59Oh, I could have made that. Yeah. You'll never play a perfect match. But then there's a difference between that and letting it show, like, I think my favorite form of showing frustration is like just a wordless yell because I like releasing the negative energy and i feel like often that can actually uh bring me into the moment and so it's like positive because you're releasing this negative energy and it's also like a snap back to okay what do i need to do now and you know i'm not roger federer but ideally it also like does something to the opponent um and then throwing a racket if i'm really pissed off but that You throw to racket?

30:43Oh, yeah, many times. But that now would probably only happen, I don't know, once every 20 matches or something like that. What were you like as a kid? Like how did you have this burning competitive desire from a very young age? Or was it something that as you grew and discovered that you were actually just really good at tennis that developed? I think I was always competitive.

31:13yeah, I have an older brother, which I think helped. Seems like a common theme. Yeah, trying to beat him.

31:22And I was a lot more angry and sulky as a kid, like through my racket a lot as a kid and had to get taught a few lessons by my mom, like paying for my own rackets and doing chores to try and set up and all that sort of stuff to rein it in. but yeah I think I was always competitive and then had to sort of mature into how to rein in the the energy and the negative energy into something that came out as more positive it's interesting that you so you play exclusively doubles now yeah yeah so what what was the main driver for that because I I always assumed that so most players would just kind of mix and match between the two yeah there's well a few explanations one is I probably wasn't good enough at singles I never really got to find out um I've had a lot of issues with injury over my career so when I was playing I always played singles and doubles and when I was playing a lot of singles I never actually played a full season so so I'd like get momentum start building the ranking things would start flowing and then I get injured and when you get injured you lose ranking you have to sort of you slide down the mountain have to start climbing from from lower down again um so that kept happening for many years and then one year I was actually playing the best singles I'd ever played my ranking was the highest it had been and then it just so happened that during a series of challenges which is like the second level of professional tennis ATP tour and then ATP challenger tour I was playing singles and doubles in the first event and I lost early in the singles and won the doubles and then at the event afterwards I was in the qualifying of the singles and qualifying happens on the weekend before the tournament starts but I was still playing the doubles final at the other tournament so I couldn't make the qualifying and then that happened like four weeks in a row where I couldn't play the singles qualifying because I kept doing too well in doubles so at the end of this set of four tournaments my doubles ranking shot up and my singles ranking had slumped because I hadn't played singles for three or four weeks and at the end of that I had to make the decision do I play bigger tournaments and doubles or go and play the smaller tournaments and singles and at that stage I was 24 or something like that and I'd had enough of the grind of the lowest levels of professional tennis which is brutal like you cannot make money you're playing in some pretty outrageous places sometimes like sleeping on the floor trying to save money while still trying to perform at like a it's still a high level like the tennis is still a high level but the rewards are almost non-existent so decided to focus on doubles from there and and I guess the third part is my skill set's better suited to doubles um I like coming forward playing at the net um that sort of thing so yeah if I'd played singles 50 years ago I might have been a very good singles player but now with the courts and balls the way they are definitely better suited for doubles how do you select a doubles partner

34:43it's it's strangely like dating like like no it's even worse than that because it's like dating from a very small incestuous pool of potential partners because firstly there are only maybe 50 people in the world who have a ranking similar enough that you could play the tournaments that you want to play secondly you have to get along with them because you'll spend more time with the doubles partner than with your your spouse like that's like much more time and then thirdly you have to play well together so you know even though there are i don't know how many tens of thousands of players trying to be professional in tennis in the world it might narrow down to a list of like five to ten who you could play with and then most of the time all of those people on that list are already with another partner so then you have to play this really gross game of like reaching out being like hey just just checking how things are going with yeah everything going well with your current partner like just checking in just letting you know that like i think we'll play well together and you know you've got to try and sort of like suss out if there's any potential movement or at the end of each year if if one of the top teams like the top teams in the world splits then there's this whole cascading effect of everyone trying to play with a partner who they think's better right and it's pretty gross um and i've always thought that there's too much switching in doubles like i really like the idea of of committing to a partner and building something long term and you know you go through the rough patches and you come out of them better because you've had tough experiences but what seems to be the case is if a tough patch goes even slightly more than people are comfortable with it's like oh it's my partner's fault and switch wonder if there's like an incentive structure that could be designed to encourage more like long-term partnerships because from a from an outsider's perspective like doubles is not so much it's not presumably as popular of a spectator sport right at least i i rarely watch it you know when i when i i know i'm not like a particularly prolific tennis watcher but i very rarely will watch doubles whereas i always watch a big singles match and perhaps it's in part because it like the the doubles do they even have do you have team names or anything you don't right It's just the names of the two individuals.

