Can we get more opinions on this?

I'm not happy with 17/100 people favouring poker as things stand

I'm terrible at both, but it's not even close that chess is the winner here.

This will be a point of controversy even after the monkeys take over, which could be any day now.

Remember, you can't bluff your way out of a lost K vs. K + p endgame.

That's what makes Chess more complicated for someone who is seeking to learn the game.

In chess, a good player may see that K vs. K + p endgame coming several moves into the future. In poker, you have at most five betting rounds, then it's back to square one.

On the othe hand, in chess, when I play someone who is godawful, all I have to do is get into position, then attack pretty straightforwardly. In poker, I may second guess myself when playing heads-up against a very unpredictable newbie.

So I suppose we have to define exactly what "complicated" means. If it means that the strategy requires deep, long-term thinking, then chess wins hands-down. If it means that there is great debate about what the most correct move is in tricky situations, then it's a closer race.

I wonder what Ciaffone would say about this, being both a poker and chess coach.

I agree. I was thinking after I made the original post that complicated is too vague and I should have at least specified a type of poker as not all pokers are created equal. Originally I was thinking NLH or PLO as the decisions are typically tougher and have more variables involved then the limit equivalents.

Chess is a far more difficult and complicated game than poker.

If you were to have a beginner in chess play against one of the top 100 chess players in the world, the beginner would lose every time.

The sheer calculations required to be a good chess player are much more complex and mathematical in comparison to poker.

Poker is a game that does require skill in calculating odds in various hands etc, and some people are much better at this than others. There is also the fact that you have to try to figure out what the other persons cards are, and these sorts of skills do not apply to chess.

Take a game like texas holdem and go up to 100 no limit and look at all of the good players. A lot of players at that level are quite good at the game and can play more than 4 tables at a time because the game just is not that difficult for them. Of course fish go to these games and people who aren't intelligent and they get beaten. Holdem is a game that is difficult for a lot of people, but once a person is of a certain intelligence then they will have the capability of getting very good at poker.


The games are tough at higher limits in poker because
People who do not possess a certain amount of intelligence will suck at poker and wont be playing those limits.



Cliff notes:

Poker takes skill and intelligence to be good.
Poker requires skills that do not apply to chess such as reading people and figuring out what the other persons cards are. Patience also.
A lot of people with decent intelligence can be quite good at poker.

Texas holdem is not a difficult game to learn and play. It is difficult to have the extreme patience that is required to play holdem successfully.

Chess requires much greater intelligence and skill to be good.
Not many people have enough intelligence to be very good at chess.


Chess is a game of pure skill. You have control over your every move.

Poker is not a game of pure skill but involves a bunch of skills. In poker you need the cards to fall your way, and you have no control over that.

I'd hazard a guess that full ring NLHE is more difficult to solve than chess. That says little about actual play, just game theoretic complexity.

Dude, your cliff notes are 80% as long as the main text!

I randed my choice since the pole sucks so badly, so I could be one of those 17.

I'd expect full ring to be one of the first no limit games to be conquered by bots (if it hasn't been already). The increase in players makes pure hand values so much more relevant so it's easier to prove an optimal strategy. On the other hand I think heads up will also be solved in due order as well since game theory will play such a large part in it which is easy for a program but can be counter intuitive for most humans. I think the sweet spot of complexity in hold'em will be somewhere around 4 players. With 4 players even preflop decisions are far from automatic.

It's pretty much impossible for a game with more players to be less complex. Maybe solving the game "given UTG raises" would be easier. But since a 9-handed game can become a 4-handed game simply by the first five players folding, anything solution to the 9-handed game must already have the 4-handed solution as well.

this is dead wrong - it might be simpler to write a winning bot, but certainly not simpler to solve the game perfectly.

It's easily possible for a poker game with more players to be substantially less complex. Take, for example, a hypothetical poker game with 23 players. That would be, by far, the easiest game to solve. Even with 15 players, the strategy is also quite simple but it becomes more complex. There's a fine balance in poker between the relevance of incomplete information aspect and hand strength. Heads up takes incomplete information to an extreme and hand strength is at a minimal. While the game with 23 players would have the relevance of hand strength at a maximum and incomplete information at a minimum. The bigger a weight of incomplete information, the more difficult it is to solve - with one exception. If you take incomplete information too far then just pure game theory takes over and again the game is not too difficult to solve. Which is why I am picking the "magic number" of 4 players. I think the relevance of hand strength just goes up too much when you get to full ring.

And I'm not sure how you're differentiating between winning at and solving poker. I'm considering optimal play. "Solving" poker would almost certainly just result in an equilibrium balance as any sort of exploitation means exploitable which means you can be losing which means not solved. As such you'd be neither winning nor losing money regardless of your opponents actions - much like randomly choosing "solves" roshambo. If you want to solve poker, it's really easy - play with as short a stack as possible and shove an equilibrium range.

I don't think "solving" poker is interesting nor difficult. It's playing maximally exploitatively that I think is most interesting and desirable.

I don't see how having more players in a game of Hold'em (only poker game I know where you can even have 23 players) gives you more information.

