I think the two most influential traits were his phenomenal game theory and his complete disregard for money.

I couldn't think of a better, brief way of saying it than game theory. Stu had played games, for money, since he was a kid. He was the only player ever to win both the WSOP main event and Amarillo Slim's Superbowl of Poker. He won both three times each. He was the only back-to-back WSOP Main Event winner and did that his first two times playing in it.

The thing was, poker wasn't even his best game. He absolutely demolished the top level competition in gin rummy. He was on a whole other level. In one of his gin rummy tournaments, after getting to the final match, his opponent, a top level player at the time, asked Stu if he wanted to talk about a chop. Stu laughed at him and countered, 'why split it? Let's throw first and second in the middle of the table and winner takes all.' His opponent had to decline that offer and then an hour later he had to be satisfied with second place money.

The reason he turned to poker was that the gin game dried up. Nobody would play him anymore.

Poker let him use all of the phenomenal memory for cards that he'd honed in gin, all of those stats and that card intuition, along with his dominating personality and gamble. His game got better as the stakes got higher because a lot of his edge came from exploiting the value that his opponents placed in the money. Stu was the exemplar of something that we all try to do, that we tell new players they have to do. To him, they were just markers in a game. He never looked at a pot and thought of it as a rent payment or a car or a house. It was just victory. Whatever he won, he was gonna give back in sports betting or gambling on a golf game or whatever. If he was busto, someone would stake him and he'd make it all back at the tables.

It's estimated that he pulled $30 million across the felt over his career and yet he died with $800 to his name. Nothing says 'disregard for money' better than that.

And, while math and the meta has a lot of players making moves like Stu's, I'm not sure it's quite the same thing. I have this suspicion that Stu, especially in his prime, could probably absorb all of this new knowledge in an hour or two's conversation with a couple of top pros and it wouldn't amount to more than something he now knows about how other players are playing. For Stu it was always about winning. Back then, he could win by scaring them and win by reading them. But those weren't his only tools. They were just the ones that worked then. If one or the other of those weren't available I think he'd find other angles and he'd manage to win today as well.