In the current issue of the 2+2 magazine Mason writes that it doesen't take 10 000 hours to become an elite poker player. He argues that the 10 000 'rule' only aplies to physical sports and not knowledge fields. This isn't true, because the findings were first uncovered when studying what seperated chess grand masters from other chess players.

What do we mean when talking about being elite? It is not only being able to win at the game, for that you only nedd a bit of knowledge and sitting down at a table where the rest of the players are completley clueless. I think we are talking about being among the best in the world. Not necessarily winning the most money, because this depends more on the skill gap between your ability and the other players ability than on your ability in a vaccum.

Anyways some reasons why it may take longer to become elite:

• Not all information is correct
  
  The information available needs to be put into a context. Sometimes it is correct to min 3-bet your aces, sometimes it is correct to move all in. Much information is also delivered by forum posters whose credentials are questionable
  
• Bad feeback loop
  
  Sometimes it is hard to find out if you are losing because the others are playing better or if you are losing because you are unlucky. There are no tools to check your lines, the same way chess players can check their lines with chess software. There are some solvers, but they depend on you puttin villian on a correct range. garbage in, garbage out.
  
• People have incentives to not share their information
  
  In chess, there is usually more money to be made from teaching chess than actually playing. Except at the highest level. Not necessairily so in poker.

So some reasons why it may take a while to get really good at poker. There are of course some things that will speed up the learning process, but Iam saving that for another day. this post is already too long

Not sure about comparing chess to poker as chess at its elite level is much harder to attain than poker is. Of course you have the geniuses in chess who at a very young age can play at an elite level and I would assume that they do not have 10,000 hours of practice behind them, same goes for poker, I do not think you need 10,000 to become an elite player as this is really just a rule of thumb.

I think it depends greatly on how you study and play the game and not necessarily how long you study or play. Quality over quantity.

I do think that it is harder to reach the elite in chess. But I think it is because chess is older and there is more information to learn.

I do think poker is more complex, because some information is hidden and the meaning of certain actions change with time and depending on who you are playing against. At the same time poker is evolving faster due to players playing more hands than chess players play moves.

Quality over quantity is already impplied in the 10 000 hours 'rule' It apparently takes 10 000 hours of quality practise. Luckily we don't need to be world class to enjoy a game of chess or poker

I have to disagree with you here. There is no way that poker is more complex, do you know the number of moves, lines and variations that exist in chess? It's absurd how many there are. Poker on the other hand only has a variety of moves that can be done. Poker is by no means easy, but compared to chess I do not think it's in the same class.

The 10,000 hour "rule" is bunk. It's not true and never was for any field.

While that may be true, in chess both players have the same information available to them. Your opponent can see everything you are doing. In poker, someone could take an unorthodox line 20% of the time for example, and you may never know how often they're doing that. I think that evens the two up somewhat.

Can you quote any studies?

There are two subtle distinctions here. The 10k hours rule is based on deliberate practice, however revised models have also suggested deliberate play can also count towards the 10k hours. So, when a 5 year old "plays" chess or "plays" their musical instrument, they are not engaging in the kind of deliberate at that point, but doing something for the pleasure of doing it.

I'm no fan of the 10k hours rule, but it is pretty robust in certain areas. For example, afaik they never found a professional musician who achieved expertise in much less than 10k hours, and accumulated practice hours correlates highly with performance level, while there is little evidence natural talent has any effect.

But there are also good examples of expertise in other sports attained in a fraction of the time. Helen Glover finished second in the rowing World Championships 2 years after taking up the sport. However, unlike a musician, the physical capabilities of a rower are far more important that technique, and you can make similar arguments based around natural talent for many sports and activities.

A news article that cites a study:

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-s...00-rule-2014-7

It's an arbitrary number and a pseudo psychological way to try to manipulate the public into buying a system which ultimately boils down to a reincarnation of the phrase "practice makes perfect." Of course you do better the more you practice. But there is no 10,000 hour rule.

Incidentally, chess has optimal play based on your opponent's moves. Poker play is dependent on more variables for optimal play. But perhaps the most important distinction is the luck factor in poker. It doesn't exist in chess.

The 10k is as true as the amount of practise one needs somewhere.

If u think u can play tens of tables of chess blindfolded simultaneously with a winning score against decent opponents without talent, then u dont have a clue.

