Do Top Closers Think Like Chess Masters?
A Recent Study Reveals How Experts Think.

By David Skinner, President Holiday Equity

The world of chess is proving to be an important laboratory for advancing cognitive science. Research in the past on intelligence and human thought lacked demonstrable results and statistical validation, leaving it theoretical in nature. Scientists needed a consistent and measurable baseline group for comparison between individuals within a study group or across vocational lines. That was until they stumbled upon the world of chess and its highly disciplined and regimented hierarchy of players, from novice to expert, to master, and grand master. Because skill at chess can be easily measured and subjected to laboratory experiments, it has become an important test bed for theories in cognitive science.

One study that is attracting attention is how experts store, recall, and apply memory to thought. If the process is different than it is for non-experts, how did experts acquire these extraordinary skills, and are they universally available? Can they be taught, or are they genetic?

In his article titled the Expert Mind, published in Scientific American (August 2006), Philip E. Ross explains that the same decisive mental skills used by a chess master can be seen in experts from other fields—as a musician recalling notes of a sonata heard years before, a physician making a life-saving diagnosis in seconds, and (for our purposes) a top closer who is able to “size up” a potential sale from across the room. In all cases, experts exhibit a single qualitative advantage in mental processes over others, an advantage that defies the odds and consistently exceeds the norms. Perhaps it’s an evolved survival skill from our past. This cognitive advantage emerges in the first few seconds of “expert thought.” It is a rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception. It alone appears to be the primary difference between the experts and the also-rans.

To apply these amazing results to the timeshare industry we must ask ourselves, how do these “very few” acquire this extraordinary skill? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? How can we take advantage of this information? Psychologists are seeking these answers by studying chess gamesmanship, decision making, and how grand masters perform it. The surprising answers are leading to new theories of how the mind organizes and retrieves information. Theories that could have a far-reaching impact on education in the classroom and success in the sales room.

Here’s how Ross explains the phenomenon of expert thinking in chess. Seemingly, over a period of years, a chess player develops an ever greater degree of “board sense,” a deep relational perception. Test results support his conclusion, which show that the scores of inexperienced novices improve with experience to the near faultless and instant recall of chess masters with respect to the immense number of game scenarios, strategies, and moves. Still, this does not explain how chess masters are able to recall such vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to exceed what scientist call our “working memory.”

Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory—the scratch pad of the mind—in a 1956 paper entitled, “The Magical
Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. Building on this, in the 1960s, Herbert A. Simon of Mellon University proposed that by packing hierarchies of information into chunks, chess masters could get around this apparent limitation. They could still access only five to nine items at a time, but the items were actually chunks of aggregated “board sense,” and this greatly increased the information transfer to their working memory. It was this ability, which corresponded to the number of years of training and experience, that differentiated the novice, expert, master, and grand master. Think of it as memory on steroids.

Ross in his article demonstrates chunks using the sentence, Mary had a little lamb. “The number of chunks in this sentence,” Ross explains, “depends on one’s knowledge of the poem and the English language.” Most of us recognize it as a portion of a longer poem and as part of a larger context of other nursery rhymes, thereby counting both the poem and its larger context as one chunk. For someone who knows English but is unfamiliar with the poem, the sentence would serve as a single chunk; five chunks for someone not familiar with English; and eighteen chunks for someone who recognizes the letters but not the words.

The novice chess player looking at 20 pieces on the board might have to deal with 20 or more chunks as he tries to consider all the possible relationships between each piece, with only a few of these chunks being accessible at any one time. The grand master, however, might recognize the board layout as a classic (in Ross’ terms) “fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside,” together with a “blockaded king’s-Indian-style pawn chain,” making up only two chunks.

In similar fashion, our top closers can access chunks of related information about customer types, circumstances, strategies, and objections from a vast reserve of past experiences. In short order he/she can recall and replay these events and predict likely outcomes. A closer of lesser experience, however, will struggle to build a hierarchy of knowledge through trial and error, neither sensing direction nor determining outcome. Where the novice sees a non-descript couple with uncertain needs, the master closer instantly sees a “gold ball unit,” all cash, in a two-bedroom platinum season. 

As Ross points out, to gain such a vast amount of information for later recall takes arduous experience. And there is no substitute for experience on the tables. No other industry is like timeshare and no other sales job is like closing. As the researchers emphasize, it takes enormous effort to build these relational structures in the mind. Simon of Mellon University even suggests that perhaps a decade of heavy labor is necessary to become masterful in any field; for instance: sports professionals, accomplished musicians, renowned physicians, and scientists. As the article points out, chess memory, like closing experience, is non-transferable. You can’t take five years of experience in real estate or auto sales and transfer it to timeshare. So our top closer, if indeed an expert, is not some “high-season Harry,” yesterday’s love-line child, or front-of-the-wheel prima donna. Closers with such years of experience are few in any sales room, and for that reason real experts are uncommon, if not rare.

At this point, the skeptics, self-anointed experts, and stalemated middling producers will discard the preponderance of scientific evidence, preferring to believe that innate ability, not years of hard work, is the fast track to expertise. Unfortunately, Ross and associates could find no correlation between natural ability and expert cognition at the master level. Motivation, it seems, is a more important factor than inherent qualities in the development of experts.   

Still, if you believe you are of expert caliber but lack the years to qualify as such, K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University represents a contrarian view that experience is not so important. He emphasizes the importance of “effortful study,” of continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. As proof he points to how enthusiasts can spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess, golf, or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level, and how a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. He reminds us how beginners who often advance quickly to a level of acceptability and peer approval, will then relax, allowing their performance to become automatic and impervious to improvement. In contrast, Ericsson says, experts and those determined to be, “keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time to self inspection,” and maintain themselves in a state of constant learning.

Look around your sales room. From the least to the most, where do the closers rank in the hierarchy of expertise? Which are the bewildered novices, the burned out could-have-beens, the so-called naturals, and the seasoned pros? Which one (or, if you’re lucky, ones) exhibits the years of accomplished experience or the “effortful study” of the masters? And finally, which one exhibits the traits of that rarest expert of all . . . the grand master?

David Skinner is President of Holiday Equity (http://www.meetholiday.com), a division of the Holiday Group, which he founded in 1992. David has three adult children, is married and resides in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from where he commutes to Seattle, Holiday’s home base. He can be emailed at dskinner@holidaygroup.com.

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