How Board Games Are Analogous to Investing

Lessons to Learn from Chess:

- what I've been doing while going through a book of chess puzzles from real games is asking myself, "What heuristic would have gotten me to the right answer as quickly as possible?" So, for example, one heuristic I've learned to look for is to focus more on 1) the more valuable pieces that 2) are "closer to the action". Another heuristic I've learned is to always check for forks or pins that could happen within a single move. Another heuristic I've learned is to look for hanging pieces. The best chess player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, has said that he learned how to play by looking at lots of games of grandmasters and trying to figure out what they were thinking when they made each move. What I'm doing right now is basically a less-advanced version of what Carlsen did, because I have the answer given to me in the book I'm using. If I was using chess games without any commentary it would probably be a lot harder to try to figure out what the players were thinking.
- This method of learning sounds IDENTICAL to what Ray Dalio said he did to get better at investing money.

I want to make a program that helps people visualize advanced info in a chess game, because I think similar programs could be useful to people in finance (they already exist in the form of stock charts, but I'm thinking that more advanced visualizations could be made). So far I've seen two chess programs that are kind of similar to what I want to do:
- Thinking Machine 4
- SparkChess

Lessons to Learn from Monopoly:
- foresight
- the importance of knowing what patterns of outcomes are likely to arise in various situations
- aggression
- dealmaking

Arguments to Not Focus Too Much on Monopoly:
Here I'll list possible counter-arguments that someone might raise that would suggest Monopoly isn't really very helpful.
- Monopoly is such a famous game that it isn't very surprising if a lot of successful people played it when they were young; it would be like pointing to the fact that successful people often ate cereal made by General Mills and saying, "We should eat cereal made by General Mills too!".
- Monopoly may be a bit more useful for business than other games since it introduces concepts like mortgages, banks, the handling of money, owning of property, and deal-making, but other than that it isn't much different from other games that require you to try to figure out what the consequences of your decisions will be and what the future is likely to look like. So once you become familiar with the business ideas that Monopoly introduces, there may be no reason to favor playing Monopoly over other games that require the same use of deal-making and foresight (eg Settlers of Catan).
- It might be unwise to play Monopoly at the expense of learning as much as possible about, advancing yourself in, and becoming friends with people in the actual field that you would like to advance in.
- Many successful people are not mentioned having played Monopoly or other games: Andrew Carnegie, Michael Burry, etc.
- Monopoly's rules are set up so that the outcome of the game is heavily dependent on luck; if the game is more dependent on luck than success in the real world is, the game may give people an unrealistic idea of how important luck is for success in the real world.

Mentions of Monopoly Being Played by Successful People:
Google Books is a good way to see if a biography mentions Monopoly.

Apparently Ray Dalio is pretty familiar with Monopoly...this excerpt is from Ray Dalio's "Template for Understanding How the Economic Machine Works":

A cycle is nothing more than a logical sequence of events leading to a repetitious pattern. In a capitalist economy, cycles of expansions in credit and contractions in credit drive economic cycles and they occur for perfectly logical reasons. Each sequence is not pre-destined to repeat in exactly the same way nor to take exactly the same amount of time, though the patterns are similar, for logical reasons. For example, if you understand the game of Monopoly®, you can pretty well understand credit and economic cycles. Early in the game of Monopoly®, people have a lot of cash and few hotels, and it pays to convert cash into hotels. Those who have more hotels make more money. Seeing this, people tend to convert as much cash as possible into property in order to profit from making other players give them cash. So as the game progresses, more hotels are acquired, which creates more need for cash (to pay the bills of landing on someone else’s property with lots of hotels on it) at the same time as many folks have run down their cash to buy hotels. When they are caught needing cash, they are forced to sell their hotels at discounted prices. So early in the game, “property is king” and later in the game, “cash is king.” Those who are best at playing the game understand how to hold the right mix of property and cash, as this right mix changes.

Now, let’s imagine how this Monopoly® game would work if we changed the role of the bank so that it could make loans and take deposits. Players would then be able to borrow money to buy hotels and, rather than holding their cash idly, they would deposit it at the bank to earn interest, which would provide the bank with more money to lend. If Monopoly® were played this way, it would provide an almost perfect model for the way our economy operates. More money would be put into hotels sooner than if there were no lending, the amount owed would quickly grow to multiples of the amount of money in existence, and the cash shortage for the debtors who hold hotels would become greater. So, the cycles would become more pronounced. The bank and those who saved by depositing their money in it would also get into trouble when the inability to come up with needed cash caused withdrawals from the bank at the same time as debtors couldn’t come up with cash to pay the bank. Basically, economic and credit cycles work this way.

from "Soros" by Robert Slater:

Games intrigued [Soros], all sorts of games. He was especially taken with one called Capital, a Hungarian version of Monopoly. From the age of seven, he played it frequently with the other children, among whom he was the best. The worst was George Litwin. It was no surprise to George's childhood friends that George Soros became a master of high finance, and Litwin...a historian. Winning at Capital all the time proved boring to young George. To liven up the game, he introduced new rules. One was to make the game more complex by adding a stock exchange. When Soros the financier returned to Hungary in the 1960s, he sought out Ferenc Nagel, who asked him what he did for a living. "You remember as children we played Capital?" Soros asked with a smile. "Well, today I do the same." [p23]

from "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein:

As a boy...He would play Monopoly for what seemed like forever--counting his imagined riches. [p3]

from a Biography Channel show on Bill Gates:

Among his favorite board games were Risk--in which the object is world domination--and the perennially-popular Monopoly--where, with a bit of luck, anyone could become a tycoon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJWJbheBv9A#t=3m53s

Monopoly is not mentioned in: (according to Google Books' search function)
- "The Snowball" (re: Buffett)
- "Hard Drive" (re: Bill Gates)
- "Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul..." etc. (re: Bill Gates)
- "Sam Walton: Made in America"