Category: Wise to the Game

I call him every day

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To outrun the law, be a professional tennis player. To get caught anyway, be a sex addict on meth.

A real story I heard this weekend, transcribed as verbatim as I can: (Spoken in a Polish accent.) 

My friend is criminal. His friend is also criminal. And he is also drug addict and sex addict. And one day, he is on… <speaks Polish. Translator says “methamphetamine”> methamphetamine. And he is driving his car, but he is sex addict, so he pulls over to the side of the road and he is… <mimes jerking off. Translator says “jerking off”> jerking off. And someone sees him and they call the police. But the police, they don’t get there until 10:30 at night even though they were called at 1:30. But since he is on methamphetamine, he is still jerking off. So he sees the police and he drives his car away, but he… <speaks Polish, pantomiming rotating his had in the air. Translator says “flips the car”> flips the car. And he crawls out the window. And he is running away, very fast because he used to be professional tennis player. But because he was jacking off, his pants are down, so he… <mimes hand going from perpendicular to the ground to parallel. Translator says “face-plants”> face-plants. 

So now he is two and one-half years in prison. And I call him every day, except for now because I am… <gestures around him to indicate he is not currently in Poland.>. 

I don’t remember what instigated this story. Nor do I have any stories to match. 

People live vastly different lives. 

Lost and Found

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To win, be kind. To be kind, break the rules.

I twice lost faith in humanity today. Once, I got it back. The rules cost my faith. People breaking them gave it back. 

Three airport snippets and a meander: 

1. The bag with no status (lost #1)

At Houston Hobby Airport, I entered my information into my airline’s bag-check kiosk. It told me to see an agent. I approached one at an empty desk. She asked if I had status. I said the machine sent me to you. She asked if I had status. I said no. She told me to go to the info desk around the corner. I told her the kiosk sent me to her. She asked again if I had status. I have the right credit card and a bunch of points, so I shrugged and said yes. She asked what I needed. I said I’d like to check a bag. She checked the bag. Then she told me I didn’t have status, so next time I’d have to go to the other desk. Her questioning about my status took longer than the bag check, and it ultimately didn’t matter. The rules may be dumb. But at least they’re poorly enforced. 

2. Carousel 5 says Denver (lost #2)

Landing at LGA, I went to carousel 5, where the flight attendants said our bags would be. The sign over it said “Denver.” I had flown from Houston. Houston is not Denver. I asked the agent standing there. He said all the Houston bags were out; if mine wasn’t, I should go to the office. I went to the office. I gave the office agent my flight number. She asked for my claim check. I told her I’d left it on the plane. She tutted, found my information anyway, and told me to go back to the carousel. I went back. My bag was there. The agent at the carousel told me he’d tried to shout for me to come back the moment he realized he’d been wrong. He might have been wrong. But at least he tried to fix it, however poorly. 

3. The green bag (regained)

When the plane landed, the woman beside me turned around and said, “My bag’s in the overhead of row 13, five rows back. Green bag. Could you pass it up?” And people did. A wheely bag, no less. At least 6 strangers joined the mission. Great move. I’m surprised it worked. Well played. 

Keeping the Faith

In downtown Houston, I yelled “Praise the Lord!” Two women on the street ahead of me turned around. In New York, where I live, and Chicago, where I’d spent the last 5 days, strangers don’t look at crazy people. In Houston they do. Maybe Houston keeps its crazy people off the street. In 24 hours downtown, I didn’t see any.

I wondered if Houston just removes them. I looked it up: it’s a mix. Houston housed a lot of its homeless, Texas bans public camping, and a city built for cars has fewer sidewalks to be seen on anyway.

About 18 hours later, I boarded a Houston tram. A man with wild eyes came to the door, clasped his hands, and started begging a being only he could see. No one moved away from him. Back home we’d have given him a wide berth. Here, the crowd understands him.

Houston gives a pass for praying.

Rules for Wagering

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To win, follow the rules.

Last night, a new friend challenged me to the video game Pong for $100 a game. He’s a brash guy: aggressive, cocksure; the sort of guy who makes new friends by testing their boundaries. I asked if he knew Pong. He declined to answer. I declined the bet. 

I offered ping-pong instead, also $100 a game. We’d just played doubles on the same team. I’d seen his game. I suspected I could beat him.

Today, I called him a gambler. He corrected me: he doesn’t gamble, he wagers. Gambling is about uncertainty, luck, and chance. Wagering is about wagers (bets). Ironically, this guy’s given name literally means “randomness.”

