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complete amateur Andy Beal studies poker in his spare time for a year and becomes close, possibly equal, to the top professionals in heads up limit hold em. (although I can't prove it and may be way off, I think of HU Limit as being towardss the top of the list of pure skill poker).

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Here we have the whole endgame/progression of poker thing coming up again. HU limit seems to me like it can be entirely reduced to game theory and statistical analysis, whereas adding more players and more variables (e.g. no-limit) would multiply the complexity very quickly. Since no one has really spent a lot of time doing statistical analyses of HU limit, it would figure that someone who studied that aspect very closely (e.g. Andy Beal) would be able to overcome a large deficit in experience.

Maybe if HU limit was the only poker game in existence and had been for as long as chess, there would exist a perfect strategy according to statistics and game theory. Given that there are a limited, albeit astronomical, number of ways a chess game can end up, there should theoretically exist a perfect strategy for chess (probably always ending in a draw, like tic-tac-toe, or white always winning). If there indeed are perfect strategies for both games, isn't "skill" just a matter of who more closely approaches perfect strategy? In this case, once both HU limit and chess have been mastered, there would be no more skill in either game than in professional tournament-level tic-tac-toe.