[Slim Pickens]

So I'll clarify, online poker, by itself, doesn't help much. It's actually pretty worthless. If a person makes no attempt to interact with the other humans involved in a common activity, it won't matter what that activity is. The person will remain solitary. The personal growth and such comes from doing things like flying halfway across the country to stay in a hotel room with some 45-year-old dude you met on the internet, not thinking for a second that it's about gay sex, and then spending a week throwing around money, going to strip clubs, drinking, and playing high-stakes poker. It comes from IM conversations with other thinking players about what all the moron unthinking players are thinking. In online poker, you have a chance to interact with a group of people who are your self-selected intellectual equals sharing a serious intellectual pursuit, rather than those sharing only a common age, with an general lack of direction and interest in life.