Question for Swedes

I don’t get why this country punches so significantly above its weight in poker terms.

Any Swedes (or anyone else) enlighten me here, has poker become huge there? How good is the education system? Or is there something else to it?

And whilst we’re at it, wtf is up with Linkoping? I mean it’s tiny, there’s only about 100k people that live there...

[Malachii]

Do we even have any Swedes other than Kongo that post regularly?

Edit: And Emil, duh.

[emil3000]

Poker is starting to become really big in Sweden, yes. High prevalence of poker players, and high incidence as well.

Linköping is my city, and I am there because I study. It's one of the major university cities in Sweden, and it happened to feature Erik Sagström, which I think inspired some of the other big names there (Bengt Sonnert etc.).

The other university cities in Sweden also have good poker players.

[Kimpan]

I'm a swede... =)

[saxhoe]

I've been posting regularly since yesterday =)

[ QUOTE ]
Do we even have any Swedes other than Kongo that post regularly?

Edit: And Emil, duh.

[/ QUOTE ]

No idea how many post, but Swedes are in general better than any other nationality by quite a long way. For those that play Prima & other 'European' sites you’ll know that many / most of the top players are Swedes. Even the US-centric Party has a high number of good Swedes at all levels. I just find it really bizarre that given the huge numbers involved one country out-performs the rest by such a long way.

[emil3000]

The first people that started getting interested in poker were the smart math types and the hustlers. Economy students and the likes. Only now are the casual gamblers really getting interested. WRT education system, I think Sweden has one of the better in the world, and good unis are available to everyone as long as you got good grades or test scores. The welfare system takes care of a lot of the costs, so you don't have mortgages anywhere the size of those in america.

That might be part of the explanation.

[emil3000]

[ QUOTE ]
Do we even have any Swedes other than Kongo that post regularly?

Edit: And Emil, duh.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure if I qualify as a regular, I just post in short bursts for a week or two mostly, and also I suck.

[Hattifnatt]

Im a Swede,

The last two-three years the Poker has exploded here. For example three-four years ago when I was starting Poker a little seriously there was one (1) "known" poker club in sweden ("Kortoxen" in the main city Stockholm where I live/played). Now its like clubs (every club is private and needs memberchip) in every city (or small town) and the Casino that has monopoly on gambling in Sweden has poker since like two years.

[kitaristi0]

There was an article in Card Player Europe a while back talking about the poker explosion in Scandinavia but I can't find it right now. Some reasons Swedes kick so much ass are:

1. Just about everyone has an internet connection
2. Generally people are smarter in Sweden than in some other countries
3. If it's the same as in Finland, then university education is free, which makes for even smarter people.
4. As a generalisation, smart people tend to make better poker players than stupid ones.

I'm not Swedish btw, I'm Finnish, but the poker explosion is really starting to hit Finland too now, so the same thing is starting to happen here that's been going on in Sweden for a few years now (WPT just aired it's first episode a month or two ago, and the first poker book written in Finnish has just been published.)