Yes, Maya does have a smoothing feature. However I’m not a Maya user, so I can’t help you much with that. You’ll have to look for that somewhere else.
About the poly count… It depends on what kind of game you’re going to create and what you’re going to do with those meshes. For example 10k just for a head means that your whole body could perfectly be around 50k and that’s a LOT of polys for a single character (unless it’s huge and you only see a small part of it). It also depends on your target platform. If you’re going for high-end PCs you can get away with high poly models, but if you’re not going for high-end PC users you’re going to have to decrease the poly count quite a bit.