can you get good playing poker for 6 hours a day for 10 years straight?

You make a lot of threads, don't you?

Gladwell reckoned that to get world class at something you need a minimum of 10k hours practice at it. Your example is around twice that.

Your sexual orientation is irrelevant.

It depends. You will have to work on your game and think about your decisions. Not just splash your chips around.

Poker history is filled with players who beat thegame at one point but got left behind when the game evolved.

I am actually finding that continued play is hurting my game. For awhile, I was thinking about the game, analyzing, post gaming every questionable hand. Now, I have played so much, i make so many decisions by reacting and muscle memory. But the problem is 1) the game, from year to year, even from hand to hand, is always adapting, 2) by making snap decisions I am missing nuances.

I have decided to take a one month hiatus from poker, and work on analyzing my game, breaking down some leaks, and reading some books.

Just because you play a lot does not mean you improve. Unless you have a feedback system in place, making the same mistakes 6 hours a day does not make you anything but better at making the same mistakes.

No.

A lot of contemporary knowledge on expertise and improving at any given skill has noticed that just doing something for a long time won't make you elite at it, you must specifically practice that skill and improve your weak points.

This is evidenced by the fact that most people drive tons but aren't at the level of race car drivers, or average golfers still shoot 100+ after 20 years.

Can you get good at starting threads if you post one-line questions almost every day?

Can someone get good? Yes.

Will most people get good? Not likely.

Thank God for that.

I will frame the question differently: Do we want most people to get good? Poker is not hockey: More players that get good, means the fewer profits the other good players make. We have, however, the expectation that most players still remain bad even if they learn to improve, which is a bit counter-intuitive.

That's the reason why senior citizens are the best drivers.

Depends on the person, and depends on the definition of "good". With an autodidactive (is that valid version of the word?) mind, I believe some people can build themselves a good enough apparatus to become a winning player on low to mid stakes over years of playing. But it does require an active brain that knows how to develop. It's just as likely, if not more likely, that you through playing 6 hours a day for 10 years will develop an auto-pilot that is completely unable to adjust to anything, and is therefor bound to lose. So yeah, it should be possible, but it's no guarantee.

I feel it's somewhat of a paradox in these kinds of questions; if you need to ask if something is possible, it probably isn't possible for you. Don't want to be a killjoy though, so hope someone proves me wrong.

Of course, but you only have to look at some players' Sharkscope results to see that high volume does not necessarily mean good player.