Learn to watch.

The first art, and the one almost nobody practices, is simply to look. It sounds too small to matter. It is the largest leap in skill available to you, and most people never make it for a single round of their lives. Remember what the ordinary player does. They treat the person across from them as weather. They look inward, at their own choice, at what feels lucky or bold or due, and they throw, and then they glance up only to read the result. They never once consider that the other person is a source of information, leaking it continuously, begging to be read. The decision to stop looking inward and start looking outward, to believe — really believe — that there is something there to see, is the whole beginning of the game. Everything else is built on it.

And there is a great deal to see, more than you can take in at first, so it helps to know the broad shapes that human leaking takes. People give themselves away through habit — the shapes they simply tend to favor, the fist they reach for before any pressure, the resting tendencies that have nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. They give themselves away through reaction — what they do in the half second after a win or a loss, the staying and the fleeing we have already met. They give themselves away through rhythm — the tempo of their throwing, the little runs and sequences their hand falls into when their attention drifts. And they give themselves away through feeling — the confidence that makes them bold, the frustration that makes them grasp, the mood that pours down the arm into the choice. You do not need a complete catalog of these yet. Catalogs come later, and they go deep. What you need first is the eyes. And then the patience, because the discipline of watching is mostly the discipline of waiting. A pattern has to show itself across enough rounds before you can trust it. The impatient player seizes on the first thing he thinks he sees, invents a read that was never there, and loses to his own imagination. The patient one says little, watches much, and strikes only once he is sure. So begin there, with the humblest act in the whole game. To begin to win, begin to watch.

Here is the smallest version of the art, the one you can use in your very next game. After a person loses a round, watch whether they abandon the shape that just lost them. Most people do, helplessly, nearly every time. That single tendency — the flight from the losing shape — is the most common readable thing in all of human play, and you now know to look for it. You will not be right every time, and that is not the point. The point is that you are finally looking, gathering, building a picture, instead of throwing blind into the dark and praying. Once your attention is switched on, it never fully switches off again, and you have crossed the line that separates the millions who merely perform this game from the few who truly play it.

If you do not yet know where to point that attention, point it at the moments just after a result — the instant after a win, the instant after a loss. That is when people are least guarded and most governed by reflex, when the staying and the fleeing happen almost before thought can dress them up. The throw a person makes from a calm, even position tells you a little. The throw they make in the hot half second after losing tells you a great deal. Begin your watching there, at the seams of feeling, where the mask slips because there is never any time to put it on. And be warned that watching is work, far more tiring than throwing on instinct, which is precisely why so few ever do it. The mind would always rather coast. You will feel the pull, especially when you are behind, to stop gathering and start guessing, to trade the slow accumulation of evidence for the quick warm comfort of a hunch. Resist it. The player who keeps watching when it would be easier to flinch is the one who, 10 rounds from now, knows something the other does not.