007: Caspar Berry on poker's life lessons

A Load of BS on Sport: The Behavioural Science Podcast with Daniel Ross and Liam Botham

This week, we are joined by Caspar Berry. Caspar started out in acting aged 16 actor in BBC show Byker Grove with “Ant and Dec”. At Cambridge he had commercial success directing award-winning short films and TV commercials, then went on to write two feature films which were produced by Film Four and Columbia Tri Star before he had graduated.

Aged 26, he decided to take a risk and move to Las Vegas with his life savings in his pocket, and for next few years, became a professional poker player.

Caspar later returned to the UK to set up 21st Century Media which he later sold to Bob Geldof's Ten Alps plc. He now gives talks and mentors around the world on all his disparate experiences.

Show Notes:

• How Caspar’s early life decisions, driven by comfort with risk, led to diverse experiences
• Poker as a metaphor for decision-making processes in life and business
• The complexity of assigning probabilities to actions and the challenges posed by unpredictability
• Differences in risk-taking between individual and team sports
• The concept of 'negative metrics': sometimes the pursuit of certain performance metrics (e.g. home runs in baseball) might lead to higher failure rates (strikeouts)

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Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto