[Sciolist]

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Games like StarCraft/Quake attract competitive gamers, people who always want to be the best.
StarCraft, and good RTSes in general, also reward strategic thinking about your goals and your opponent's.

I don't think StarCraft skills translate into Poker skills (except meta-skills like multitasking or something), but I do think they both attract a certain type of person.

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The most important skill you can learn from playing games is how to learn. Knowing how to accept responsibility for your losses, knowing how to study players who are better than you, and knowing how to honestly appraise your game are very important. There aren't really that many activities that you can pick these skills up, but SC is one of them.

I don't even know if you can say poker is one of them: A deep and almost intuitive understanding of variance is neccessary to start picking up those other skills in poker, and normally it takes so long to develop it that you're already broke, or you just aren't learning very well.

I reckon that people who win at poker mostly learnt how to learn somewhere else first (e.g, tennis, rugby, to use two well known examples).