It seems important to establish whether we are in fact going to be in a race and whether one side isn’t already far ahead.
With racing, there’s a difference between optimizing the chance of winning vs optimizing the extent to which you beat the other party when you do win. If it’s true that China is currently pretty far behind, and if TAI timelines are fairly short so that a lead now is pretty significant, then the best version of “racing” shouldn’t be “get to the finish line as fast as possible.” Instead, it should be “use your lead to your advantage.” So, the lead time should be used to reduce risks.
Not sure this is relevant to your post in particular; I could’ve made this point also in other discussions about racing. Of course, if a lead is small or non-existent, the considerations will be different.
Some of the points you make don’t apply to online poker. But I imagine that the most interesting rationality lessons from poker come from studying other players and exploiting them, rather than memorizing and developing an intuition for the pure game theory of the game.
If you did want to focus on the latter goal, you can play online poker (many players can >12 tables at once) and after every session, run your hand histories through a program (e.g., “GTO Wizard”) that will tell you where you made mistakes compared to optimal strategy, and how much they would cost you against an optimal-playing opponent. Then, for any mistake, you can even input the specific spot into the trainer program and practice it with similar hands 4-tabling against the computer, with immediate feedback every time on how you played the spot.