37:07Yeah. Whereas if you had long-term, longer-term partnerships, you could actually like the two tigers or whatever name you guys come up with and something that makes you more like identifiable and therefore marketable, which would actually incentivize them players to actually stay together for longer as well. Completely agree. Completely agree. Yeah, it's an interesting chicken egg thing because a lot of people who play tennis recreationally enjoy doubles as much if not more than singles especially the old the older generations who can't get around to court as well so i actually think there's i'm sure i have a biased um sample size because you know i i ask quite a lot of people about this like what do you think of doubles compared to singles and i often hear i actually prefer playing and watching doubles but because doubles is on tv so little there's not the exposure for the players to to result in like more interest and result in more sponsorship opportunities blah blah blah so one way of looking at it is particularly if teams stuck together and you could market people as a team then you could build hype around teams you can have rivalries oh it's the tigers against the hawks today yeah yeah but then the other side of it is it would be a risk for the atp or the wta to put marketing spend into something that's not proven yet you know like should we risk however many millions of dollars trying to make doubles a bigger sport we've already got already got singles and that marketing strategy is proven i mean like the most famous and most successful team of all time was the brian brothers and they were just a dream for for sponsors and for the tour because they're identical twins and insanely successful and they always played with each other so it's like the name is illiterate illiterates as well brian brothers the bbs yeah yeah so i yeah I do agree with you I think teams should stick together and and if they did I think they'd be both both for success on court and I think there'd be a lot more success off court if teams stuck together for longer have you ever had like a really notable conflict with your partner there was one guy I played with for a couple of years quite early in my career and great relationship we had quite a bit of success sort of moved up through the ranks together

39:28and talking about like known weaknesses his forehand was a known weakness on tour and it got to the stage where in practices and matches I wouldn't see that many shots because everyone would just hit it to his forehand and they'd know that that was all they had to do and it got to the stage where there was a definite glass ceiling and I knew that so I think we were ranked in the 30s or 40s in the world at the time and the next level from there if you're top 30 you can always play the masters events which outside the slams are the biggest events and they have the most money and the most points that's sort of like the highest level you can get to as a as a range and I I knew that if we didn't fix his forehand we'd never get there and I spoke he had a coach that he was working with I had a coach that I was working with at the big tournaments they'd both be there and both be like trying to help us as a team I spoke with my coach a lot trying to figure out how to broach the subject of hey we need to improve your forehand in a way that wasn't negative or blamey and was like look at this opportunity that we have but also saying like if we don't then this is it this is the best we can hope for and long story short it led to a pretty nasty conversation with him and his coach because there was just a complete difference in theory of what made a good forehand which i found incredibly frustrating because from my side it was like well obviously you don't know because your forehand is known to be terrible so open your mind to someone who's produced a bunch of good forehands not saying that mine was amazing but he had produced a lot of good forehands my coach and uh ultimately closed minds and we split um but that's when i when i think of conflict with a partner that's the situation it comes to mind because of how uncomfortable it was with the coach and with the player and like not being open to something that was that seemed so obvious and was like such a drawback and a glass ceiling on like the guy was such a hard worker and so passionate about it yeah it sounds I mean it's again going back to that dating analogy it's like knowing when to quit like that's often I think one of the biggest sources of distress of anyone in their life is like you're in a relationship that's not going that well but you've put in years of work into it but if that doesn't work or have results then what do you do yeah so do you have a rule of thumb now is there anything from that lesson that you've taken away where you're like okay in the future this is going to be the benchmark or do you or is it just that you've increased your stringency in in terms of selecting a new teammate, new partner?