You might be able to do pretty well with talent and little practise but the possible high competition needs ever higher talent and amount of practise.

How much is 1 percent? May be all u need to turn a profit.

The poker argument is about weak competition and a relatively easy or less talent needing game relative to competition and even being an easy game like easy studies where one can score high enough or even perfect and it being less or not at all about talent, and there is no 10k hours, it being just a number.

I see the 10 000 rule as an estimation on how long it takes on average to get to the top level in competitive fields. And as a reminder that talent is overrated.

Some interesting conclusions in the article you linked. Very low numbers for education, which doesent make a lot of sense to me. I would see studying as practising, but maybe they use some other definition.

What the meta-analysis you quoted actually concluded:

As most people in the field have concluded, the practice rule is significant for certain fields, but not for others. The variance explained by deliberate practice for sports, music and games is still arguably the biggest single predictor of success in these fields, and therefore has to be considered highly significant.

Of course, physiology (sports), and cognitive ability (music, games) can be argued as bigger predictors, however both physiology and cognitive ability can be further delineated (strength, stamina, hand-eye coordination, etc), and therefore practice may still be the single most important factor for success in these fields.

You can see all the pieces in front of you in chess. You cannot see the other players' cards in poker, yet you need to make a decision about them, based on his behaviour before, his behaviour now, and your reasoning/intuition. Despite his attempts to perhaps throw you off/distort your perception. Therein lies the complexity. It's an apples/oranges comparison to compare moves in chess to card/betting variables in poker.
It's like people saying 'NL holdem is an unsolved game'. Hit them on the head with a chair. It's a game of 'people'. Within the framework of betting, within the framework of cards. Yeah, let me know when you've solved people.
I know there is 'understanding your opponent' in Chess (from my very limited play). But until your opponent can hold 6 of the pieces under the table, it cannot be compared to poker.

I am aware of what it "actually" concluded and my post in no way contradicts that. I never said practice wasn't important. I said the 10,000 hour "rule" is bunk.

Your conclusions are severely flawed. First off, you opine that it is "arguably" the biggest single predictor of success yet claim that it is therefore "highly significant." Well, to reach your conclusion, you changed your opinion to that of it being fact. It is not fact, as you yourself said, it is "arguably." Second, you say it must be "highly significant." Also, incorrect. In psychology, you need a 95% confidence interval to be classified as significant. Since you have not done such statistical analyses, you cannot claim it is "highly significant." In fact, the study I cited finds just the opposite.

It takes 10,000 hours, assuming the information you learn from is correct, accurate and freely/easily available.

Points 1 and 2 concern correct and accurate information. Point 3 concerns freely/easily available information. It will obviously take a lot longer than 10,000 hours if you learn the wrong stuff and the stuff you need to learn is hard to obtain.

Your post hasn't actually proven that it takes more than 10,000 hours if you learn from good, quality, accurate information sources.

It's arguably the single biggest predictor of success. For example in games it explains 26% of the variance. 74% of the variance therefore remains unexplained - it could be that one single factor (e.g. intelligence) explains the unexplained variance, however it's far more likely that several variables explain this 74%, and therefore the 26% explained by deliberate practice may be the biggest single predictor.

Hence it's arguably the single biggest predictor; however further research would obviously need to be conducted to retain or reject this hypothesis.

There are a number of ways that you can infer statistical significance. I'm not sure what you mean by "In psychology, you need a 95% confidence interval to be classified as significant", but I assume you mean you need an alpha level lower than P=0.05 for a result to be classified as statistically significant.

In the meta analysis, the reported alpha levels for games, music, sports and education are all lower than p=0.001, so in statistical terms they are all "highly significant". I don't know which part you are looking at that suggests they are non-significant, but whatever it is you're not interpreting it correctly, or talking about something completely different.

I never intended to try to prove that it takes longer than 10 000 hours. I just wanted to raise some points that the 10 000 rule might be applicable to poker, since Mason seems to think it isn't

I would say that humans usually have quite a difficult time to understand variance. This variance makes learning to play poker well, harder than many other fields, where you can trust the feedback you get.

Let me look at the article as I may have misinterpreted the statistical analysis.

Either way, I stand by my post that states this whole 10,000 hour nonsense is a pop psychology concept to reinterpret the common sense knowledge that the more you practice, the better you get. And that the concept has gained in popularity thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and his quest to make some quick cash.

