[Jordan Olsommer]

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What numbers or estimates could you provide to support this statement?

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Here's an extremely rough estimate:

Say Doyle played every world series of poker and each lasted for four days, twelve hours a day, and he saw the last hand at each one (ie he played all the hands in the tourney). At a live game rate of about 40 hands per hour, that's 67,200 hands over 35 years of the WSOP.

Now just to cover ourselves, multiply that by 3, because Doyle didn't just play the WSOP (say the WPT and Amarillo Slim's Superbowl of Poker, even though neither of those went on for 35 years ). That's a very liberal estimate of 201,600 tournament hands Doyle has played.

At a rate of 60 hands per hour online, one would have to play 3,360 hours of tournament poker to reach that number, which an expert player is most certainly capable of, especially when combined with some additional live tournament play at the slower rate, and of course multitabling. (to give a specific example, there was a guide floating around about a pretty much formulaic approach to beating Party 10+1 SNGs, which the author prefaced by saying he had become sort of an SNG expert, since he had played about 500 of them in the past 3 months - at one hour per SNG, that's about 1/6th of the 3,360 hour total; he'd have a number of hands equivalent to our estimate of Doyle's [which took him 35 years to acquire] in 18 months).

So it seems to me entirely possible.