42:32I think the stringency that I've increased is, I would never want to play with someone who wasn't honest about their own shortcomings, because everyone has them. Everyone has aspects of their game that are their weaknesses and it's all at different levels. Like the best players in the world, their weaknesses are still really good, but they're still weaknesses. And so if people aren't willing to admit a weakness, then there's no hope for improving that and if if that's a weakness that will stop us as a team from getting to where I want to get to then that's a real problem that's interesting you say that because at the same time there's I would agree that you'd think in a vacuum with any kind of peak performance you need someone who can critically examine their own weaknesses as objectively as possible and then like plug those leaks and you know we say plugging the leaks in in the game of poker if I know that my weakness is actually these certain situations I don't bluff enough or I'm like I get I get too fearful or I get too too aggressive you should be able to critically examine that but at the same time in poker at least there have been some players that seem to have this x factor where they're almost delusional about what you think is their skill level and yet they just keep winning or in look at ceos sometimes like there's this level of madness that some of them have where it's like in a in a vacuum it's like you want to start a company that does that and you expect it to grow to this within this amount of time that makes no sense like you run that simulation a thousand times that's going to come true about five out of a thousand or something like that and yet it's those people are the ones that if you if they don't have that seeming delusion, they would never try it in the first place.

44:20So I'm curious, like, you know, you take a Nadal or a Djokovic or someone like that. Would you say these are all like just deeply objective, classically rational people, or do they have that madness as well? I love this because that guy, the reason he got as good as he was, was because of the delusion. Like the forehand shouldn't have let him get to a ranking that he was at, but because he he was delusional enough about it to like you know he missed six in a row and after the sixth miss be like yeah okay okay the next one's going in like i got this it's like what like no you don't but he literally believed it and that's a bit of a superpower and i i imagine everyone has a bit of that like you you probably need a bit of that i just it was so glaring with him and it was it it felt to me like it was such a such an easy fix to improve quite a lot that it stuck out but I imagine everyone has an aspect that they have to like almost consciously be delusional about because they're insecure about it on a match court the better you are the lesser gets found out but then this is again where where I think tennis gets really interesting is when you have the very best players in the world playing against each other they're the only people who can find each other's little weaknesses out and then you've got the the mental challenge of how how much can i keep this delusion going and so yeah i don't want to get too sort of specific and technical on tennis stuff but like nadal playing federer on clay is there were there were situations in that matchup where nadal could could quite consistently find federer's very slight weakness and prey on it and just stuff like that.

46:08And like early days of Federer playing Nadal and Djokovic on grass, like just very specific situations where the best in the world could unmask the delusions in their opponents. And yeah, again, when it gets down to that level of intricacy, that's what I find really interesting about sport at a high level. Did the players ever, after one of these Federer-Nadal matches, Do you think they ever sat down over a beer and break down the game, break down the match? Probably not what I imagine you guys did in poker. I think there are some friendships amongst the top guys where they could have a beer together, but because they are just so insanely competitive, I very much doubt there'd be trade secrets shared.

46:58I think I would love for a film crew to organize Federer and Nadal when Nadal retires, just having like six drinks together and getting loose and being like, remember this match when you did this. And I would love that. So in poker, we have a lot of what we call leveling. It's like, so I think he's going to do this. I'm going to do that. But actually, then he'll most likely realize this. So actually, I'm going to go back to that. Do you have that kind of level of strategy before you're about to do a serve and you're figuring out where to put it? Yeah, particularly on serve. I'd really like to know more about that on the poker side because in tennis, I think it occasionally goes to the third level as I would conceive it, where particularly if someone has a weakness.

