How many hours of poker study on average to become an expert at No Limit Hold em?

There's 168 hours in a week
There's 730 hours in a month
There's 8760 hours in a year

Average person working a 9-5, works 50 weeks a year with 2 weeks vacation. Works 2000hr/year.

when you think ur an expert u realise u know nothing ?

an old guy once said sometime ages ago

I've been a pro for 12 years and although I'm certainly no expert I'd say I'm well versed in the modern game. I've studied somewhere between 1 and 3 hours in total during my whole career and I skimmed through the hwang plo book once. Basically, I'm super lazy and will eventually fall flat on my face.

Take from that what you will.

Study is surely very important but overrated relative to mindset and practice.

If you're Libratus or AlphaFold, about 4 hours. If you're human, it's nearer 10,000, as per Gladwell's 'Outliers'.

Is there an actively played game more difficult to master than no-limit holdem?

Everyone thinks they are an expert that is what is so great about it.

Go?

as the software/tools get more advanced i think the study time will go down

A strong work ethic is necessary, otherwise no time will be enough (that's been my case).

For a second, I thought DeepMind had actually made a poker bot with this name, until I googled it. WP!

Depends on how you define "master". Chess contains a smaller solution, but for any given "top x percent" in chess vs. NLHE, you'd have to study much more to reach that percentage in chess.

It is safe to assume no pokerplayer have studied as much or with as refined methods as Magnus Carlsen has.

The problem with poker is there is a lot of misinformation or just plain bad information out there. So knowing where to look is just as important as retaining and processing the information.

im struggling to think of a harder game because i dont think 'go' or chess are as difficult, or come with the psychological burden of exchanging massive amounts of money, losing, winning, tilting, etc. I think PLO/mix are close runner-ups

DAniel cates (jungleman) said that he believes that NL is the most complex variant because of the betting structure. NLO would probably be more complex but nobody plays it really. limit games (counterintuitive) have much larger game trees, so mixed games are probably close in terms of difficulty to master

i think poker is the most amazing game period, it is so deep and rich. there is a mathematic symmetry in the game, and the way its meant to be played. it is like a minature economy (real value &represented/perceived value), and a microcosm of life. unfortunately it is a zero sum game, which makes it rather dark

10K hours

This is a futile conversation because there is no differentiation wrt to the individual human/poker player. Simply logging hours if you are a low IQ person with bad impulse control will never make you an expert. There is a bare minimum IQ threshold you need to be a pro poker player, probably like 110 and the more intelligent you are (along with other positive personality quirks) the greater your chances. Everyone loves to talk about hard work etc, and that surely can help but most people are capped ability wise. The true elite have intangibles the masses will never have.


Source: actual 10,000 hours of live poker experience playing with people who have been playing poker for 30 years and are still terrible

It's said that a picture says a thousand words - see the post just before your post.

about 3.5 years.

There's a huge difference between 10,000 hours of deliberate study and 10,000 hours of playing mindlessly.

depends on what you consider an expert, but I would assume 1000 hours of study is plenty to be at an expert level

K. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist and professor who over conducted studies of deliberate practice routines for chess players, violinists, and other performing artists, actually did a study on 16 professional poker players over a three year span, as noted in his seminal paper The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. He concluded that to attain an expert-level understanding of poker one would need to perform somewhere between 1492 and 1776 hours of deliberate practice.

Depends how smart or stupid someone is ,

For durrr maybe few days, for u ....maybe never...

Around 350 hours imo

Starcraft? LoL?

Poker is unlike other games, more practice does not necessarily make you better.

For example, I can give you two scenarios:

1.You're on your own for 10k hours in a time chamber where you will come out unaged, how and what you study is up to you

2.You're personally taught for 100 hours by the best in the world of your choice where they design a program for you and you follow it

Which person will come out on top?

Poker isn't "solved," but at the lower stakes it pretty much is, ofc there are certain things you have to see to believe, but the ridiculous hour numbers like 10k+ are total nonsense.

Technically being a decently winning player makes you an expert in the game considering you will be in the upper 5% of players, but being a decently winning player and understanding why it is so is another thing all together.

It just depends on your IQ, how you study, how you play and who you study with/under. It could vary from 500 hours to never.