I don’t enjoy gambling, either. I’ve liked craps once or twice, playing with someone else’s money, but I haven’t enjoyed gambling since a plastic slot machine at 10 years old. I like playing, and I like winning. I don’t gamble because it’s a losing proposition.

Wagering, though, I do frequently. My rules:

Julian’s rules for wagering

1. Don’t wager more than you’re willing to lose. Self-explanatory.

2. Clearly indicate the stakes and the rules. Most wagers fail on miscommunication. Better clear than confused. State the rules and win conditions up front. Repeat the score and the running tally, frequently. Walk over to the other side of the table if the music is too loud for him to hear you call the score. 

3. Get paid. Many wagers fail not from a loss but from a loss of receipt. If you don’t get the money, did you really win?

4. Quit at any time. A different friend doubled the stakes every time he lost, unwilling to stop until he got even. Motivating, sure. But it misreads the value of quitting while you’re behind: the alternative is quitting when you’re further behind.

5. Control your emotions. Anger can make you a better ping-pong player. It can also make you blind to the meta-games. And the meta-games are usually where the money is.

6. You don’t have to earn it back the same way you lost it. When you lose money one way, it’s tempting to win it back the same way. But funds are fungible. If you lose at ping-pong but win at poker, you can stop playing ping-pong. Lean into your comparative advantages: specialize and trade.

Games Played:

I flew out of Chicago Midway today. The metal detector beeped. The agent told me this meant I’d been “randomly selected” for extra screening. I asked if that meant the body scanner. She said yes. I told her I’d opt out. She told me to take off my shoes and run them through, then asked if I’d go through the scanner now. I said no (did she really think removing my shoes would change my opinion?). She summoned a male agent. He asked me to point out my property. I said, “My partner has it.” (She’d known the game was on the second I got flagged. She was capping my downside to enable me to play.)  “All of it?” he asked. Yes. He walked me to a separate lane. I asked how long he’d been a TSA agent. “Since there’s been a TSA.” He started the spiel: “Any sensitive areas, any painful areas?” And then, hot damn, was this guy thorough. As he ran his hands up and down my midriff, Partner made a cupping motion on one of her breasts, seemingly indicating what the agent was soon to do to me.

After the free massage, I returned to Partner with a new glow.

He offered me $4k for 15 minutes of play. 

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I said no. To win the bet, win the games. To keep the winnings, stop while he can still pay.

I’m not skilled enough at ping pong to play for $2k per game. Yet tonight I played ping-pong for $2k per game.

Here’s how:

He asked, “Ping pong?”

I said, “Sure. $100 per game?”

His eyes lit up. “Sure.”

We agreed: game to 21, 5 serves per person, serves must be cross-court.

I won the first game. We played again. I won. A third time: I won.

He said, “Double?”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

He said, “$200 per game.”

I said, “I’m up $300. You want to play for $200 per game?”

He said yes.

I won.

He said, “$500? I need to clear this out.”

We shook hands.

I won.

“$1,000?”

I won.

“$2,000?”

I won.

So now I’m up $4,000. And the biggest danger in this spot is the guy not paying. Because I’d pay a $4,000 debt if I had one. I only make bets I’ll cover. So if he doesn’t pay his debt, he was free-rolling me the whole time. (“Free-rolling” is when you have the ability to win but no ability to lose. If he would collect upon a victory but not pay upon a loss, he’s free-rolling me for the bet.)

I also 1) don’t want him to feel shitty, and 2) don’t want him to stiff me.

So when he says he wants to play for $4k, I know he’s steaming. I know he’s fuming. He’s physically pacing at the base of the ping pong table like Chris Rock on stage. And I don’t know if he’s someone who will actually pay his debt. If he is, we can play for more later. If he isn’t, I don’t want to gamble anymore.

The game is no longer ping pong. The game is: will this guy pay off an $8k debt? If not, I’m taking my ping-pong ball and going home. 

Who’s That Groomsman? 

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The goal of the game is bonding. You bond by guessing each other.

The bachelor party organizer tasked me with creating an activity. Here’s what I did:

The Method: 

0. Learn the constraints. How many people? What duration? When? Where? Vibe (chill/athletic).

  • 10 people, 60-90 minutes, outdoors sitting around a firepit

1. Learn the goals. 

  • First or second activity at a bachelor party: bonding, getting to know each other.

