Some people have natural talents that others cant even comprehend.

Did you guys read the ending?

They took him and his sister to a foster home and away from his father.
Free country huh?

This is what happens when you don't put your kids in school to be brainwashed.

Yes thats true.

Few things

- Chess players make good and solid poker players but not great poker players.
- Most of the former IM+ that I know tend to stick to games that are most technical and can be learned in a way "what to do in a specific situation" like SNGs, tourneys or eventually ring PLO where you can do pretty well only with home preparation + maths and dont need to have typical poker skills like being a good hand reader. And they do tend to nit it up, big time.
- If we talk about people that came from other games then clearly Magic players stand out and make far, far better poker players.


Jeff is just unique and probably would do good at anything he would touch, also from what timex said his aproach to poker is completly diferent then the one most chessplayers have. it will be interesting to see if he will keep his interest for poker. I mean he didnt care to become top at chess why would he care about poker, maybe he will play a few more EPT and find another hobby, something more chalenging for his briliant mind then a stupid 2 card game.

He used to be a real nit in tourneys when he started out some months back. I've seen him play Harrington-esque poker in various live tournaments up until recently. You know, when people first play poker tournaments (not just live but in general), they've read a book or two and play nitty, and when they get better they start to open up slightly. I feel like Jeff's made this same transition, but at a 10x faster pace, and against 100x tougher fields.

And he said he's coming to Prague

Was this in America or Canada?

Obviously I don't know all the details but in that video they did say that he and his sister were sleeping in a car with temperatures down to one degree above freezing

this is completely backwards

edit: some of the best in the world still are weak in things like calculating pot odds or have various other simple leaks

certainly not the case in chess

this is absurd as well, there is so much more to chess

consider the amount of hours spent to erach the top, it is nowhere close

Chess is MUCH more complex than poker and requires a higher level of intelligence. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly mistaken.

last two posts are lol

+1.

Poker is a game of incomplete information... the game changes as u play wth different people. With chess u can prepare lines beforehand with databases and the help of computers.

I consider chess to be a solved game already & poker is always changing. And even if u are good @ poker ur still gonna have to put the time in

geymoneyobv,

are you any good at chess? serious question

The problem is that take a random 20 year old with no chess experience and try to make them world champion of chess. The chance is as close to zero as humanly possible. If they try to become the best in the world at poker, there is some small possibility.


Of course this also remains true for simply becoming a grandmaster. Almost no one has done it while knowing nothing at a relatively old age (or at least not being very good at the time), while it's routine that poker players take up the game relatively late in life and can still be one of the greatest.

Note that almost every single top chess player in the world was a great talent by the age of 10-12 years old.

poker is an easy game to learn and hard to master
chess is in a completely different league. It's like learning a new language, hard to learn near impossible to master. You need to have a gift for the game and practice all your life. It is a thousand times more complex and has a near infinite amount of possibilities rather than just check, call, fold, bet and raise.

i feel like you are agreeing with me?

of course agreeing with you, its a joke. Just replied to yours for some reason.

This is a bit absurd to discuss which game is harder. Every game is as hard to beat as your opponent is, I mean there is you and the other guy and you have to be better then him.

pong isn't a hard game no matter how good your opponent is.

LOL at whoever said that they consider chess a "solved game."

This thread is just screaming for a good photochop of Jerry Yang staring down Emanuel Lasker over the chess board.

This isn't quite true, in my eyes anyway. Chess simply requires MUCH more study and hard work to master. Intelligence is important in both games.

Did anyone else rewatch Finding Bobby Fischer because of this? Funny, the last game is based on the Waitzkin-Sarwer game and is portrayed as Waitzkin offering him a draw even though he knows he can win, it getting rejected, then him winning.

In real life Waitzkin reached an endgame that looked really hopeless for him, but played very very well to manage a draw in the endgame.

Also the Sarwer character in the movie looks older than Waitzkin, but in reality he was younger.

Basically Sarwer was >>>> Waitzkin, but he was the villain in the movie so there you go.

The two require two totally different intelligence types, although it's possible for the chess intelligence type to overlay with poker (although the winning-poker intelligence type would offer absolutely no advantage whatsoever in chess)

The greatest poker players usually have a genius for compiling seemingly irrelevant (to mere mortals) fragments of imperfect information and contrasting it against a range of probabilities, further against the organic, human intentions of their opponent. There are skills involved here that most chess players don't have.

I completely agree that Chess requires a more conventional intelligence type that a lot of winning poker players are lacking, but the intelligence type winning poker players have is usually just as absent in chess-playing types

(obviously, exceptions to every rule, but I'm pretty sure about this based on my own observations in life as a semi-serious chess player when I was younger, and a mediocre poker player now)

If Jon Krakauer wrote his biography I would finish it in one sitting.

This guy looks genuine, really nice guy in the interview.

Will keep tabs on this, cheers OP.