This;

And dgiharris; genius isn't genius, its very much genius in ones enviroment.

Isaac Newton is special I give you that; but you can make the case for almost everyone else that they were a genius as a product of the elements around them.

Would a free thinker like Eistein flourish in today's rigours and Expensive! scientific world? Probablly not. What about Napoleon, you catch my drift.

he could memorize a six deck shoe, and was banned from playing blackjack. he was the best gin player in the world, and beat harry stein 86-0, won over 80% of the gin tourneys he entered, and was banned from playing gin. he won the main event the first time he ever played it, beating doyle brunson, and then won it again the next year. he's the only 3 time main event champion, and he only entered 5 main events. if you look at his major multi table tournament results, he came in first half the time. the majority of the rest of the time, he was at the final table.
he wasn't just the consensus best player, like phil ivey is today, a little better than the rest of the best. he just crushed everybody every time he sat down.

+10000

Will we agree to disagree.

If someone has an IQ greater than 160 in their respective field. And you somehow had the ability to transport them in time and then enable them to apply themselves in that same respective field, they would still crush that field.

I do not mean to be condescending, but its my experience that the general public and average person has never had the opportunity to witness genuis first hand.

One of my professors in college was a former chief scientist at a major research facility and Nobel prize winner in Physics.

It was scary to witness how smart this person was. And I mean that literally.

If my professor was born today, he would grow up to crush physics just like he did 60 years ago in his prime.

In the case of Stu Ungar, FFS, he won the WSOP just a little over ten years ago and we are already so quick to dismiss him as compared to today's players. WTF?

I do not know why the human ego thinks that we 'modern' people are so much smarter than our predecessors. This is just not the case.

I agree 100%. I also think many people think games are "so much tougher" when in fact they arent that tough at all.

coke is a lot stronger these days so stu probably would have died a lot sooner had he been around to get felted 18 times in a row playing online alone in a hotel room

coke isn't a lot stronger these days, and he did mountains anyway.

1. The variance online is bigger than live because your edge is not so great if u are a good player.
2. All of you have eard of great call by stu ungar but u never eard of great folds by him.
If he was 14 now playing online he would be crushed, he would not crush the game!
He cant read people in the computer, and he was the best seeing when people were on draws. People would value bet their sets and he would not be able to fold his TPTK because there were 2 clubs on the flop and he thinks they were on a flush draw. I'm a big fan of him and I have a photo of him on my desktop but he would get pounded by ivey or durrrr in this days, and maybe even by an NL100 regular.

He won a 100k bet when he counted down a 6 deck shoe and named the last card, but you do not need to memorize the hole shoe to do that. You can just keep two counts.

example

count a

club=1
spade=2
hart=3
diamond=4

count b

Ace=1
2=2
3=3
4=4
5=5
6=6
7=7
8=8
9=9
T=10
J=12
Q=13
K=14


With one card remaining you can figure out the last card based on the value of the two counts.

gee sounds like you want to compare, earl the pearl vs thomas, or Michael vs lebron , or jim brown vs emmitt . all games have changed....... time makes that happen, but stu .......... was special , chip was special, ivey is special , but the game is more involved/ talked about more today, then in the past ........... more tool's today for today's player ........... i do believe most of yesterday's players......... would have less today , timing , and being in that time frame was very good for them.........

way do americans say "anyways" ?

By far the best gin rummy player in the world. Seemed like he was good at reading hands, had good natural talent. I think he would play a lot of online poker since he craves action.

I can't stand the people that say he couldnt even beat 25 nl online. If he played online since the beginning, he's much smart enough to be a winner. I think if he played low\micro stakes online by any chance he would dominate heads up.