Well sure it all depends how you define "skill."

For me, there being less room for improvement in things like golf and sprinting doesn't mean that poker players are less skillful (or even less skillful at what they do) compared to athletes in those sports.

But your posts are problematic for me on so many levels. For one thing, many sports require certain body types where physique is essentially a pre-requisite to even having a chance at being one of the top players. Offering people a billion dollar reward to be the best at it can't change peoples' body types. Whereas anyone can take up poker.

The only real, relevant skill in poker is game selection.

Or reverse game selection. The reason why guys like Jungle, Ike got so good at heads up is because they didnt game select and just played all the best players.

LOL, very good line. .....

otoh, that poker-playing chimp who appeared at the WSOP a few years back might have a prior claim to that status.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEaKxNYD2lk

When I played him HU, he shoved on 80% of his hands pre-flop.

Fedor is only player I've seen who befuddles the top level players so much that it frustrates them. His timing and reads are so consistently good it's spooky.

If poker players were put into tiers, excluding the stars cash game people who use sims and other tools of assistance the top tier would be

Fedor
Scott Seiver
Dan Colman
Viktor Blom

then below that you'd have people like Doug Polk, Brian Rast, Haxton, Jungle.

Then below that you have the live pros.

Reading this thread gives me belief that poker is still profitable.

1. Variance
2. Rake
3. (it's about a tie these days- between everyone who plays)

One can be very good at heads up (1 on 1) as far as the technique goes, as it can be mastered the most easily. One table cash games can be technically pre-planned with great detail. Are the best bots not beating relatively tough games online at many forms and formats?

Compared to esports, golf, 100 m, boxing, I am not ready to say there is more "skill" in the form of technique, if that is what we are talking about. You don't need a Piosolver or similar for most of that stuff.

One needs a tough game before one needs more pre-planning, as winning otherwise is basically an "automatic" side-product of the opponent deviating from the best play.

In chess, one wins (when no blunders) similarly vs. weaker opponents, getting a superior position because of a positional mistake (rather than tactical, as a blunder) the weaker player made, it also being "automatic."

You can prepare your chess openings with a computer (engine, program) checking it "all;" similarly to poker.

At tougher games, one wins by putting more effort into pre-planning, understanding of the positions after the openings, as it can be pushed further and is the next step after getting a hoped for at least reasonable "middle game" position.

Is poker solved? At what level and against who; God? Easy game; here I come Mr. Fishteller.

Grandmasters in gaming are generally about 12 years old, so it seems pretty easy for some (after ten years of training).

Troll-free top 5

1) Ben86








2) True
3) Sauce
4) OtBRB
5) Isildur

Rake is No. 1, it wins EVERY hand it plays

Variance only affects to which seat the chips are pushed around before they fall down the hole as rake.

lol @ avatar...... you pay royalties to the Iceman ?

My post was a little tongue in cheek, but my point was that the nature of poker does not lend itself to the kind of dominance that can be achieved in other endeavors.

A world class chess player, sprinter, or golfer will destroy an opponent with amateur level skills every single time. And it's pretty easy, even for a layman, to tell the difference between the great and those who are only very good. Yet with the influence of variance, a world class poker player can be and often will be beaten soundly by an opponent with drastically inferior ability. And players with marginal skills can and do enjoy extended periods of massive success. All of us have seen players with little more than rudimentary skills stacking large in cash games and taking down big paydays from tournaments.

I remember reading about a simulation study a while back, to do with a million GTO players playing a million random hands. I think of it as a million Iveys or Junglemans or whoever playing a million hands each. The sick part was the number of them that failed. As I recall about 40,000 of them lost. And a substantial number, about 4000 of them, lost major amounts. Think of that. Thousands of Phil Iveys losing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions playing perfect poker. One can dream.

This

This post makes my eyes bleed even more than Slanskys'.

Yea I'm also gonna throw a bone out there to fellow Blom. This thread (due to the OP) seems focused on NLHE, which I've already made a reply about, but when it comes to -raw poker talent- I honestly don't think there is a person out there who wouldn't honestly come down to saying Blom. The guy just plays and he does it without technical help/software and he's basically world elite in any card game that exists. Absolutely bizzare. He's a completely normal dude but just has a ****ing nack for understanding card games.

I mean, he had mixed games explained to him by Dnegs once or something, and then he's suddenly pretty much #1 in the world HU at it. At them all. Wot?

Holy ****e oborra is 46? Is that right? Henson MLB shows $2.3m in cashes but he seems to be lives tourneys at $100-$300 BI's mostly.

This is the reason why I'm not a winning player.
Not because I'm not good enough!

I'll take the winner of each pot's profit. You can have the bottomless pit that is the drop. You get boring wealthy over time- and it takes forever for people to even realize you are good at poker. I'm buying a yacht after the first session and everyone knows I'm the best for sure...

Ofc I pay royalties.

Eric Lindgren

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

libratus

As an overall player Trueteller or Sauce123 probably.. or Annie Duke

1. david baazov
2. rafi ashkenazi
3. lee jones
4. eric hollreiser
5. dnegs
6. steve ruddock
7. chest
8. spin'n'win
9. flat pay****out
10. shill up

This. AINEC.

Andrew Robl

One funny angle he pulled is filling his pockets w weights or something before he got on a scale the year he won the Main (as Binion's was paying the winner his weight out in silver). As if a win wouldn't have gotten him enough silver lol

ProfessorEd