Everyone wants to learn poker when they see the money...

[pzhon]

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Not only do you need hundreds of hours of hard work on your game, you need the ability to deal with long periods of variance. There is a silly number of stumbling blocks before you're even a decent poker player, let alone a superstar.

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Being a superstar and being a winner are different.

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I think an average person stands a better chance of running a marathon in 12 months time than being a winner at poker.

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I think you are overestimating the difficulty of both.

I've known normal people who, for whatever reason, decided to run a marathon in a year, and did it, including a middle-aged overweight woman with no athletic background that I know. Of course they weren't competitive, and they were completely spent afterwards, and their toenails died and fell off, but they finished.

Poker isn't brain surgery, where there is a high, objective standard for competence. You just have to be significantly better than that average poker player at the levels you play, and the typical microlimit poker player doesn't study the game or think about it. I think most people could be taught to beat penny-ante poker games in a day using something like my Basic Strategy ( link, free OBG account may be necessary to view it), and Party's $0.50-$1 in a few days. However, it could take much longer if the person were convinced he already knew how to play.