{"id":745,"date":"2026-07-09T05:14:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/why-the-best-player-alive-barely-runs-chunking\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T05:14:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:14:02","slug":"why-the-best-player-alive-barely-runs-chunking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/why-the-best-player-alive-barely-runs-chunking\/","title":{"rendered":"Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs &#8211; Chunking"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>They\u2019re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what\u2019s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what\u2019s happening and to predict what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n<p>So when Messi walks, he\u2019s not resting. He\u2019s chunking the entire field. Every position, every shift, every gap in the backline is feeding a pattern library that he\u2019s been building since he was 5 years old. By the time he decides to move, the map is already drawn. And when Ronaldo heads a ball into the net in total darkness, it\u2019s because he\u2019s seen that angle of another player\u2019s leg and that ball\u2019s trajectory a hundred times over and knows the pattern it follows.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/kottke.org\/26\/07\/why-the-best-player-alive-barely-runs\">kottke.org\/26\/07\/why-the-best-player-alive-barely-runs<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They\u2019re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what\u2019s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what\u2019s happening and to predict what\u2019s coming next. So when Messi walks, he\u2019s not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,164,7,35,37],"class_list":["post-745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-attention","tag-chunking","tag-consciousness","tag-learning","tag-neuroscience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}