[marksimi]

Yes, but my comment wasn't directed at that point. It was just that we can't reliably say that being a (theoretical) top 3 live game poker player allows us to isolate the most important (differentiable) skill at that level being live tells.

Further, I disagree with your point that the mathematics of poker (implicitly top tier highest level poker) are not complicated.

(edit) to your top line point: > My intuition having played recreationally is that the absolute optimal move in poker is relatively trivial to calculate compared to chess/go.

While the branching factor of Go is between 10^250 to 10^361 (and chess is ~35), poker is 10^17 to 10^165 depending on the game variant: ""Thus, the game tree for no-limit has a much larger branching factor and is significantly larger; there are 10^165 nodes in the game tree for no-limit, while there are around 10^17 nodes for limit (Johanson 2013)" - Sam Ganzfried, Reflections on the First Man Versus Machine No-Limit Texas Hold ’em Competition

...though it's the hidden information component which ratchets up the complexity and leads to a game tree size that's many orders of magnitude higher. If you're curious about that, there's some great info here on other aspects which add complexity: stack depth, multiplayer scenarios, etc: https://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/billings.phd.pdf

That said, I do agree with a relaxed version of the point you're getting at: some subset of high level poker skills can generalizable quite well to other jobs.