Reread it. For some reason, I was focused on the professional one. So there is a significant correlation between performance and deliberate practice but it only accounts for a small percentage of the differences in performance. But again, this still indicates that the "10,000 Hour Rule" is bogus insomuch as it is not a large predictor of performance and doesn't take into consideration individual attributes and characteristics which supersede the quantifiable time practicing.

Quote from the conclusion:
"Ericsson and his colleagues’ (1993) deliberate-practice view has generated a great deal of interest in expert performance, but their claim that individual differences in performance are largely accounted for by individual differences in amount of deliberate practice is not supported by the available empirical evidence."

You indicated that it still may be the biggest single predictor as the individual attributes can be broken down into smaller components such as intelligence, hand eye coordination, etc. But if you're willing to break down individual attributes to such a small degree, it would only be fair to analyze and break down deliberate practice into the types of practice and various domains of practice to likewise identify the minutiae within the practice.

It isn't pop psychology. You can agree or disagree with the theory, but the work has been peer reviewed and published in academic journals. I'm no fan of Gladwell either, but you shouldn't base your assumption of the theory based on a hack's view, any more than you should base your argument around a click-bait headline that bears no relation to either the main article or the meta-analysis ("New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule")

First of all it's not a correlation it's a regression, and secondly if you've ever run a multiple linear regression you'll know that when something explains 26% of the variance, this is not a small percentage - 26% is a highly significant chunk of the variance, and should in no way be dismissed - especially off the back of a meta-analysis.

The deliberate practice theory has never claimed to take individual attributes and characteristics into consideration, so that's not a fair criticism.

I don't have any issue with this conclusion. In order to claim that deliberate practice "largely accounted for.... individual differences in amount of deliberate practice", the amount of variance explained would have to be greater than 51%. When you consider all the other potential variables, this was always going to be highly unlikely.

That notwithstanding, the authors of the meta-analysis in no way seek to dismiss the 10k hours rule - they are simply re-stating the boundaries. Intuitively, 10k hours of deliberate practice explaining 20-25% of the variance seems very fair and reasonable to me, especially with a meta-analysis to support these conclusions.

Edit: As a personal note, i'm no fan of the 10k hours rule. However, there is enough evidence available to suggest that it should not be dismissed based around personal opinion. Other authors (e.g. Cote, Bake & Abernethy, 2007), have offered a good critique of the theory, and offered several revisions including the concept of "deliberate play", and transferable skills spent engaging in similar activities also being significant - so poker players improving their critical thinking by playing chess, backgammon, etc. These two revisions are both significant improvements on the original theory IMO.

Your post contradicts itself in what appears to be an attempt to simply counter the points I was making. The article itself speaks of correlation and the conclusions they draw are that it is not as large of a component of performance as previously opined. I'm not sure how you can try to correct me when I'm citing what the article says. If you take issue with that, I'm sure the authors would love to hear from you.

Your post states one thing then you semantically try to manipulate the conclusion to where it doesn't contradict what you were originally saying. If you aren't going to play fair, why play at all?

I've made what I feel to be a number of fair and reasonable judgements of the data presented in the meta analysis, which are in line with the authors own opinions.

I'm not going to go around in circles explaining why something is or is not statistically meaningful when it appears at face value you don't have a thorough enough grasp of statistics to be able to understand the arguments I'm presenting.

The authors conclude:

Which is exactly my position on this subject.

The 10k hours rule is not "bunk", and however you try and re-frame your argument, this study that you cited in support of your claim does not support your argument.

Ah. Now it's clear. We actually agree on the importance of practice. I have mentioned that numerous times.

What is now clear is you don't understand the crux of the argument surrounding the 10,000 Hour Rule. If you did, not only would you see why it's bunk but would also see why this article is relevant and not just "click bait."

I have to go to work but the basic argument is anyone can be an expert in any field if they put in enough deliberate practice. That the practice aspect is more important than other factors. What the opposing view states, and this study agrees with, is individual differences in the way of talents and attributes are a better predictor of performance than practice.

So let me make this easier for you to isolate your position: do you think practice is the most important factor as the 10,000 Hour Rule states or that individual characteristics and natural attributes, as I and this article state, is the most important factor?

As much as you try to spin it, you can't have it both ways. Pick one.

And lol at a guy who doesn't know what a confidence interval is and its relation to a p value trying to talk trash on someone else's understanding of statistics.