BobHarris.com - Play not to lose...

Books! Actual books!

"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"

-- The Wall Street Journal

"Pulls you in like a good sports story"

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"

-- New York Newsday

"A surprisingly touching memoir"

-- Entertainment Weekly

"Snappy and informative"

-- Associated Press

"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."

-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."

-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game

"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"

-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All

"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."

-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”

— Boston Globe

"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."

— New York Observer

"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”

— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”

— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

Main

Play not to lose...

Tag it now -

Tuesday, 05 December 2006

I write about this in Prisoner of Trebekistan, because it comes up in Jeopardy! (in the betting, mostly), it comes up in sports, it comes up in re-taking Congress, and it comes up in everyday life: play to win, and you often win; play not to lose, and you usually lose.

Taking a break, I watched the TiVo of yesterday's action in the second Ashes cricket test between England and Australia. (For those new here, in the last few years I have become a tragic Aussie cricket fan.) It was the final day of a test England badly needed to win or draw, and in the first two days they had built a massive advantage. By the morning of day three, Australia's statistical chance of winning was near zero, although by the end of day four the Aussie batsmen had least fought back enough to make a draw the most likely outcome.

However... ever watch an American football team with a massive lead blow it in the fourth quarter by going to a "prevent" defense, allowing the other team to dominate the game simply out of fear of making an ordinary if costly mistake?

One of these things is not like the other

One of these things is not like the other

That's what England just did. Both batting and bowling, for the entire fifth day of the match. More than eight solid hours of psychological backpedalling. And they wound up losing by six wickets as a result.

Granted, a couple of bad calls from the umps didn't help, but the umpires didn't make the Brits run themselves out, play defensive strokes until their run rate fell by half, or swing wildly at balls two feet away from the stumps.

And granted, the Aussies certainly had a hand in things. Shane Warne, he of the unspooling testicles, uncorked one unbelievable delivery that curved about a foot to the right in the air before bouncing back almost two feet back to the left. There's no YouTube yet of that particular ball, but the Gooch ball on this video, the fourth one shown (and do feel free to skip the chat), is pretty similar:

(Incidentally, while the Gatting ball arguably changed the way cricket is played, for my money the second one on this reel, the "Chanderpaul ball" of 1996, is the coolest to watch.)

But flashes of Aussie brilliance aside, England simply stopped trying to play shots while batting, and then in the field, instead of attacking the Aussie batsmen with their best and letting the shots fall where they may, they spread the field, put in a lame spin bowler, and simply tried not to give up too many runs, exactly the way American football coaches do when trying to hang onto a lead instead of just playing the damn game. The result --

Never before in the history of Test cricket has a team declared in the first innings with so many runs on the board and gone on to lose.

-- was almost inevitable.

Perhaps worth noting for future Jeopardy! players, the Dems in '08, etc.

PS: The BBC live-blogged the day here. Read from the bottom up, and watch pleasant cheeriness gradually overcome with a sense of inevitable doom. Any Cleveland sports fans out there will surely sympathize.