Actually, poker has gained quite a lot of traction academically. For example:
http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications.html

You are wrong, NE's can only exist when you have everything 'alike' and everyone participating in the game know what will follow from taking part in the game and playing it to maximize their return (or minimize their loses). Once you get any deviation from this the NE's begin to behave strange and you will see rents which can't exist in a NE since they destroy the games fundamentals.

Any argument that Poker in any way would be more complex of complicated then Chess is laughable. The only reason why poker hasn't been solved is that there is no real incentive to do so and even though you have a few kids playing around with scripts that lack all theoretical knowledge of what they are doing they manage to make winning bots while it took the time since computers were invented to reach a state in chess where you need a supercomputer that is designed against specific opponents to beat the game. There might have come a generic chess computer that can beat any opponent but I doubt this. Most chess computers like Deep Blue are designed to beat the world champ and not survive a chess tournament.

OK, what is the (single) objective measure of complexity? There has to be only one measure, otherwise choosing a measure from the available ones introduces subjectivity. There is only one measure of mass or distance for example (there are different units but they're all equivalent, 2 different units won't rank distances in different orders)

great post.

one thing that strike me has funny is when lot of people says poker and chess are opposite games, like u said a lot of mathematician like lasker,botvinik,etc did pretty well in chess cause their s a lot of geometrical concept AND with math,like in poker , u face a lot of problem in chess where u need to take an analatycal approach of the problems u see and try find a solution.

imo i see a lot of similarities in both games and its probably why math person can excel in both games since boht game require a lot of the same analatic,deduction qualities.

its just one use numbers and the other use chess pieces but the quality required in both game are the same, that is why math student usually are good in both games

This is such an ambiguous question that will never have a definitive answer.

Analytical skill is not the word. Both games are as difficult on the aspect of making mistakes, both small and big, but chess is additionally more a game of luck as one can't see it all like one can in poker where the level of play one needs to achieve is also lower because of that and poker is super boring because of that.

You know, I think there is a way we can scientifically answer this question while factoring in the ambiguity.

Here is what I would propose.

You do a simple survey. No bells or whistles.

You find 100 people who have at one time held a 1700+ rating in chess and these same 100 people are WINNING poker players and have the data to prove it (whether online or live). You ask these 100 people which game is more complex.

Being someone who fits both criteria above my vote is OVERWHELMING for Chess being more complex. Hands down AINEC.

This question is like asking someone which is the better place, Paris France or Tokyo Japan and the VAST majority of people answering the question have only been to one of the two places.

If you want an accurate answer, you need to really only ask people who have been to both places, and that applies to the Poker vs Chess argument imo.

Chess is more complex. Not even sure how its a question as its so obvious.

Fwiw at my peak chess i was around 1950 elo (pretty average). I now play poker for a living and its nowhere near as difficult or as complex as chess

I am personally not a great chess player, but not horrible either. I have read some chess books and I played the game often growing up. If I happened to see a chessboard in a random friend's home and challenged them to a game, chances are I would win. But I would easily lose against most people who are serious about the game.

I enjoy chess, but never found that thinking about the game is very mentally stimulating. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Once you learn how to solve a jigsaw puzzle, which happens at a very young age, all you can do to improve your skills is practice and get better at finding the correct piece more quickly. The same kind of thing goes for chess. Playing chess well is mostly a matter of learning some strategy tidbits (like evaluating piece values and knowing to "control the center" and "keep knights off the side"); and after that, memorizing a bunch of openings and learning all sorts of endgame scenarios. And that's about it - all that's left is practice; that is, getting good at chess is almost entirely about "finding the correct piece" quickly. Sure, maybe along the way you learn some new interesting opening variations or tactical maneuvers, but to me, the game just kind of lacks substance.

Poker on the other hand is extremely interesting to me. There is an endless amount of stuff to think about, though most of my thinking is when I'm *not* playing. I am constantly questioning and refining my strategies, trying to understand areas in which I am being exploited and ways in which I can better exploit other players. In addition, I'm very interested in much simplified versions of poker (like those discussed in "The Mathematics of Poker) and the solutions to these variants and how these solutions are applicable to real games when playing against exploitable opponents. In tournament play, we have to think about all sorts of lower-variance vs max-chip EV tradeoff spots. There really is an endless amount of stuff to think about. To me, poker is full of substance whereas chess just isn't. This alone makes me consider poker to be more complex than chess.

Back to what you've said... The problem with it is that, against the player pools at large, it is relatively easy to be a winning poker player as compared to chess. This isn't because poker is "less difficult" or "less complex" than chess; it's because many poker players have motivations that aren't strictly based on winning. Poker is both a complex thinking game and a gambling game. I could easily teach any half-intelligent person how to beat a "gambling" poker player (i.e., a "fish"). And because of this fact, I could easily teach any half-intelligent person how to beat pretty much any live low-stakes casino game, which always happen to be filled with fish.

Furthermore, poker is a game of risk. Very few poker players ever attempt to play anywhere near optimally, because even if they are strictly motivated to win, they will still naturally try to limit their own monetary risk.

