[AaronBrown]

I'm also going to attempt a serious answer.

The problem with the question is PhD's are not granted in practice areas. Being a successful poker player is more like being a successful businessperson, or doctor or lawyer than being a researcher in business, medicine or law (actually medicine awards doctorates for practice, but PhD's only for research, Law is really messed up with doctorates for practice and master's degrees for research; but I'm taking PhD to mean "research degree" rather than "doctorate").

So the person with an equivalent of a PhD in poker should be someone you would go to for new poker ideas, not necessarily someone who can play well or teach well. A successful practitioner who has written useful books is also not the same thing as a professional researcher.

Of course, there are PhD's who study poker: mathematicians, computer scientists and economists. But these are PhD's in other fields who study poker, not poker PhD's.

I think a PhD in poker would have to (a) be familiar with the range of poker theory and literature, and (b) have contributed to it in a way valued by other researchers, not necessarily the general public. Sklansky, Malmuth and Miller play so much, and are so popular, that they could be PhD/popularizers (like Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking) or successful practioners who also write (like F. Lee Bailey or George Soros). The pure poker PhD should be a theorist more than a player or popularizer.

So I would ask, "who writes the books and articles that are most read by other theorists"? Ed Thorp ("Beat the Dealer" and "Beat the Market") is a great example of a guy who doesn't play poker and isn't interested in it, but whose books are certainly read by people interested in poker theory.