Hugo Langéen: From Orchestra Musician to Poker Champ and AI Guru

(Photo: Nordic.businessinsider.com)

One of the many cliches we can attribute to Malcolm Gladwell is the idea that expertise tends to take roughly 10,000 hours of intentional practice. It’s a pretty extraordinary decision to take those 10,000 hours and cast them aside for a whole new game not once but over and over again. But that’s exactly what Hugo Langéen did, after landing his dream job in the Malmö Opera’s orchestra he realised he had no more mountains to climb in the world of music.

“Being a musician is about putting extreme amounts of time into something very specific, and abstract at the same time...” said Langeen. “To be great you have to analyze your abstract work, and place it within a framework.”

Sound like anything familiar?

From Catgut to Gutshot

Langeen had been playing poker for a while and seeing something exciting in the game, he started to put his time into that as a new challenge.

“Poker is in a sense the opposite of music,” he says. “You get instant feedback in poker (when playing online) – and there is no limit to how good you can get. You receive stats on exactly everything.”

As his game developed he found himself intrigued by the similarities between day trading and professional poker. Dabbling at first, then going full time, he surrounded himself with mentors and set to work cracking the market code.

Then, after a split with his wife, came the biggest career change of all . the switch to full-time dad. Soon he found the demands of the market and of raising his children on his own too much. So he began to look into outsourcing some of the trading work. Not to colleagues or partners, but to his PC.

The Robots Are Among Us

To that end he gathered a number of experts in AI and worked out a system that would take trader inputs and use them to make decisions based on their expertise.

Century Analytics, his company, are now looking to launch their new AI in early 2018. All that is keeping his robot from working the markets is receiving a license from Sweden’s financial conduct authority.

With his time freed up by the new product. Who know’s what new career he’ll take up to fill the time.