It's easy to teach someone how to beat a live low stakes poker game. But can I easily teach an intelligent person how to maximally exploit those same games? Absolutely not; this takes a huge amount of experience to begin to get really good at... And to truly maximally exploit a poker game means to disregard risk. Pretty much nobody does this. Therefore, what happens, is good poker players often find the game to be both easy and dull. They don't think very much because they don't have to think much if they are simply concerned with beating the game rather than really maxing out their winrate. Good players seek easy games, the more mindless their decisions, the better. They generally play for monetary reward, not for the prestige of "being the best" as chess players do.

But when we think of poker in the same way as chess -- when we are thinking about optimal play rather than how to mindlessly beat bad opponents, then poker suddenly becomes an enormously complex, intricate, and interesting game.

Poker is undoubtedly the most complex of the two. Chess AIs can beat the top players easily. The same cannot be said for poker AIs. There's a lot more money to be made in making a good poker AI than a good chess AI too - chess isn't played for money online.

Chess has actually been partially solved for a common opening. King's Gambit has essentially been solved. It will be a very long time before anything poker related becomes solved.

I'm pretty sure there are some things that should probably be called at least poker related that have already been solved (I think Rhode Island Hold Em was solved for one). Depending on how much liberty you're taking with the word essentially here there's a decent chance you could say the say thing for HUHU or even just LHE.

That's because Poker has a HUGE random factor to it. Your argument works the opposite way.

WSOP Main Event is a perfect example. The quality of players obviously goes up as the final table approaches, but no one would argue the final table is composed of the 9 best players in poker.

A massive chess tournament would have the final match between two legends of the game without a doubt. No Moneymaker 'equivalent' would survive the first round (maybe second round).

Can a computer beat me in Tic-Tac-Toe or Rock-Paper-Scissors?

That article is not real.

as poker is a game of incomplete info and uncertainty, and the player must be able to deal with the analysis of risks and returns, I consider that a good poker player must be a good risk taker, very similarly to a investor or speculator.
conversely, as chess is a game of complete info and no uncertainty (at least at a theoretical level) I think that someone is a good chess player if he's able of making the best move given all the info that exists (e.g. anticipating the moves that their opponent will make given the move that he chooses), in a way that if you have two perfect chess players the expected outcome of the game is a draw.
imo what makes a good poker player is very different from what makes a good chess player, it's hard to say which is the hardest.

it's not that easy to define a function from the set of all games to some level of complexity. It's impossible to build a transitive complexity relation between all games where no one could say "but consider blackjack and gameXYZ" which would make a relation seem not applicable.

So we have to evaluate complexity in different domains.

poker is a game of incomplete information, therefor requires mixed strategies.
chess is a perfect information game and has therefore just a single pure strategy.
in that sense, poker is more complex. But of course that is just one minor aspect.

computational feasibility of the game divides into further subdomains.

For instance, beat-ability of a program.
A human can't beat a chess computer.
A human can beat a NL HU poker bot.
in that sense, poker is more complex. but in the same sense, addition of natural numbers if more complex then chess, because a computer can add numbers that no human being can (think 10^50 digits).



So you can argue on different complexity domains, and the answer will vary. there is no correct answer as there is no good function for mapping games to a scale of complexity.

Just because there is not a program that beats poker does not mean computer can't beat poker. The whole argument does not make sense.

I posted a poll yesterday at a chess forum. Here are the results so far:

http://s19.postimage.org/dwgwwsa43/Chess_Poker.gif

So it is running about 10 to 1 in favor of chess requiring more analytical skill so far.

I consider my self an expert level poker player and an intermediate level chess player. I feel like I've forgotten more chess knowledge than I will ever learn at poker. In other words, I feel like people who think poker is harder are either crazy or ignorant.

It's much easier to consider yourself an expert level poker player without being one than it is to consider yourself an expert level chess player without being one.

I don't think that's a fair comparison because both those games are trivially solved. There are no AI techniques being used other than "look up the correct move in a list of moves" for all moves. But I would be surprised if a computer couldn't beat you in Rock-Paper-Scissors. Humans are terrible at generating random numbers. If it used markov chain analysis of what you were choosing I'm pretty sure it could gain a decent edge over you.

Poker analysis is far more difficult. In chess towards the end of the game you can solve it. These are known as end game tables and many AIs use them - they solve the game for when there's fewer than 6 pieces in play. In poker you cannot do this because you do not have complete information. If we had knowledge of our range and our opponents range we could begin to solve it. But you do not know your opponents range. To determine the range of a GTO player you would have to solve the entire game - unless chess, poker cannot be broken down into simpler problems.

For rock-paper-scissors, I don't think it would be very difficult to formulate some kind of pseudorandom number strategy that would be even against an exploiting program.

I know. My point is that the metric "can the computer beat humans" isn't a good one for evaluating complexity.

To nit for a moment, you mean 6 or fewer pieces.

It took a lot of effort and decades of research to build programs that could challenge the best humans in chess. I don't think a similar effort has been put in poker yet even though the incentive, that is to beat online poker, might be higher. But online poker is fairly young and I think we need to wait a bit longer.

Even though computers can beat us in chess today it doesn't mean they can analyze better every position. Computers have a decisive advantage in short term tactics and are less prone to mistakes. Even though computers cannot solve chess via brute force they can perform an exhaustive search for a few moves ahead. If the chessboard was bigger maybe today's computers wouldn't be good at chess either.