The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks

by Ben Cohen

Overview

How can you maximize success—and limit failure? Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen brilliantly investigates the mystery and science of streaks, from basketball to business.

"A feast for anyone interested in the secrets of excellence." —Andre Agassi

For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found?

In The Hot Hand, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen offers an unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation into these questions. He begins with how a $35,000 fine and a wild night in New York revived a debate about the existence of streaks that was several generations in the making. We learn how the ability to recognize and then bet against streaks turned a business school dropout named David Booth into a billionaire, and how the subconscious nature of streak-related bias can make the difference between life and death for asylum seekers. We see how previously unrecognized streaks hidden amidst archival data helped solve one of the most haunting mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. Cohen also exposes how streak-related incentives can be manipulated, from the five-syllable word that helped break arcade profit records to an arc of black paint that allowed Stephen Curry to transform from future junior high coach into the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Crucially, Cohen also explores why false recognition of nonexistent streaks can have cataclysmic results, particularly if you are a sugar beet farmer or the sort of gambler who likes to switch to black on the ninth spin of the roulette wheel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062820723
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	159,507
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He writes about the NBA, the Olympics and other topics that don't involve extraordinarily athletic people. He lives in New York with his wife and their cat. The Hot Hand is his first book. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 On Fire: "Boomshakalaka." 11

2 The Law Of The Hot Hand: "Unhappy fortune!" 41

3 Shuffle: "It's just random." 65

4 Bet the Farm: "Principles over patterns." 95

5 Wheel of Fortune: "It's my life." 125

6 The Fog: "Be true to the data." 155

7 The Van Gogh in the Attic: "Aha, aha, aha!" 207

Epilogue 243

An Author's Note on Sources 251

Endnotes 257

Bibliography 267

Acknowledgments 283

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

01/13/2020

In this meandering debut, Cohen, a Wall Street Journal sports reporter, asks what makes for winning streaks. The “hot hand” of the title is the state of being in the zone, of making one win after another, seemingly effortlessly. Cohen’s lifelong love for basketball is an excellent excuse for exploring why this happens, which he does through stories of a high school basketball team that used data to improve its game, as well as through a video game developer, a viola player, a sculptor, and many others. Is the hot hand real—can a person or team identify what led to a winning streak and thus replicate those factors? Sometimes, waffles Cohen, and when one can harness a streak, it’s a lucrative and rewarding endeavor. The narratives are reasonably entertaining and the math persuasive, but without much rationale except expressing the author’s love for basketball, the execution is unfocused. Readers looking for an answer as to whether they can strategize their winning streaks could be forgiven for wanting something more decisive than the author’s tepid “well, kinda.” Agent: Eric Lupfer, Fletcher & Company. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A fascinating book on the elusive allure of being on a roll. For any fans of human psychology, or numbers geeks, wolves of wall street, basketball obsessives – and anyone else who loves great stories that hint at the mysteries behind our decision-making, belief…and occasional runaway success.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Long before I reached the end of this provocative and uniquely brilliant book, I knew I would never be ‘finished’ with it. Ben Cohen’s research shows how every day, from basketball to business to beet farming, human events are profoundly shaped by the power of streaks. I will never make another difficult decision without considering this.

Sam Walker

"Fascinating, eye-opening and consistently entertaining, The Hot Hand asks a big question: how do we determine when one success will likely follow another? The answer is not only surprising, but instructive.

Charles Duhigg

I’ve been on both sides of the ‘hot hand.’ I’ve had it, and I’ve faced opponents who had it. And I’ve written extensively about the role it played in my life. But Ben Cohen offers up an original and riveting deep dive on this fascinating topic, which relates to so many other pursuits. A feast for anyone interested in the secrets of excellence.” 

Andre Agassi

★ 2020-01-12
Wall Street Journal sports reporter Cohen looks into the odd "science of streaks."

Is there a "hot hand," the term basketball players use to describe that magical, endorphin-inducing moment when you can't miss a shot and "achieve some elevated state of ability in which you feel briefly superhuman"? It's one of the finest of psychological states, and if most of us don't land in it regularly, there are people like Steph Curry to study, as the author does. By the numbers, Curry shouldn't be the superstar shooter that he is—even though he's 6-feet-3 he's still smaller than most of the players he goes up against, a key datum point. What changed him was a summer spent teaching himself to shoot all over again: lifting the ball over his head and releasing it as he was jumping up, essentially making himself as tall as the defenders who would otherwise block his shots. That summer involved thousands of shots, and in the end, it made Curry "the best shooter the sport of basketball had ever seen." This case study provides a springboard for Cohen to look at such things as the construction of data sets. One of the cardinal sins involving data is to make conclusions with numbers that are too small to support them—whence the "law of small numbers," proposed by the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who themselves have written an improbably brilliant hot streak of scholarly papers. Cohen examines the use of those data sets to crunch all sorts of perhaps unlikely problems: Is a supposed lost masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh the real deal? Did Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, really die of a heart attack, as the Soviets proclaimed, or did he die in the gulag? Cohen returns, always, to the game of basketball, but he pauses along the way to provide fascinating looks at coin tosses, investments, farm yields, and other real-world instances of how probability plays out in the world.

Sports fans and science geeks alike will enjoy these travels in the world where numbers, luck, and superstardom meet.

Kirkus Reviews

An unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation… An absorbing, thoughtful and thought-provoking read throughout.

Midwest Book Review

"Captivating."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Cleverly crafted...an interesting and thought-provoking book on a topic that isn’t often discussed but that impacts many different interests, activities and industries."

BookPage

"An intelligent popular social science book."

Tyler Cowen

"Engaging... Intriguing."

New York Times Book Review

"An engaging and provocative look into what it really means to get hot. Curious as to how you can maximize success? Read on."

Ozy

"Fascinating."

The Federalist

"A fascinating look at decision-making and success." 

Sports Illustrated

"An entertaining and provocative investigation into the seductive idea that streaks not only exist, but can be created."

Brooklyn Digest

"Fans of Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell will devour this one.

Lee Woodruff

"Fascinating. ... It's something that if you're either a math or a sports geek, you're going to find really intriguing." 

Barry Ritholtz

Supremely engrossing… The book is a page-turner if ever there was one.” 

MoneyControl

The Hot Hand lends itself to fans of basketball, stats and stories well told."

Free-Lance Star (Fredericksburg

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