47:52So let's say you're serving on a big point. let's say it's like a your break point down on your own serve and you're serving so you're serving like 30 40 to the ad side if that helps to set this up in people's minds and you know the guy has a weaker forehand return so he's expecting you to hit it to his forehand because it's a big point and you play the percentage plays but then you you often especially if the match is tight you want a cheap point off your serve and so if he's leaning to the forehand there'll be space out to the backhand side so you're more likely to hit an unreturnable serve if you go for the wide serve and then add a layer on top of that which is what's my favorite serve rather than what's his weakness that's another sort of level but then you go back to okay well he might think that I might go for the cheap serve because I haven't had many cheap cheap points on my serve yet so you go back to the forehand side and that level of things is quite common I like very occasionally might go one level beyond that and go back to the wide serve or like something completely different but yeah that's that's sort of the level that that I think in tennis and I'm just I'm curious with poker how far down the he thinks that I thinks that he thinks like how far down do you go it's really hard to quantify I mean again it feels like three maybe four at most I don't think I ever went more than probably three levels deep in any situation do you guys incorporate a randomizer in in your strategy because like that is a big part of poker it's an essential part like to play game theory optimal you it's about knowing the ratios of um how often you should bluff in a given situation and in order to get those you know it's so let's say you want to bluff 30 of the time in this given situation so how do you know it's that 30 percenter it's it's that 30 percent time people will look at the second hand on their watch or they'll be playing with their chip and see where the the words on it land when they drop it um there's there's different ways do you do any of that that part i've never been i've never heard is anything other than intuitive of yeah yeah that For me, anyway, that part's always been intuitive of we need to change it up now.

50:11But almost always it's based on what's happened already of like, OK, he's leaning a little too hard on this one. And so we need to change up to keep him off balance. And then we'll go back to something that's like a layer below or something like that. Right. Because the thing is, is that human beings are not good at actually doing randomization. like if you get people to try and pick you know give me a string of random numbers between zero and a hundred the the types of patterns that people give actually aren't very random like we underdo doubles or triples even um we always think that numbers have to be different sequentially and that kind of thing uh and which is why i think poker players we don't trust our intuition to go oh that oh it feels about time you know it's been 30 percent like we just don't do that we literally use some kind of physical randomizer like the second hand on the clock um so it's it's sort of somewhat surprises me that the top players aren't introducing like i i would love to see you know someone have a dice in their pocket and like throw it in the air and let it land it doesn't matter like because in poker like it's actually almost a good thing for your opponent to know that you're randomizing it's not a bad thing because as long as your ratios are correct as long as they're like whatever your decision you know what what comes up in your randomizer they don't know what that means it's actually not bad that's so interesting i i wonder if there's room for improvement in tennis for like a conscious randomizer yes i'm i'm gonna experiment with this oh i'll let you know i'll let you know how it goes that's super interesting what role has uh technology played in terms of...

51:56Because Hawkeye, right, which is the... I mean, you'll explain it better, but it's basically using a camera to look back at whether the ball was in or not. That was introduced in, what, 2006, around that time? Sounds about right. I mean, now there are many tournaments where there aren't lines people. Hawkeye just calls the lines. Oh, it's automated. Yeah, so it's not like lines person calls and then you have the ability to challenge X amount of times in a set. The lines are just called and that's that. Do you prefer that? uh i think net yes like i i do think there's more of a parade when lines people are involved which i think might be good for the sport yes um but it's these drama points yeah but but like it's it's cleaner there's no arguing people sometimes ask to see it but there's no point because it's just going to show you that that the ball was out right like you can replay the mark and there's also there's enough margin for error with hawkeye that it can be wrong like you can see the ball better than hawkeye there's two or three millimeters which you know like it makes a difference um but there are no disputes because you can't blame anyone it's just right it just is what it is it's the yeah it's the error the the the error bar basically on the technology and presumably you know like i feel like my personality at least if i was playing tennis and i would have i would expend a lot of mental energy wondering whether the umpire is being stupid i just feel i i know that that's something that triggers me when there's like a human element and the human is the arbiter deciding what's what was true or not and if i think they're wrong it's going to bother me more like if a machine gets it wrong that if some it's less personal yeah for some reason so i know from my personality that would i think i would prefer that sort of rigidity and even though there is a margin of error and it may be sometimes less accurate than a human on average it's presumably more accurate than a human being i think so yeah has to be yeah surely like the speeds of these balls are going at and like it's yeah i'm sure these guys have good eyes but come on and actually sometimes from the umpire's chair it's harder to see balls in or out just based on the angles um and yeah like I feel so sorry for umpires because it's the most thankless job the best they can the best they can achieve is not being noticed unless they have a beautiful voice in which case they might get props for that but I was actually I was talking to um I was playing Davis Cup in New Zealand last week and the guy who was the supervisor for the Tide very experienced umpire and I was talking with him about this and I thought it was quite beautiful actually that he it seemed anyway like he had complete contentment in not being noticed like he had either he truly believed this or he'd conditioned himself to believe that if he wasn't noticed during a match or something like that that was like huge that it was like a beautiful thing you know and that's not normal right like we we want to be recognized for doing something rather than for the absence of doing anything.