2. Select a theme. 

  • The groom loves Pokémon, so Pokémon it is.

3. Coalesce. What is the easiest way to achieve the goals in theme?

  • A simple game of “who’s that Pokémon.” 

4. Research. 

  • Ask the groom: what Pokémon would each person be, and why?

5. Make simple game. 

  • Show a picture and read a description of the Pokémon, then see who can guess which person it is. Then read the groom’s description of them and prompt new guesses. Repeat for all people.

Bing, bang, boom.

The Field Report 

We ran the activity today. 8/10 people enjoyed it. 1/10 demonstrated boredom two-thirds of the way through. The last 1 gave side-eye throughout the entire night, so it’s probably not exclusively about the activity that he gave it side-eye too. 

No one was offended. Most people enjoyed their Pokémon. When the experience dragged, we sped it up. 

My one misstep: after my own Pokémon was guessed, I forgot to have the groom describe why I am the Pokémon he said I am. (This step existed to enable group understanding and friendship-forming and bonding.) So the event worked well for everyone else, and only 80% well for me. 

8/10 and 80%? Sounds like a win.

I originally met the groom on an interview tour of an arts school. We connected because I was the most aggressively-forward social butterfly in the group: during the hour-long tour, I spoke with every single one of the 20 aspiring students. The groom had noticed my occupying this social position, and therefore decided he didn’t want to meet me, from a “this social position only has room for one” mentality. Having met everyone himself, we finally chatted in an elevator near the end of the tour. The conversation was so delicious we went out for drinks that night and spent a decent part of COVID playing video games together from a distance. 

I didn’t have the chance to be introduced to the group? Sounds like it’s time to turn on that social butterfly again, introducing the rest of the party to the same version of me that’s the reason I’m here at all.

Why Do People Live Here?

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To win, position well. To position well, realize it’s a choice. 

“Why do people live here?”

It’s a common refrain when I travel. And I travel a lot.

Between 2018 and 2025, I lived in a van, driving around the U.S. and Canada. For 4 months in 2022, I lived in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea. And most places make absolutely no sense to me.

New Orleans, New York, San Francisco: I get. Austin, Seoul, Paris, Tokyo: totally. But Chicago? Kansas City? Cleveland? Dallas and Houston? Those tiny towns in Nevada and Colorado and Oregon with more elevation than people?

I’m in Chicago for a friend’s wedding. A surprise thunderstorm shook our windows. Two years ago when I visited, I heard a siren. I asked my friend: “What’s that siren for?” He said it’s a weather warning: we were about to be cold enough to be deadly.

The trains run above ground (terribly noisy), and most don’t even run all night. The weather is always either too hot or too cold. The theater and art are good, but not as good as New York or L.A. The food is tasty, but overwhelmingly unhealthy. Maybe it’s the sports?

I don’t buy that most people intentionally choose where to live based on their values and preferences.

Where & why? 

Ask people why they live where they live (I do, constantly) and most people give one of 4 answers:

  1. They were born there. (This is Partner’s most frequent response when I pose the question.)
  2. Work or school took them there.
  3. A lover took them there.
  4. It’s the nearest city to where they were born. (Partner grew up in the “big city” for her area, because it had a Walmart. This “big city”: 16,000 people.)

Who’s the actor here? 

Every answer describes something that happened to the person. Born there: the game placed you. Work took you: the company (or admissions committee) chose. A lover took you: the lover chose (or their company did). Nearest city: the game placed you, plus a radius.

Where you live is one of the biggest decisions in your life. It decides your environment, your friends, your culture, your wages, your rent, and your weekends. And it’s a rare big game where most players never even realize they’re playing. The board hands them an opening setup, and they just accept it.

I can count on one hand the friends who chose their place to live by auditioning and deciding.

Reality & possibility

How many people decide where to go? Between 18 and 30, do you explore while you can (no mortgage, no kids, career still portable)? After your kids leave home, do you think about moving?

Money, visas, family gravity: there are good reasons to stay where you live. But a lot of it strikes me as activation energy. You’re a distinct person with individual tastes. And you just happen to have been born in exactly the right place? 

I’ll take the other side of that bet.

Life Advice for the Laid Off

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To win, see the silver lining. To see the silver lining, get rained on.

