What Rowing Coaches Can Learn From Poker

Being “results-oriented” is a common and oft-lauded approach to coaching. I’m sure many of you reading this have this phrase on your resume or have used it in an interview. I know I have. Today, I’m challenging you to put the results aside for a moment and focus on being process-oriented instead. Just as the best poker players do. 

I know poker may seem like an unlikely source of coaching insight, but bear with me. The best coaches are open to inspiration and education from even the most unlikely sources—even casinos. 

In professional poker, being focused on the results is detrimental to performance and will only distract from assessing your performance accurately. You can win with a bad hand and lose with a good one. For example, the best hand in Texas Hold’em, the most popular poker variant, is two aces. The worst hand is 72. If both those hands are all-in before any other cards come, the two aces will win 87.4 percent of the time. 

If that scenario plays out, and you lose while holding two aces against a player with 72, did you make the wrong decision? Of course not. So the biggest determinant of consistent success is not the outcome but the quality of your decisions. The challenge is understanding how and why the decisions were made. 

This is where coaches and poker players have a lot in common. Both must make decisions with imperfect information. Poker players don’t know what cards their opponents have. They don’t know what card will be dealt next. Coaches must recruit without knowing which athletes will pan out. They must select line-ups without wholly accurate on-the-water evaluations. They must write a training plan without knowing whether a different one would produce fitter athletes. 

Both at the table and on the water, the challenge comes in assessing performance accurately after the fact. The best way to do this is to look at the information you had at the time and ask whether you made the best possible decision. If you made the same decision time and again in parallel universes, what would be the results? How likely would you be to win again and again, whatever “winning” means in a particular scenario. 

This is really hard to do. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues, humans tend to engage in “attribute substitution.” Rather than doing the hard work of answering this difficult series of questions critically, we choose to answer the simpler one: “Did it work?”

This misses the point and robs us of the opportunity to set the foundation for long-term, ongoing success. You can make the wrong call in selecting a crew and still win. You can train your team improperly and still come out on top if you just happen to have a great group of athletes or your opponents falter. You will never be better until you can examine past decisions critically, setting aside the outcome and determining how to make those decisions better in the future. 

“To win at poker, you have to be very good at losing,” posits Tommy Angelo, the famous poker coach. The same is true for coaching. Only one team wins the national championship at your level each year. But every coach, with the right approach, can learn just as much, if not more, from a well-examined loss. 

It all comes down to making the right decisions. And a little luck.

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