[Siegmund]

I can imagine a time in the future - perhaps quite distant future - when a large number of people know a near-optimal strategy for poker, and they all sit down at a table and don't have much to do except follow their strategies and see how the cards fall.

I certainly agree that you are very unlikely to ever see a real table today that settles into anything like that -- simply because so many players do things so wildly far from their optimal strategies, and the rate of turnover is so high.

In a home game where the same people see each other week after week, I imagine that they approach some kind of stable state, and then one or more of the players gets bored and deliberately changes his style of play - not because he things it's better but because he is bored.