Average IQ of winning poker players at different stakes

Chamath lol. IPO scammer who gets away with it because hes advocating for green tech.

I wouldn't bother w/ this because as someone who has played poker a very long time, and played at the highest levels, I can tell you there are some dumb mofo's who make money because they have extremely high emotional intelligence, and general awareness.

Being a great poker player is primarily about high level critical thinking skills + observational awareness (especially live). Great poker players are considering and processing way more information than good or average poker players, and they are applying high level critical thinking skills to get to the best decisions possible, with the highest degree of probability, most consistently.

In other words, IQ only plays a part in what makes a great poker player.

I don’t think ability as a poker player correlates with IQ. I personally think it more correlates with repetitive learning and academic study (as most of it is either learning a lot of GTO or a lot of data or both at the same time).

I think top online crushers are going to tend to have higher IQ than live crushers. Live crushers are definitely going to be above average intelligence, but most are not true geniuses. They are just good at a specific skill set which likely includes social skills.

Actually a lot of the high stakes recreational players are fairly likely to have a high IQ. A lot are successful business owners or professionals. But that doesn't mean they are winning poker players. And the pros they play with don't necessarily have more or less IQ.

I think most live professional poker players will fall between the 90th and 95th percentile which would be about 120-125 IQ. I think a decent but smaller number will be greater than 95th percentile and between 85th to 90th percentile. I would guess less than 10% of live poker pros would be below the 85th percentile, which would be 115. That's just my guess having been around a fair amount of live poker pros.

I'm not an expert in IQ either. My guess is, if you were to take a random public school class of 20 kids before they start separating kids into honors classes, the smartest kid was probably in the 95-99th percentile, the second smartest kid would probably be in the 90th-94th percentile, and so on. I think most poker pros would be ik the top 3 of 29 smartest students in their class. No idea how accurate any of this is, but that's my guess.

I haven't interacted as much with online pros, but my guess is they have to be smarter on average because the games are harder.

Also, you have to realize that as stakes shoot up a lot, that doesn't mean they games get proportionately harder and players have proportionately higher intelligence. A professional live 2/5 player probably can beat a 25/50 live game or 50/100+ provided they have the bankroll and aren't playing scared. At a table of recs and professionals, the professionals are all going to win and the recreationals will lose in the long term. Other factors are going to limit the number of professional poker players in a given game. Bankroll, people gatekeeping seats, etc.

I don't why you are assuming that "live professional poker players" are overrepresented on the tail of the distribution. To score 120+ on IQ tests means that one is not only very smart but also well-rounded enough to do well on the various cognitive, performance, and social-based tasks.

No one assumes that the average chess grandmaster is 120+. I don't see how the average poker pro would be considered "smarter" than the average chess GM.

The same thread you started a year ago that immediately got locked wasn’t good enough?

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/ne...

120 IQ is the 90th percentile, right? I would definitely think nearly all chess grandmasters are going to be in the 90th percentile + of the population. Less than 1% of competitive chess players are grandmasters, and competitive chess players is a population pool that is already going to be overrepresented by people that are above average intelligence.

So in my elementary school, a classroom had about 25 students. I say elementary school because after elementary school, kids get separated into honors classes. The 90th percentile would be the top 2‐3 smartest kids in the class. I guess that is cutting it fairly close. A lot of the poker pros I know would have been the top 2-3 smartest kids in the class, but to be fair that may be a high estimate. 85th percentile would be the top 3-4 smartest kids in the class, I feel more confident in saying the majority of poker pros would be 85th percentile IQ and higher, or 115+ IQ.

But maybe my city is different. I live in a city of 1.5 million people and I would guess there are less than 30 professional poker players here. The market for good games is pretty small. It could be an outlier.

Although I probably should have said 125-130+, you're making an assumption that a challenging game that requires good memory, calculation, and visualization automatically suggests high general intelligence.

However, this isn't how general intelligence is conceptualized or assessed.

I would lay money that a significant percentage of GMs would not score more than two SDs above the mean on an IQ test in their own language.

This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. IQ values are definitely way off here. Average is 90-100ish overall so there wouldn't be much difference towards poker players. Just because one may be good at poker it doesn't mean much. My IQ is average but I can count the living **** out of a blackjack game. Makes me believe IQ doesn't even really mean anything. The test that I've taken are simple pattern recognition, anyways.

about tree fiddy

But are the pro whale bum hunters as immoral as the immoral businessmen they play with

idk, robin hood got pretty comfortable towards the end of his career

I’m not saying either group takes place over the other on moral high ground.

It might be the case that it is a form of releasing karmic tension for the hedonistic lifestyle of your average tech billionaire and that “The Corporation” who played Andy Beal (he wasn’t in tech tho), players like Rick Solomon, are just fulfilling this prophecy for them

Real IQ tests are administered by a professional and take 30-60 minutes to complete.

Yeah I've only done the online ones, figured they're probably not that legit

Pattern recognition is included on IQ tests, but as a relatively small component.

true lol the ones I did were all pattern recognition, got bored of it

Does anyone know how to take a real IQ test or are they only paid (all these Mensa, Mega communities)? I've taken it several times in my life and the result has always been between 160 and 165 lol. Raises fair doubts about the authenticity.

Is the first paragraph of the above 'a level', to use old-school 2+2 parlance? Seems like a very reasonable assumption to make, to say the least

It's only absurd because people try to use an IQ score to define how "smart" someone is, rather than use it as a predictor of academic success, which is all it was ever supposed to be used for.

Those are all components of general intelligence, but there are numerous, other skills/factors that are measured that aren't correlated with visualization and calculating abilities.

I recently took an online IQ test and was pleasantly surprised to see that I scored over 40!

I'm going to guess:

100
110
115
120