Who is the smartest overall poker player?

[cold_cash]

It's me.

I'm also the best looking.

[The WET BEAVER]

I'll put gabbyyyy near the top of my list

[GuyOnTilt]

That wouldn't be the same MensaIQ178 who is constantly table-coaching the 15/30 tables via chat on Party while never himself sitting down, is it? That guy pisses me off to no end.

GoT

[ArchAngel71857]

hahaha. I don't know if it is the same. But this is the guy who challenged Ulyssess to a HU freezeout a while back and proceeded to declare himself champion, while ending down a cool 100.

-AA

[BlackAces]

If he was still alive, it'd have to be Stu Ungar. Didn't he have an IQ near 200?

[Daliman]

I think i heard 182, but i bet BG is right up there. For some reason, Sklanksy having an IQ of 176 seems to pop into my memory.....

[SevenStuda]

Without a doubt, Michael Davis.

[cardcounter0]

Bob "Hoppy" Jones.

Now no one here has ever heard of old 'Hoppy'. That's because Hoppy lived in a real small town in Kansas. Why? Because the pace was slow, he could walk a couple blocks and get a shot and a beer at the local bar, a couple more blocks past some nice Midwestern kept yards and gardens, and he could watch the kids play ball at the baseball field.

Hoppy knew where the best place to hunt doves and quail was, and what ponds had the biggest bass. Hoppy always had the newest model Cadillac, the first big color TV in town, and all that stuff, but pretty much lived slow and simply.

What made Hoppy so smart? Well, Hoppy never worked a day in his life at a regular job. Every one else in town, either worked hard trying to scratch a living in the dirt farming, or worked shifts at one of the two plants at the end of town. A couple people worked dawn to dusk, running the grocery store or the gas station or the cafe. Not Hoppy. If there was a football game or something going on in the big city he wanted to see, well Hoppy would just go. No calendar, no appointments, no boss to answer to.

How did Hoppy live such a comfortable life of lesuire among a bunch of hard-working Midwesterners? Well, most every Friday or Saturday night since about 1920, Hoppy went down to the Eagles Club and played poker in the back room. He took a nice chunk out of every factory worker's paycheck, and a little bit of the farmer's money too.

Yes, you say. He might have been a good poker player, but that doesn't exactly make him smart. I agree. What made Hoppy smart was what he did with the money. He would take those weekly winnings, and drive to the next larger town where there was a stock broker. In the 40s and 50s, Hoppy would regularly buy things like IBM (back in town nobody had ever heard of such a thing or company), or add to his AT&T ("old Tea", Hoppy liked to call it), or some shares of Sears.

Yep, Hoppy lived comfortable on his own pace and terms, never worked or had a boss, did what he pleased, and had plenty of money to enjoy life. I call that pretty damm smart for a Kansas farm boy.

(and if you asked him nice, Hoppy could recite from memory paragraphs of Chancer's Tales, or the Illiad, Shakesphere, although I think some of the early English poets where his favorite)

[namknils]

Stu Unger? I don't care what your IQ is, if your dumb enough to OD on drugs and get into as many gambling problems that he did you can't be considered "smart".

[Analyst]

[ QUOTE ]
I think i heard 182, but i bet BG is right up there. For some reason, Sklanksy having an IQ of 176 seems to pop into my memory.....

[/ QUOTE ]

Ignoring the inability to really measure intelligence, and certainly not with a single number -

These figures are certainly possible, but with no disprespect to the aforementioned, seem unlikely. The typical IQ curve is given as having a normal distribution, mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 16 (some have an SD of 15, IIRC). That means someone with an IQ of 176 is 4.75SD above the mean, roughly the "one in a million" level. DS may be one of the ~6000 people in the world with an IQ of 176 or higher, but people tend to not realize just how few really tally these turbo-genius numbers.

FYI, 182 is a lot scarcer - perhaps just 6 points higher, but less than 1000 in the world tip the scales to this extent. That is the nature of the Gaussian curve, if such is truly applicable to intelligence.