I was listening to an episode of the EconTalk podcast with Ariel Rubinstein, an accomplished game theorist. He wrote a skeptical afterword to The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Von Neumann and Morgenstern, the seminal game theory text, in which he questions the ability of game theory to improve performance in games. It even contains this seemingly bizarre sentence: "There are few insights from game theory that would improve one's game of chess or poker."

From the poker player's perspective, that's a hard one to figure out, since so much of poker strategy talk now deals in concepts and language from game theory. But some Google searches indicate that, within the game theory community, there is serious disagreement on how useful game theory really is. In the poker community game theory is usually viewed as a relatively scientific, agreed-upon set of ideas, but it seems that some game theorists don't really see it that way. Can someone who knows more about game theory than I do offer some perspective on this?