I played live casino poker for first time this past weekend. As someone training to be a psychologist (and went with a buddy who is also training to be a psychologist) I think you could, with practice, gain an edge in both live and
online poker with psychology skills. I'd say the edge would be better live then online as online you'd rely more on purely villain fear and putting them in pressure spots whereas live you'd do that AND learn to read players physical and verbal tells using that against them. And especially being able to detect tilt and exploit that.
In only my second time playing live there was an older guy playing who seemed to be a reg but was extremely aggressive with mediocre hands. He showed down way too much with crap like Q3o pairing his Q on flops like QdAd10s. Over a few hours he swung down to maybe $50 then up to probably $400-500 before losing that all, rebuying twice, then losing most of that to me when another player pointed out his tell (and I saw he was tilting, reshoving more). Initially he set mined a ton and would only raise someone with sets, as he tilted, he got sloppy. I took a risk based on this psychological read on him checked a flopped set on a rainbow board ahead of him, sure enough he bet, I re-raised, he shoved, I insta called (and bizarrely got another player to come along for the all in) and won. He had like K4 on a K62 flop ending with K6299 for my 6's full.
However I wonder if the psychological edge is greater at higher live stakes than say $1/2 since most regs at $1/2 I've talked to feel that there's still lots of fishy players who "just wanna have fun" and will be oblivious to your attempts to scare them off draws or tap into an anxiety about losing money.
It's probably doable at certain stakes but you'd still need to apply good reads on people like betting patterns, signs of tilt, tells. And if you knew nothing at all about chances of completing draws, # outs, then you'd misapply your psych edge on boards where the other person definitely isn't folding.