I guess the only way I can say it is that you'll never find a top fs player who doesn't have some reasonable ability to play seq at a fairly high level... but you can find 1000's of seq players that have no ability whatsoever to play fs... of course this isn't scientific support for my argument, but it's definitely interesting.. no?
I think that's because EVERYONE starts out as a sequential player and then some choose to also learn to play freestyle while many do not. So of course all FS players are going to be good SEQ players, that's what they started as.
Is there anyone who came to this site without being well versed in Risk (a sequential game) and just started playing freestyle without bothering to play sequential? Seems very unlikely. Instead, everyone here enjoyed playing Risk, found an online version, and either continued to play "normal" (sequential) or branched out to other versions (freestyle).
If we are making analogies, it's like in sports - everyone might play soccer (for example) when they are younger. Then at some point, some people decide to play basketball instead. They still have their soccer fundamentals that they picked up, meaning they can continue to play soccer decently, but they've now developed skills at basketball as well. Meanwhile, the guys who continued to play soccer ONLY are very good soccer players, but they don't know how to play basketball. It doesn't mean basketball is any harder or that people who play basketball are better athletes than soccer players, it's just that EVERYONE (in this example) has soccer skills and only some people chose to develop basketball skills.
That's the same thing here. EVERYONE started out with sequential (original Risk), and only some learned freestyle.
I think if you could find a group of people who had NEVER played Risk (or similar sequential games) before and taught them how to play ONLY freestyle, and then eventually had them try to play a sequential game they would be just as bad at that as the "average" sequential player is at freestyle - because they wouldn't have the skills of predicting/planning for long term moves and whatnot, they would only know how to react and would get buried by players who have those abilities (aka most sequential players). But finding such a group of people to test that seems unlikely.
) and you have that much time with no variables changing. However in speed freestyle you have 1 minute (or whatever time limit) to play your turn ALONG with watching all the actions of the other players all at the same time. Its like doing the same type of complicated math problem, but now the variables change every 2 minutes if you don't complete it. So you have 100 people who could solve the problem, but it may take them up to a week to solve it. But you have an expert mathematician who solves it in a few minutes. 