Back in college, my roommate set me up on a date with the woman who is now his wife. She texted me earlier today asking for advice. Her husband was laid off in one of those massive rounds you’re hearing about. Here’s what I said:

  • People are rarely laid off from their perfect-fit, dream job. This could be a great opportunity to find something you care about more. Getting laid off is often something very stressful, but also something people are very happy about in retrospect.
    • Another friend lost his job last year. After months of tough (and often disheartening) searching, he found a job that aligns with what he studied in college. His previous job delivered a paycheck. His new job fits his values. It’s no coincidence that those people wanted him: they share values and interests, and we want to be around people with whom we share values and interests.
  • List your values, stack-ranking them. How important is it to you to stay in the house you’re in? More or less important than the industry you work in? Reasonable people might have different preferences. Only by knowing your values can you decide in accordance with them.
  • Venn diagrams are your friend. For him, the intersection could be philosophy, theater, physical awareness, and getting along with everyone. It might be a specific niche, but someone will pay you for it. Are you willing to travel for it? That’s why you need your stack-ranked values.
  • Don’t be the best: be the only. Don’t seek a job where you’re the best; find a job where you’re the only. If you lack competition, people will reward you for solving their specific need.
  • Our economy is currently in a big ol’ unpredictable cluster. (One of my favorite financial newsletters wrote about this the other day.) Consider what bets you’re willing to make. I’m taking out long-term, fixed-interest-rate debt on an income-producing asset. I could definitely be wrong (and I don’t have the license to give financial advice), but it’s a bet I believe in.
  • If you want help structuring your freelance work, give holler anytime. (I’ve helped a few freelancers make meaningfully more money without changing the work itself: just the structures around it: pricing, packaging, billing, contract drafting, and the like.) 

Half of advice is the advice itself. The other half is listening. The third half is being there for someone: kind, present, and caring. And the fourth half is knowing when to stop. 

Games Played

A recurring ledger of games observed in the wild

  • The Global Entry agent at O’Hare Airport hands you a laminated card to carry through baggage claim, then to hand to another agent upon exit. How can this possibly be the best system we’ve developed?
  • Groceries in Chicago are like $80 where the same amount would have been like 20€ (~$25) in France. And you have to use the app to clip the annoying little digital coupon. This digital coupon bullshit is so annoying that it would motivate me to shop at a different grocery store entirely.
  • I have always believed that laundry is best done naked so one can wash all of one’s clothing. When following this strategy at a guest house in a foreign city, one should recognize beforehand that one will be locked in one’s room for the duration. And may God have pity on you if the laundry machine breaks. 

Rugby 7s: Two Halves, No Whole

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To win, attract fans. To attract fans, form a cohesive game. 

Rugby 7s needs to choose a side.

After three days at the HSBC SVNS World Championship in Bordeaux (and 8 years following the sport as a casual fan), I think it’s standing at a crossroads. It can lean into being the 14-minute party it already is, or it can grow into a full, standalone sport. Right now it’s trying to be both, and that’s untenable. 

(For anyone who’s never watched: sevens is rugby boiled down to 7 players a side and two 7-minute halves. A full day runs more than a dozen games, back to back. It’s the tasting flight of athletic events.)

I argued last week that a sport’s heir wins by cutting the boring parts. Sevens already did the cutting (15 players down to 7, 80 minutes down to 14). It just never decided what it was cutting toward. 

If You Lean Into the Shortness

The short version is already good. It just wastes its own format. Two fixes:

1. Use the downtime. The games are too short for fans to bond with the teams, so spend the breaks building investment. Share stats on the players. Run through how important this game is. Each team is only on the field for under 20 minutes. That tightness is good. Use this time to reinvigorate the fans about the metagame. 

2. Vary the downtime. How many times can a crowd sing “Sweet Caroline” and watch the “sleepy cam” (the one that finds someone napping in the stands)? Once a day, the organizers seem to believe. These approaches are repetitive. Put a team on interstitial fun: t-shirt cannons, quick water-balloon fights, fan footraces for prizes, a costume contest for cash. You already have a fanbase that turns up in costume. Lean in.

If You Make It A Full-Length Sport

A 14-minute sport is not full-length. The organizers pack three days of tournaments together because each game is only 14 minutes long. What if they made it 2 hours instead? The ledger: 

What it has going for it

  • Fast play. Almost no setup or positioning. All action.
  • It’s a highlight reel. Lots of intensity, no dull moments, and a huge amount of drama. Most of basketball happens in the last 2 minutes. Rugby 7s has a new exciting event happening at least every minute. 