55:10But yeah. It's like Buddhist, it's like monk mode almost. Yeah. Yeah. But I thought it was, it was cool to hear him say that. And the best umpires in my mind are the ones who admit the possibility of them being wrong. What, what infuriates me with an umpire is if they say you're wrong, it was this. and end of conversation because that's not necessarily true and and it's the same like if i say that ball was in then they could say i didn't see it that way and that's like okay well you didn't see it that way we saw it differently difference of opinions that's fine but if they say no i'm right i saw it correctly you're wrong if you're in the heat of the moment and you think that you've been hard done by man it just like ratchets up your anger and yeah is there any schmoozing of umpires that goes on behind the scenes no it's pretty strictly controlled like you don't know who your umpire is going to be i think maybe day of the match you might be able to see who the umpire is i think maybe it might be on the schedule but um like umpires aren't really able to talk to players off court it's very separated and but you presumably can't stop that i mean i don't know how many umpires there are in the world but there can't be that many especially like for big grand slams like you need to have the best people so how do they ensure because thinking about there must be a strong incentive because if there are there's so many of these like little micro calls the best umpires in the world they're still ultimately human yeah and it's it's almost impossible to eradicate bias yeah from completely so putting my like sneaky poker player hat on like there is like there's surely an incentive to to just be friendlier with them because you just never know when it might it might count like again they don't intend to be unfair but just if you have a player who's just notoriously an asshole and a player who is just notoriously a really nice guy yeah that's going to make an impact it could also work if the player is big enough like i'm thinking of nick kurios as this example who's a big sort of bad boy Australian, very talented guy, and would just always blow up at umpires, I think both ends of the spectrum could actually work in your favor, where if you're really nice, then they want to help you out.

57:34And if you're a real asshole, then they don't want to piss you off too much. Right. And they'd also don't want to be seen to be being then, you know, being accused of being biased against you. Because if it's like, there's this whole narrative of like, this is the bad guy to the umpires then he can use that as a thing against you and like i guess you know good umpires trying to be as unbiased as possible but there's like layers to that and i guess that's one of the one of the ways that having hawkeye and that sort of technology has cleaned things up because if you think an umpire is wrong you have a means to question and address and like you know fairly frequently the lines people and umpires get proved wrong with a call do you have access to the data of of you know you can get the recording or the hawkeye footage of your past matches and then can you use that for training essentially that's a very recent thing being able to access the hawkeye footage um and it's it's sort of weird because at the challenger level that sort of second tier of professional tennis you can get a recording of every single match that you play it's just it's like the live streams are owned by the atp but at the tour level because they sell tv rights to all of all of these different uh countries media corporations often you can't watch replays of your matches which seems sort of backwards that's weird yeah yeah it's quite frustrating especially with doubles like more uh many more singles matches are recorded again because of that you know doubles has far less exposure but at the same time it pisses the doubles players off because it's like well hey we're doing everything we can to be as professional as we can every day and we don't have access to video of matches like that seems like such a basic tool for improvement for professional sport what rules of either tennis you know the actual tennis game itself or like the medical the meta rules of like the structure of of the way the tours are set up would you like in an ideal world you can make wave magic wand you would change to because presumably your number one and maybe maybe that's not the case correct me if i'm not but like your number one objective is to just make the game as fair as possible or are you optimizing for actually entertainment value so that more people just watch the sport um but then depending on whatever your core objective is would there be any rules you would change the way things are structured to to make that objective more efficiently reached I would optimize for entertainment because I think sport has to like it ultimately it's entertainment and a lot of sports have a real problem where their average demographic is getting a lot older so it's much harder to bring young fans in so I think you you'd have to optimize for entertainment and part of doing that in tennis I think is reducing the stuffiness level where you don't have to be perfectly quiet during points you know like why why should that be the case i mean at the us open it's it's very loud anyway because there's just a really loud buzz all the time and people are fine like you still play um so i think one rule i'd change that i think actually some tournaments are changing is maybe just the the small parts behind the court like the stands that are in where the ball might go during a point people can't move around during during the points but outside of that come and go as you please like I think it's a bit stupid that fans have to wait sometimes for 10-15 minutes for a change of ends to like go and watch some tennis um that's the type of thing that I'd change I think I'd bring more music more like atmosphere into tennis tournaments right because the aesthetic of tennis is it's not that cool yeah it's it's a bit sort of stuffy and and yeah it's just it's got this like 1950s energy yeah or something to it uh i mean it's it's it's changed to be fair it's i think it's become a lot more like the the players aren't just wearing white anymore you can wear you can wear different um colors but like you compare it to say like something like the nba yeah right basketball that's just it's got a very modern day aesthetic yeah um where and yeah to get because I mean the attention economy is so competitive tennis is competing against not just other sports but just all other forms of entertainment e-sports now tiktok exactly e-sports there's just so many other things uh so yeah what what other things would you do like to put in the tiktok generation that's a billion dollar question at the moment that I I know ATP is putting a lot of thought into and I think they've they've tried to sort of reframe their marketing to be a bit edgier and like the commentators are younger and and you know more people of color and all that's all that sort of thing

