The Ten Smartest Poker Players

[CCass]

David,

Why didn't Joeybitch make the list?

[twang]

This thread makes me want to throw up. And that's not because I disagree with the top ten list.

/twang

[djack]

David, I've agreed with everything you've said in this thread so far. Most people are simply ignorant on the subject of tintelligence.

Nonetheless, I don't agree with this paragraph at all. Have you read Easterbrook's _The Progress Paradox_? I believe the subtitle says it all: _how life gets better while people feel worse_.

Happiness is not equivalent to progress.

[ QUOTE ]
Because the great majority of people are perfectly happy without great art in their lives but are not happy without great medical care, the opportunity for a lot of leisure time to play with their kids, and the enjoyment of things like TVs and stereos even if the entertainment is provided by merely good artists. Ninety nine percent of the population gets greater happiness from things the very best scientists provide than from what the very best artists provide. Scientists don't just make life possible, they make it good.

[/ QUOTE ]

[laurentia]

Creativity and reasoning ability are measured on the same scale. Some insights might be or seem to be more the effect of one or the other but there is no essential difference for the consumer. The difference in definition comes from the fact that you see less clearly identifiable logical steps in case of creativity.

[Sredni Vashtar]

Oh, it was the first thing I noticed.

While immeasurable, I hold creativity in the highest regard. It has not mass, yet warps space and time. It has not velocity, yet outpaces light. It has not Energy, yet powers all that is.

One fallacy has been that mathematicians and scientists don't have creativity to the degree that the pure artists do. So some think Mozart is creative, while Archimedes is not.

Yet we hear of mathematicians speak of beautiful equations, elegant solutions, and graceful methods. None will ever agree as to what beauty is. But all know it when we see it.


Once you recognize this creativity as being the heart of the universe, you will see how it all comes together. Now Mozart, Shakespeare, and Edison make the list, but this list has no order and does not have a number. And it changes depending on the observer, and the frame or reference. For the nature of the universe is inherently subjective, why should it be surprising that the most compelling human attribute is?

When you combine this vile subjective thing, this creativity, this beast that we cannot measure, with historical reasoning ability, you end up with a Sklansky list- people on whose shoulders society has been carried, sometimes beyond their understanding. But was it their reasoning or their creativity that got them there? Is it the water or the chicken that made the chicken soup?



Sredni Vashtar


I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)


When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)




I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727), From Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855)



Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)


Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)



To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)



I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

[Sredni Vashtar]

Zeno,

You mentioned elsewhere about Washington. What I always admired about him was his idealism and bravery. A rare person, Washington.

SV.

[Sredni Vashtar]

"When Sklansky makes his smartest ferrets list, there'll be no doubt about who's number one. "

Since I am the only ferret on the board, I will be both first and last, alpha and omega.

Tricky Andy, Tricky [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

SV.

[cpk]

I resent the aspersions cast upon CS degrees. Lower division CS classes are nothing special, but reasoning skills are absolutely crucial for puzzling out analysis of algorithms. Furthermore, CS students often have to learn things on the fly that other majors are given a semester or two to learn, because there's simply not enough time in the CS calendar. I had to learn how to solve differential equations in two weeks so I could write code to do the same in my numerical methods class. Put that in your freaking pipe and smoke it.

I think among those with strong reasoning capabilities, there falls out two inherent abilities not often shared. One type can easily understand the concept of a pointer in programming (or even more appropriately, a lambda function or closure). The other can scrawl out reams of reams of equations on quantum mechanics. People who can do both are extremely rare. However, I think that both sets of people are capable of the deep, complex reasoning that poker requires. The difference in thinking is a matter of analytical language--students of computer science are more at home in algorithms, set theory, and discrete math, while physicists tend to like differential equations, tensors, and other fun things. I've studied all of these things, and I don't think either set is fundamentally harder, but I don't know--the symbology of the former is a lot easier for me to grasp than the latter.

[Cyrus]

Interesting thread.

[ QUOTE ]
Although Mozart specifically, might be an exception, it is totally reasonable to not grant a great composer the same level of intelligence as a physicist. Because one has a trait that can be applied to a much smaller subset of the problems out there than the other one.

[/ QUOTE ]

The resident troll is more correct in this one than the rest of you realize. There is a very good reason that head hunters prospecting to get talent into the investment banking/OPM community are paying special attention to liberal arts courses thrown in the mix. (Do not misunderstand! You need to be up on Economics and finance to get in but, while it is realtively easy "for smart people" to get such degrees, it is way tougher to be well versed in them and be able to appreciate poetry or sculpture. It's the people with the latter attributes that tend to identify trends the earliest, for instance.)

I will cut to the chase and speculate that there must have been a significant number of people throughout History who could have been brilliant in some discipline but their abilities went unrecognized because they could not adequately put ideas to action. (The Egyptian pyramids example was correct.)

History is "made" by people who are, in a sense, tight/aggressive types. (But also by maniacs. The element of randomness in History is staggering, paralyzing. You have been warned.)

The whole argument about Physics knowledge correlating with smartness started off reasonably well but got fuzzied up when Sklansky tried to defend his argument by pointing out the "successes" of those diplomas in poker or society as leaders. Extremely intelligent people, like Physics Ph.D's, are smart -- but in ways that are not necessarily enough, nor completely adequate, for leading people. You are talking about smartness, not efficiency.

[ QUOTE ]
My father has often said to me that if you can do math well you can do anything well. An exaggeration to be sure.

[/ QUOTE ]

To be absolutely sure.

[ QUOTE ]
But except for possibly physics, what other word could be substituted for math and still be remotely as true?

[/ QUOTE ]

Communication.

And it's not even close.

[Ponts]

I have read this thread today and found it very interesting indeed. Can't really figure out what people have had in mind when posting: Is it important to be smart to be a good poker player? Is it important to be a poker player if one is smart? Or should someone who is smart take their responsibility for the sake of others and use their brains to innovate for the common good?

In my book the one who posted this:

[ QUOTE ]
An idea straight out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I sometimes think of the best poker players among us as being "on strike," calculating EVs instead of designing 300 story buildings.


I have seen the best minds of my generation calculating pot odds...

[/ QUOTE ]


..could be considered one of the smartest in this thread, and if you are playing poker, which I suppose, one of the smartest poker player.

My point is of course, being smart and see that one can make very much money in playing poker is not the same as being smart and actually create something that noone else have ever done, which both will enrich him-/herself and others.

Be in charge of your own life and just see whats best for you, is not always the best for you in the long run!

At this point in life, I love poker and play a lot, but I also do other things that hopefully will lead to that I can be able to take part in the development of our civilization.

How about you?


/Ponts