Poker at the Penalty Spot
By: Brad Stollery
Tags: Motivation, Poker, World Cup, Economics, Soccer

Games are microcosms of life. They involve struggle, camaraderie, disappointment, and ecstasy. As such, games offer the inquisitive spectator a chance to reflect on social behaviour from afar. As both an aficionado of poker — a deeply strategic game — and a soccer fanatic, I’ve noticed a way in which wisdom from the former game can benefit the latter.

Soccer’s World Cup, the paramount event of Earth’s most popular sport, is the biggest game of all. The knockout stage of the tournament introduces the penalty shootout, a tie-breaking procedure in which players are given a free shot on goal from twelve yards, with only the goalkeeper to beat.

Penalties, as they’re known colloquially, are supposed to be advantageous for the shooter, who has a large goal to aim at. A well-taken penalty is nearly impossible to save — a keeper who does so becomes an instant hero — and around 3 in 4 penalties are scored, on average. The price of that advantage, however, is added pressure. The shooter is expected to score.

Reach for the sky (unless there’s a snake in your soccer boot)

The Economist magazine analyzed World Cup penalties spanning a forty-year period in search of patterns that might suggest an optimal strategy.

Figure 1. Photo credit: economist.com

Based on those data, it turns out that

Goalkeepers find high balls the hardest to deal with — just 3% of penalties aimed halfway up the goal or more are saved. Yet there is a tendency for these shots to miss the target: 18% of high shots do so, as opposed to 5% of low shots. Overall, though, allowing for misses and saves, high shots are successful 79% of the time compared with 72% for low shots.

High shots are more likely to score, yet Figure 1 shows that most penalties were aimed at the lower half of the goal. What explains the paradox?

One answer is that unlike rebounds from penalties taken during shootouts, which are immediately dead, rebounds from penalties attempted during regulation play are live balls. This means that someone taking a penalty kick during regulation play might shoot low to increase the chance of tapping in the rebound if the keeper saves the original attempt.

That explanation doesn’t apply to penalty shootouts, though, which account for the bulk of penalties taken over the years. There’s another reason for the discrepancy, and it gives insight into how people make decisions when the stakes are high. It concerns the fact that we human beings are emotional creatures who, for the most part, care about others’ opinions of us. ‘Ego bias’ affects our decision-making.

To spare your blushes

If scoring from the penalty spot is ostensibly simple, merely hitting the target should be even easier. Knowing this, nothing is more humbling for a penalty-taker than shooting high or wide. Even having your penalty saved is a better outcome, psychologically, than missing altogether. Shooters thus have some incentive to be more conservative in where they aim, because low shots are less likely to miss their mark.

Of course, that line of reasoning makes for a poor strategy. A penalty-taking robot would pay no mind to emotional considerations of potential humiliation. Focused purely on maximizing the probability of scoring, it would aim for the top corner every time. The benefit gained by straining the goalkeeper easily compensates for the increased chance of blasting the ball over the bar — the data show this strategy is nearly 10 percent more successful. A missed shot and a saved shot count the same on the scoreboard, after all. The only difference is in the shooter’s head.

Yet that difference makes all the difference, because soccer is played by humans whose emotions affect their physiology. Pressure weighs even on the best players, who miss the odd penalty despite scoring goals ruthlessly, in far more difficult situations, during open play. (Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have each missed a penalty kick in this World Cup.)

You can often tell if a player is going to miss a penalty by watching their approach to the ball. A fast run-up immediately after the referee’s whistle — see Asamoah Gyan’s penalty in the 2010 World Cup quarterfinals (with the weight of a billion Africans’ hopes squarely on his shoulders) — suggests a subconscious desire to get the stressful situation over with. That player lacks composure.

A good penalty-taker decides where to aim first, takes a moment to visualize where the ball is going to go, then focuses all the way through the shooting motion to make sure the foot strikes the ball properly. As with any activity performed at a high level, even aspects as straightforward as an unencumbered shot at goal demand serious forethought and practice. The higher the stakes, the more nerves become a factor.

It’s all in your head

The laws of nature forbid us from living through any single moment more than once. We’re not allowed to rewind and see what could have been. This reality predisposes us to hindsight bias, where we overvalue outcomes and undervalue the actions that preceded the result.

Counterfactuals are instructive for allowing us to contemplate superior alternatives. It’s a common exercise among skilled poker players, who understand that the decision-making process is more important than any one outcome, which is subject to factors out of one’s control such as statistical variance.

Most people have a natural aversion to risk because risk sometimes leads to loss, which can be embarrassing. But losing doesn’t necessarily mean you made the wrong decision. You might have just gotten unlucky. Moreover, shame is a function of pride; it’s nothing more than a state of mind. A fear of shame discourages you from taking worthwhile risks, and it’s a bias that leads to poor decision-making. Conquering that inhibition removes a major obstacle from the road to victory.

Instead, think like a poker player. Remember that over the long run, if you factor in what you could have gained, a missed opportunity to win is the same as an equivalent loss. Discard your pride, and make the best decision. You’ll thank yourself later.

Most penalty-takers in soccer focus too much on their dread of missing the net, and think too little of the reward that awaits them, more often than not, by aiming at the top corner anyway. Taking intelligent risks in other parts of life is the same. We are always forced to live out our actual misfortunes, but we’re never confronted by the successes we forsook. If we were, we wouldn’t overlook them as often as we do, and we’d be bolder and better off for it. Those missed successes exist only in some parallel universe where a more logical and courageous version of us lives. Luckily, we each have the opportunity to make choices anew every single day. All it takes is determination. As the Tottenham Hotspurs’ motto goes, “To dare is to do.”