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The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is an investment theory that states it is impossible to "beat the market" because stock market efficiency causes existing share prices to always incorporate and reflect all relevant information. ~http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothesis.asp

I often hear poker players and/or students of economics trying to explain that the markets we face today are not “efficient” and therefore the efficient market hypothesis and the theories that might extend from it do not necessarily apply and aren't necessarily useful.

I think this is a misunderstanding and misapplication of the insight that we have access to in studying the “efficient market”.

We can turn to Hayek's essay The Use of Knowledge in Society for his explanation on the importance of markets and how their price signals are made up:

…the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
The prices created by markets solve the complex problem of the optimal distribution of our global commodities and as Hayek points out there is no subset group of participants that can have the level of information of the entire whole of the participants.

Hayek's point is not that our markets are efficient, but rather that we need to use the efficient market as a tool to solve this otherwise impossible problem of optimally distributing our resources.

What Hayek paints and what the efficient market hypothesis is useful for, is understanding that...

...the aggregate of the subjective view points IS the objective viewpoint

Put another way, there is no machine, metric, or formula man has access to that is able to put a counter argument to the prices that our markets create.

There might be an individual with a good idea, that will ultimately translate to a more efficient market and more “correct” prices, but that individual cannot argue that the prices already created are NOT the ultimate objective view.

There is no argument put forth, for example, that today's markets ARE efficient. Rather when we think of efficient markets we can make extrapolations from the assumption.

When a society or collective of individual players enters into a bargaining problem and comes up with its ultimate solution for that time period it CAN be said that the solutions (prices) that arise are EFFECTIVELY the height of efficiency.

They are not arguable by theory alone. Theory can compete with the aggregate of the subjective view (ultimately technology and experiment might change this view).

In a future article I will try to explain why the “price” of bitcoin is the most objective valuation our society has access too.