Re: Poker and art and 10,000 words.
If I knew how to write links to other threads I'd be set. Check my recent posts and you'll find I talk all the time about the 'creative' side to poker as opposed the numbers side. In a post just yesterday I used painting as an analogy for how some people approach poker.
To paraphrase: I can reduce a painting to a ream of paper full of numbers. I can talk about the %s of each color and ratios of open space to ink. List the elements and their constiuent subatomic parts, etc.
By the same token, just because poker is full of numbers does not mean there isn't a pretty picture under it all. Chess is a great analogy as well. When a perfectly brilliant move sends every GM observer into a giddy fit it still only gets a simple "43..Nc5!" in the annotation. A great trap might work the same way. And like chess you are going to find more art where the GMs are playing than where the patzers are playing. Read some hand histories from WSOP final tables of years past, specifically read up on Stu Ungar, if ever there was a poker artist, he was it.
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