Comment by britzkopf

I've had a very long standing debate with friends about the nature of poker. I'm neither a statistician, game theorist, nor mathematician so I'm very open to being corrected. My intuition having played recreationally is that the absolute optimal move in poker is relatively trivial to calculate compared to chess/go. That is to say, most experienced players would reach this threshold without too much training. Obviously, what makes poker fun/interesting is that you are trying to guess the strategies of other players, based on your interpretation of their behaviour, and react accordingly. If all that is true, then I would submit, that at any sufficiently high (i.e. non beginner) competitive level it probably comes down to luck, since I don't really believe that the second skill described is really learnable. So when we say "John is the world poker champion for 10 years running and is obviously far better than any mid tier player" are we not saying, essentially, that John is a human polygraph machine. Why, then, is that absolutely astounding skill not being harnessed for something else?