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.

It depends on the meaning of the word 'complex' but in the meaning I assume the answer would be poker.

Some posters are confusing the question of the complexity of the game itself with the skill, training, intellect etc of the players. There is no doubt that top level chess players have way more analytical intellect than typical top level poker players. Thats because (a) there is a high luck element to poker vs zero in chess which means that the skill filter is nowhere near as efficient and (b) current poker theory/analysis is light years behind chess. (There is many times more chess literature on a single opening than the entirety of poker literature ever written). However, that doesn't mean that chess is more complex.

I would take complexity to mean the difficulty of making correct decisions in the game. I have played both competitively and believe that the variables in poker are more difficult to bring together in correct judgements (which is not to say that decent poker players can't get reasonably close most of the time). Chess is all about whats on the board and the opponent doesn't really matter. Much of the complexity in poker comes from the fact that optimal decisions depend on the opponent(s), who is a human and inherently complex. Mixing psychology, maths, probabilities, memory, game flow, position, etc etc is ultimately more complex than the one-dimensional complexity of chess.

So, imho, poker is more complex, but not as played today.

Ye I know that is what I mean I am pretty sure if as many people tried creating a poker bot as there have been chess researchers I am pretty sure there would be a decent sw already.

'poker' as a whole could be harder than chess when you think about so many different games of poker, tournaments, HU, etc., but if we're talking just about NLHE, I don't think so.

They're both different kinds of analytical skills really, you can't compare the two easily. I'm a pretty good chess player and an alright poker player, but couldn't tell you which required more analysis.

Poker is many times more psychological, and you're always analysing what's already happened, but in chess you're trying to think 10 moves ahead.

A 3 day poll at a chess forum gathered only 16 votes for the question, "Which game requires more analytical skill, poker or chess?"

• 1 voted Poker by a small margin
• 1 voted Chess by a small margin
• 14 voted Chess by far

You really can't draw any conclusions form such a small sample. Even with a much larger sample, I'm not sure what conclusions you could draw. FWIW

To answer this question, let's first look at the definition of complexity. The dictionary gave the following:

composed of many interconnected parts; compound; composite: a complex highway system.

In poker, the different possibilities is to bet different amounts like 4 times each per round for each player. Preflop, flop, turn, and river. Then relevant concepts to the game is to figure out what is the cause of bets, some maths, statistics to cards, equity etc. It requires knowledge of the brain as well, which is the most complicated system in the universe. Yet when we guess what other people are thinking, it is not subjectively perceived in an equally complex way as the real interconnections in the brain.

In chess, you need to analyze all possible moves for each turn. To think 2 turns ahead, you need to think of all the possible moves in turn 2, for each possible move for turn 1 and so on. Such that the amount of visualization/analyzing required for thinking each turn ahead increases exponentially.

I certainly notice that when I play chess it requires a lot more mental energy. After one match I am often too tired to play a second game. However does this mean that it is more complex? I wouldn't say so. Some mentally damaged people can do difficult mathematical calculations in less than a second which normal people can not. Yet they can't do other normal stuff. How can one then know if they think more complex or not?

As conclusion I would say that chess does require more analytical thinking. Yet I don't know nor care to think any further about which one is more complex.