[WJL]

Lots of good posts in this thread. Hope this one can add something to the discussion. I'm no great poker player, but I am learning, and I have played most of the games mentioned in this thread at an advanced level.

Something nobody has really mentioned in this thread is that unlike chess and tennis, poker is generally played against multiple opponents. I think this is why there will never been a Kasparov/Federer sort of dominance for anyone in poker, no matter how good they become. Golf is a much better analogy, and that's one of the reasons I think poker players seem to like golf.

Golf and Tennis are both very high skill-level games, requiring a fairly long practice regime to even become competitive at low levels. But golf has never seen anyone who had a year like, say, Jimmy Connors had in Professional Tennis in 1974, when he won 98 of 104 professional matches. If a golfer wins 6 or 7 tournaments in a year, he had a phenomenal year; it is much the same in Poker. One reason is that there is a lot more varience in golf; every course is different, and weather conditions can completely change the character of any one of them from day to day. Sometimes you hit a wicked slice off the fairway, hit a tree, and end up sitting in front of the green. Sometimes you hit a great shot and land on a sprinkler cover and end up in the rough. Major tournaments have responded to the increasing skill and improving equipment of today's golfers by adding even more varience to the game in the form of narrower fairways, larger sand traps and very difficult green topologies, leading some players to compare certain courses to a putt-putt course. Tennis has much lower varience, and with today's equipment, the game is played pretty much the same on all surfaces, unlike the pre-composite days.

I'd agree with Brandon that online poker can have a high stress component, and what he says about stress chemicals in the body is quite true. The massive number of hands played by many online players can generate great skill, but may tend to burn out many of them before their games can fully mature. Live players, while experiencing periods of high stress, have time to recover due to the slower pace of the game, and have more time to observe their opponents. It is also very difficult for someone playing 12 tables to take any decent notes on their opponents, while live players often have volumes of notes on various hands they played and against whom. Online players 12-tabling are competing against 70-120 opponents at the same time, while the live player is only competing with 6-10; an online player and a live player with similar mental/emotional/physical attributes are equally focused on the games they are playing, but they are focused on different things, and the live player is observing more and making fewer decisions based on a broader range of variables. In the end, I think Brandon is more right about the possible results of prolonged high stress in relation to online players, but live players, not so much.

Now, let's address the math issue. I think most of us can agree that the math involved in NLHE ain't rocket science, folks. Not many people can do an ICM in their heads live at the table, but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out on paper. Figuring out the pot odds in a given hand is about all the math you really need at the table in this game. You can do some Structured Hand Analysis away from the table to analyze tight situations, but at the table itself, there's a lot more to the game than the math

I'd also argue that starting poker young is not really required for the development of a great poker talent, but a game-playing mentality is. Many game skills transfer across disciplines; Harrington was a great chess player before he was a great backgammon player before he was a great poker player. Stu Ungar was a gin rummy player, and didn't pick up hold'em until much later. Brandon seems to be saying that a player will rise from the current milieu that will be superior in character to any of these, but I'm not so sure. The variance that exists in poker by design seems to be enough to absorb any future improvements in precision that more in-depth training can deliver.

There are some qualities of great players that Brandon doesn't mention. Courage, resilience, self-awareness, dogged competitiveness and empathy are qualities most great players have or must develop over time to have long-term success. I say this, and I think of Phil Hellmuth, and you know, maybe I'm wrong . . .