[abaldwin99]

The difference for poker is it takes a lot more play time to sort players by skill. There's no ELO to climb and thus you don't get to play against more challenging opponents.

e.g. I'll lose 100% of my matches against a Chess GM but against the best poker player in the world I could go all in preflop every hand and still win the match ~20% of the time.

Only way to counter this variance is to play lots and lots of hands (Law of large numbers) It could take weeks/months in a single matchup to determine the better poker player.

In terms of playing for real money, in general you'll find more challenging competition at higher stakes. But then there's an incentive for bots.