1:02:27I think this like one of the issues might go back to the high barrier to entry of tennis where football you know like soccer football and basketball almost anyone can play and it's everywhere so you just need a ball and a court yeah yeah and and so you get this sort of street aspect to it which i think brings the cool so i mean maybe i'm selling selling my sport out here but like maybe maybe tennis doesn't have a big future like maybe things like pickleball where you don't need as much space so the the equipment's not as expensive like that sort of thing maybe they're going to take over i mean the the the growth and interest of something like pickleball is way faster than than with tennis um so yeah that's that's quite a cynical view on things but just with the the dimensions of a tennis court and the rules of tennis and the way you know the technology in tennis rackets has improved just so much and string and all that sort of stuff that it is going to be expensive to to get good tennis stuff i imagine in perpetuity so i don't know how you reduce that barrier far enough that you bring sort of a street aspect into it which i think seems to be the thing that the tiktok generation are most resonant with yeah i mean even things like i wonder if there's like graphics because one of the things that made poker pop was a showing whole cards and having those graphics on screen and like then they added layers of things like what are the odds you know what are the cards that this person needs to hit what are their current odds you know right now there are 70 % favorite to win oh this card now came out now they're only a 20 % and like having data and like moving data on screen I think again people are so we're so used to having this high dopamine uh visual assault on everything that we look at and easier access as a first-time watcher as well I imagine yes you don't have to deeply understand the game of poker to understand the odds and like who's got the upper hand in a situation right exactly i wonder if there's like some there's some kind of like visual graphics that could be added one of the most famous coaches in the world a guy called patrick maratoglou coach like serena williams and stuff uh he has started a thing called uts i think it's called ultimate tennis showdown and it's taking a much more entertainment perspective on tennis where i think there's music the whole time playing and I think there are graphics on court and they have I haven't paid enough attention to it but I think they have it's not typical tennis scoring they have like things where you have like a hot streak so if a player wins a certain number of points in a row like points after that are worth double or something you know that sort of thing so I think he's put some effort into yeah trying to make it more exciting which yeah I probably need to look into that a little more no i bet that will trigger the purists though oh yeah everything triggers the purists i'd love to dig in a little bit more into the the manifestations of competition within it and particularly you know this channel is all about understanding what are what i call the moloch traps but these sort of negative spirals of competition these races to the bottom that can emerge um and then like what what can be done whether it's top-down solutions or bottom-up solutions uh to stop it from happening that way so are there any manifestations of that that you've noticed that perhaps like driving players into you know mental health issues or physical health issues that you think just are needlessly there and need to be need to be fixed yeah i mean i think the the most obvious one that springs to mind is doping like there have been tennis players caught doping and that is i think a race to the bottom of how can i get the edge regardless of means um another one is there's a really fine line here or like a gray area here where like if you're enough of a dick to everyone then you might get an edge like you know if you're known as just being brutal and snappy and like always cut through it rather than having the veneer of friendliness um then i see like this is definitely a generalization but comes from many female players i speak to about this like the the women's side of tennis is a lot more like that where grudges are held for a lot longer there's a lot less of a veneer of civility and friendship and there's more like you stick to your team which could be your parents or your coach and like separateness and I think it seems that on that side of the tour there's a race to the bottom of um yeah host hostility and behavior and like clashing and conflict right where does the edge come from by doing that what's the incentive I think it's it's an intimidation tactic of like no I'm not your friend no I'm not gonna give you an inch anywhere on the court off the court um that sort of thing and like I don't necessarily think that it means that you're gonna have a better chance at beating someone because it can trigger both ways it can trigger someone being a little more fearful of you on the tennis court which in pressure situations gets magnified or it can trigger this like screw you mentality that some people really thrive on um and i think yeah i'm i'm not sure how much of that is is conscious on the women's side or it's just that's the way it's developed and that's the way the tour is but do you think it's in part is it could it be because the the prize money is less so there's more like scarcity um i mean is it less last i heard it was but i know they've been trying to make them more even well all the grand slam has been even for a long time oh they have okay they're the biggest paydays for men and women and then you have the 80 the ATP and the WCA those are men's and women's governing bodies they don't control the Grand Slams that's a separate thing and then they try to sell their own media rights and tickets and stuff to their own events and the men's tour has a bigger pot than the women's tour there but they are separate entities so I think it's unfair to say that men and women aren't paid the same when they're they're governed by different entities and they're separate tours yeah because what what sort of these these moloch situations typically have in common is they the incentives are set up in such a way that you are pushed to do the short-term gain for a lot but results in long-term pain so like doping right you'll get you'll get a short-term advantage you'll build muscle mass or whatever it is faster um but the long-term pain comes at first of all you know your actual hurts your body in the long run right to be doing steroids for a long time uh is steroids is the usual thing people do or honestly for tennis i don't know because bigger muscles doesn't necessarily mean that's i think that's one of the good things about tennis is you could be doping all you want but if someone's a better tennis player than you then they're probably still going to beat you.