What it’s up against

  1. No obvious fanbase. Rugby fans already have two codes to follow: union (15 a side) and league (13 a side). Sevens is a third, and a stripped-down union at that. Why would a rugby fan adopt a third version? And a newcomer has no particular reason to start with the niche one. (Except that sevens is the Olympic version. And that’s a big leg up.) 
  2. Injuries. In 3 days I watched 9+ players get carried or helped off, 2 of them on stretchers. The playing base is growing fast (it looks like a blast to play, if you’re not attached to your future cognition). For a sport chasing families and casual fans, that body count is a bad look on camera. 
  3. A touring format that fights fandom. There’s no home-and-away. A small set of core teams (8 this season) tours a circuit (Dubai, Cape Town, Singapore, Perth, Vancouver, LA), then 12 teams contest a 3-city World Championship (Hong Kong, Valladolid, Bordeaux). That’s a time-trial structure (Formula 1, tennis, the surfing tour), not a league. Great for a traveling roadshow, lousy for “my team versus your team”. 
  4. Yearly churn. Each season the bottom of the top tier is relegated (down to “SVNS 2”) and new teams come up. So the division’s membership changes every year. Just as a new market learns its team, the team can drop out of the top flight. Hard to grow roots that way.

Changes I’d make

Regardless of which path Rugby 7s takes, these are improvements to the game: 

  1. A score shouldn’t end the game. Right now, if you’re up by two scores when the clock hits zero, you’ve effectively won but everyone keeps playing until one of a number of game events happens (the ball goes out of bounds, e.g.). It’s an anticlimax. Either call it the moment it’s decided, or flip it and give the trailing team a lifeline: they keep playing as long as they keep scoring. 
  2. Let the halves run longer. Fast doesn’t have to mean 7-minute halves. Hockey is just as fast and handles the gas-tank problem with constant substitutions. Roll players on and off and you can stretch the game without melting the athletes. (Note: You can’t just make it longer. They tried. World Rugby cut their finals from two ten-minute halves down to two seven-minute halves in 2017 precisely to avoid injuries. You have to add fresh legs and deepen the bench.) 
  3. Host it in party cities. Amsterdam, Budapest, Las Vegas. The core audience wants to drink for 3 days straight in costume while watching sport. Put the event where that’s already the local economy. (Bordeaux, in fairness, understood the brief.) 
  4. Make the drop goal matter. The scoring: a try (similar to a touchdown in American football) is 5, a conversion (like the kick after a touchdown) is 2 (so a converted try is 7); a penalty or drop goal (similar to a field goal that’s not after a touchdown) is 3. Which means a team down by two unconverted tries can claw back exactly to a tie (7 + 3) but cannot win it. Bump the drop goal to 4, maybe even 5. The drop goal turns from a museum piece into a live weapon, and “up by 10” stops feeling safe. 
  5. Publish the draws earlier. Tell fans when their team actually plays. As it stands, you find out the morning of the first match, which doesn’t help fans. Currently, a bunch of fans missed the first half of the first day. If your team is playing in the morning, would you make it to the first game (early) and then have a nap? Definite possibility.  
  6. Stop the clock during dead time. The clock keeps running during penalty kick-outs, after a score but before the restart, and between a scrum call and the scrum itself (a scrum is like a hockey face-off where three teammates are tied together). That warps the game and rewards stalling. It bites hardest on a yellow card, when a team who’s playing 6 players against 7 for 2 minutes can just bleed the clock. Stop the clock and the gamesmanship dies.
  7. Trim the pool stage. You play 3 pool games to cut 12 teams to 8, and then the real tournament is also 3 games. Half the days are positioning, and the pools barely change anything. That’s too much foreplay for the payoff.
  8. Make the final feel like a final. Today the final is the same length as every other game. Give it longer halves, or make it a best-of-3 with the 3rd/4th-place match slotted in between for the breather (if you’re concerned about injuries). 
  9. Fix the scrum. Over the last 3 days, I cannot recall a time when the team rolling the ball lost possession. That makes scrums in rugby 7s basically just a restart with extra steps. This one needs a revamp, because as-is it’s just wasting time. 

If rugby 7s keeps sprinting the direction it is, it’s going to get tackled. Time to keep tinkering and pick a side. 

Today’s Games Played

The cheese standoff. A vendor slices me 200g of emmental and quotes 3 euros 50. I say card. She says 5-euro minimum on card. I say card is all I’ve got. She says no deal. I walk to the monger two stalls down who sells me 200g of emmental for 5 euros 40. Partner points out how, in the US, the vendor grumbles but eventually takes my money. I’m reminded of the time $20 was as good as 20€. 

