Halfway through Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler's portrait of the artist Robert Irwin, there's an extended digression into the dynamics of betting on horse races. Irwin made his living by betting the horses, all the while taking his artwork—initially a matter of paint and canvas—further and further away from the tropes of pictorial art (or, for that matter, the tropes of "art"), removing first the presence of any distinct marks on the canvas, then the square frame of the canvas, then the "art object" itself (this progression can be well understood through reading the book and trying some of his works; one of them is on display at the SFMOMA).

But while peeling away the layers of his consciousness, Irwin was also spending time at the race track. He says an interesting thing about horse racing:

I can't think of a game that's more complicated. The thing about the race track is the incredibly wide range of information that has a bearing. If you're going to have a chance there, you have to achieve the discipline necessary for keeping track of all of it. ... The first area of information is like what you get out of the Racing Form or what you keep your charts far. ... I had all the figures on who was where, leading or trailing, at two, five, eight furlongs, and so forth ...

—Robert Irwin, quoted in Lawrence Weschler, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees"

He goes on for pages, and it's quite engaging, to note all the aspects of the game he tracks.

But what I find interesting is his comment that horse racing is the most complicated game, integrating so many different things. I've heard similar things about other games, other pursuits. Take poker, for example. To play poker you have to be good at figuring the odds of various hands occuring, given different cards being excluded; this is a purely mathematical question. But there is also the psychological component: reading your opponents to estimate what hands they might be playing. And there's a strategic dimension: planning over the course of many hands and comparing your chip position with the others. What do you play when you're down on chips? What do you play when you're leading? And, too, there is the proverbial poker face: staying cool, holding your posture, watching the others without letting them know what you want to know. Poker's a fairly deep game, like the kind of game Irwin's talking about. But poker's still within the realm of games of chance.

Mountaineering is another activity that calls on the total person. Physical fitness is essential, of course: both cardiovascular and, to an extent, sheer strength (though it should not be thought that climbing rocks needs an abnormally strong body). But then you also have to have a sense of your body, your balance, the way weights on string are likely to move, and the ways that four limbs (or moreover, the human form) can press against a set of surfaces of various angles to achieve a particular traverse. You must be adept with knots. And a mountaineer is, ultimately, a camper, an outdoorsman, a survivalist, a naturalist.

Clearly, there are many games that are as complicated as what Irwin describes; but my impression is that each of has, typically, one activity that we've hit upon as "the most complicated," bringing to bear the widest variety of trainings. It seems that when one person looks upon a domain that's not his own, he's likely to see a muddy heap of indistinct skills. When I look at soccer players, for example, I see men who train hard for fitness and accuracy but probably neglect anything else. To me, horse racing is narrow and specific, and seems all chance—whereas, say, long-distance bike racing calls for a mechanic skill, a dilligent mental control (for endurance), an ability to perform under sleep deprivation, and so on. Is bike racing more intricate than horse racing, or is it only a matter of individual taste that gives me so little to chew on in the latter case, while Robert Irwin has a feast?

I'd like to know. What makes us fix upon different things—hobbies—and see so much content in them, while others just drop away in a blur of indistinction?