[SeaEagle]

Nice Post.

At the risk of taking this thread back on topic:
In your OP you essentially made a correlation between complexity (ability to gain expertise) and skill (amount expertise impacts the outcome).
[ QUOTE ]
I think it could also be said that the greater the edge available in a game, the more difficult it is to reach the higher levels a great amount of effort and study would be required.

[/ QUOTE ]
This correlation doesn't exist. For instance, Tic-tac-toe is pretty much 100% skill and an expert will beat a beginner pretty much all the time. However, it only takes about 10 minutes to go from beginner to expert.

Poker, in fact, is at the other end of the spectrum. A beginner can beat an expert a large percentage of the time, yet it takes a lot of skill/knowledge/talent to become an expert at poker.

I would argue that many luck-heavy games require more expertise to consistently win because you're fighting the luck factor. In poker, I believe limit takes more expertise than NL to consistently win because the luck factor is higher. NL is the "Cadillac of Poker" precisely because it has a lower luck factor and the difference between skilled players and unskilled players is therefore greater. Note: this is very similar to the argument that Malumth makes in his Essays.

IMO poker is very close to chess on the "amount of expertise available" continuum. However, it's way to the luck side on the other - way more luck than (competitively played) monopoly or stratego for instance.

One more point. The extremely heavy luck factor is why we're always talking about variance here. You can play 10s of thousands of hands of poker and not know if you're better than your average opponent or not. There aren't very many other games that have so much luck that it could outweigh skill for 10s of thousands of games.