The bottle-cap. A French security officer asks if I have bottles. He squeezes the bag. It crunches. He says, “Bottles.” He tells me to take off the cap and bin it. I take off the cap, walk towards the bin, pocket the cap, and walk past him into the stadium with the bottle. (Once inside, I reapply the bottle cap: this wasn’t mere sport, I wanted to use that bottle cap!) French security continues its purposelessness. 

“Oh, Right: It’s a French Baby!”

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To win, befriend the hooligans. To befriend the hooligans, follow the fun.

What is the purpose of sport?

  • Fitness?
  • Camaraderie?
  • War minus the shooting? (Orwell’s opinion.)

Today, I experienced my first real-life British rugby hooligans. A dozen of them, in St Andrews Rugby hats and shirts, had packed into the tram before Partner and me. We boarded their car, met by the keyless strains of “Wonderwall.”

Then another song. Then a chant about a man who wants to go to the pub (yay!) but the pub is closed (boo!) but there’s another pub (yay!) but they don’t serve beer in pints(boo!) they serve it in buckets! (yay!), but the bucket has a hole in it (boo!) but it’s in the top (yay!) and so on.

At the first stop, the doors opened and I called out, “Come on in, there’s plenty of space!” The rugby fans laughed. A few stops on, I was singing along.

Then a family boarded with a ~16-month-old baby in a stroller. There wasn’t quite enough space. The doors closed on the front stroller wheels. And reopened. And tried to close. And reopened, hungry jaws attempting to devour the stroller.

Terrified at the prospect of being eaten, the baby began crying. One of the hooligans began shushing the others. The rest joined in, more as a game than from any knowledge of the baby: a dozen drunk men playing the Quiet Game. They fell silent enough to hear the crying. Someone started up, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star…”

The only time comparable to a dozen rugby hooligans singing a baby to sleep was 20 years ago next month, when a beer line of Colorado cowboys sang my mother happy birthday. Both were very kind and affectionate, and both very drunk.

When “Twinkle, Twinkle” ended, one of the hooligans asked how the baby was doing. Not great, it appeared. So someone said, “Oh, right: It’s a French baby!”

They began “Frère Jacques” instead. The baby’s ~3-year-old cousin loved this.

Whatever the purpose of sport, neither Orwell nor I would have guessed: lulling babies to sleep on French trams.

Why I love the kick-and-chase (and you should do)

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To win the rugby match, score the most points. To score points, move the ball forward. 

Rugby 7s is my favorite spectator sport. My favorite move: the kick-and-chase. The move is what it sounds like: kick the ball into the space behind the defense, then run it down before they can. (Context for the unfamiliar: rugby is a sport similar to American football. In rugby, you cannot throw the ball forward.) 

Here’s why it works.

1. Speed wins the chase. Some teams and players have wheels (the Kenyan men, Japan’s number 3, Mariana Talatoka for Fiji’s women). When you’re that fast, the kick is more a pass to yourself (it’s harder to run with the ball than after it), and you win the foot race more often than not.

2. Nobody’s home in the back. With only 7 per side, teams can’t afford a defensive sweeper. Drop one player from the line and you’re defending six across, and 6-on-7 gives a free space to the offense out wide. 

3. The defense is facing the wrong way. The instant the ball leaves your foot, you’re already sprinting. They have to stop, turn, and go. How many of them will make it there faster than your teammates? 

4. Even a miss pays off. Lose possession and you’ve still gained sizable yardage — and their ball-recoverer will need support to mount a reasonable offense. No second man means no ruck (pass through the legs, during which only your team can grab the ball) and no ruck means they hand the ball right back. The kick-and-chase-to-tackle-and-recover pipeline is a strong one. 

5. My favorite: the bluff. Just having a kick-and-chase in your bag forces the defense to pick a poison. Guard you tight and your kick gains more value. Sit back to cover it and the holes open up for your runs. The threat alone bends the whole defense. If a team restructured their strategy around it (instead of simply playing rugby 7s like it’s a faster rugby 15s), the metagame could easily undergo a paradigm shift. 

So if anyone’s ever complimented your speed (e.g. if Partner referred to you as “having wheels” and I made oinking noises in reference to you being a greased pig), develop your kick. Then go chase it.

— HSBC Sevens World Finals Day 1, Bordeaux, France