1:09:46So there's like, it's like, I think it's just a stupid decision. Like there's, there's not that much to be gained from doping and tennis. And presumably tennis has a less of a problem compared to other sports when it, with, with doping. It feels like there are some sports where it's just like, it's kind of like everyone agrees. Like, yeah, like we all know everyone's at it. Whereas it doesn't seem to be the case with tennis, right? It's like, it's, it's definitely the exception. Yeah, I think so. And I, and I think it's because it's skills based rather than pure physicality based. Right. right right right so it's yeah it's less useful there so i don't know if you saw uh they recently announced it peter teal and some other valley people are doing this enhanced games uh which i have to say when we were watching the olympics and recently over the last one and and you know there's so much talk about doping and so on it's like why don't why doesn't someone just do like a an anything goes olympics as a like alongside it so we can see okay this is what humans do naturally and this is what can happen if you just take the rules away and and I I feel very torn on it because from a curiosity standpoint I want to see it like it's super interesting and I also think there's can be value that would come from actually just seeing okay what can just science unleashed combined with competition create I'm sure we'll learn a lot about the human body and there'll probably be some discoveries that are actually very beneficial for people but it doesn't come without costs either presumably so i'm curious what what your take is as a just as a sports person like someone who loves sport like do you think that this is actually just going to be a race to the bottom or is it worth doing that experimentation i'm a little bit torn on it because i'm similar to you and that i'm just really curious and i want to see it as a spectacle but i isn't this an example of a race to the bottom where health be damned, everything else be damned.

1:11:41I mean, I remember, I'm going to get the numbers wrong in this, but I remember hearing about a survey that was done on elite athletes. And it was, the question was something like, if you could take a substance that wasn't illegal, but that would, where you knew that you would win a gold medal, but it would take 30 years off your life or something like that. Would you take it? And a huge majority said yes. Wow. And that baffled me. And it's like, like I think that that is sort of in a nutshell, what's going to happen with the steroid Olympics is like people are just going to. Well, that said though, it's a slight, it's a different game because in that height, you're talking about a gold medal, which the gold medals in themselves have some value.