Well ok you get some from the increased betting information, but it's not like you're going to be able to know precisely what cards are coming out or anything like that.

chess by far, imho.

again, totally wrong. An equilibrium strategy in poker (assuming there is exactly 1) doesn't break even against other strategies, unlike roshambo. To see this, ask yourself how do you think it would do against a strategy of "open fold every hand"? Of course it wouldn't maximally exploit this strategy, but it would win a lot of money against it.

In fact the equilibrium strategy would win money (pre-rake) against every other strategy, and break even only if every other player at the table was using the same strategy.

Thirdly, "solving poker", by any definition of "solve" is extremely difficult. The proof of this is that no one has done it. And for most people it would be extremely interesting - finding an equilibrium strategy that would beat every other strategy would be a huge first step to figuring out how to maximally exploit a given other strategy. Of course, "interesting" is subjective. The solution to poker would not intrigue an aborigine with no form of money who had never seen a playing card, and it may not intrigue you either, so I can't say for certain that you are wrong on this part. But you have everything else backwards. Are you sure you didn't swap accounts with Discipline?

also, Nichlemn's point above is a fairly trivial response to your claim. How could you play perfectly (unexploitably, or maximally exploitatively) in a 9-handed game when everyone has folded to the button without already knowing how to play in a 3-handed game? Card removal effects would actually make this game slightly tougher to solve, not easier.

In a heads up game your opponent could have any of 1326 possible starting hands, in some cases with literally equal probability if he's doing something like opening every button. In a 23 handed game at least one of AA/KK/QQ/AK/etc will be dealt extremely frequently and should be pushing their preflop equity hard making their hand range extremely transparent and narrow.

And similarly if there is ever a multihanded flop. As the number of players increases, the odds of non-nut hand being good dramatically decrease to the point of irrelevance. Eg - heads up with TT on a 78J board you're feeling fine since there's no reason to think your hand won't be okay although it certainly might not be. 10 handed with TT on the same board and you're check/folding since you simply don't have close enough to the nuts.

The heads up example will be somewhat more difficult to solve as it involves alot of very conditional actions based on previous history/etc that all completely change based on the turn. In the massive multihanded example, it's simple: make the nuts and jam hard, otherwise fold.

That sounds like a decent example in theory, but in reality I'm not so sure. The fact of the matter is that in a modern 9-handed game, when it's folded to the button those last three players are playing vastly different than would 3 players who were playing a 3-handed game so the maximally exploitative strategy would be completely different as to be nearly unrelated to the maximally exploitative strategy in a 3-handed game. Of course it would involve opening a huge range of hands under any circumstance - what would change is the response to your opponent's actions, and I think this is unarguably going to be much more simplistic in a 9-handed game.

Also there is proportional relevance since we are not assuming perfect play, but discussing how challenging it would be to approach perfect play in given circumstances. In a 9-handed game I think it's fair to say that vastly less of your overall profit is garnered from the situation of where it is folded to you on the button. In a 3-handed game, I also think it's fair to say the vast majority of your profit would come from this exact situation.

You could potentially play this situation in a full ring game without much skill and still play at least remotely close to optimally. Whereas if you played this situation without much skill in a 3-handed game, you wouldn't be playing even remotely close decently let alone optimally.

short answer: chess, long answer: ???

I mean really, poker is a very simple game. You can teach a monkey how to beat small stakes sngs, you can teach your sister how to beat small stakes limit, you can teach your uncle how to beat small stakes NL.

though.. you can teach basic openings and some simple endgame in a short period of time and absolutely crush your average person off the street in chess.. and win every single time. In poker, you can teach these things and crush in the long run against random idiots.

there is a lot that goes into this argument, and i am leaning pretty heavily onto the side of chess being more complicated. there are so many options in this game, so many levels of thought, it requires the ability to think miles ahead of your opponent.

poker requires that you make better decisions than your opponent, understand why they are making certain bets in certain situations, checking a board here but leading out there, etc.

there is also more emotional involvement in poker because of the money. it can be extremely stressful reaching the top levels playing for pots worth more than many people's homes. does this make the game more complicated? maybe, maybe not, but certainly can add to the overall stress level and higher burnout rate.

poker requires a different skillset than chess. a LOT of very successful chess players have tried to make the adjustment to poker, and while many find success beating up the lower limits, few if any have been able to break into the higher stakes games. why this is exactly i can not say. perhaps chess requires too methodical of an approach where poker requires more flexibility. that would be the simple explanation.

someone much more intelligent and a better writer than me has probably explained all of this already.

Also, non-chess players need to realize that there's no such thing as a "perfect move" in the majority of decisions. There are positions that the strongest grandmasters are in disagreement about. Tactically there can be decisions that are forced, but the same can be said about poker.

Another thing which makes chess highly complicated is the fact that, at grandmaster-level play, many lines of play are memorized, and masterful play is often a matter of how you divert from the established line. From that point on, each player presumably determines the strategical differences between the standard line and the current line, evaluates how their position may have been weakened or strengthened as a result of the diversion, why their opponent might have decided to take the current specific course of action, and how best to proceed. There is a lot of thought involved here, including having to act on incomplete information -- e.g., what the opponent's knowledge and preferences are.

One other point: Compare the result of the novice player in a chess tourney versus the novice in a poker tourney. Often, novice-style play is favored at the poker table (over-aggression, bluffing, etc.), but an uneducated chess player is dead in the water.

Well to be honest there almost always is a theoretically perfect move, it's just that we usually don't have to capabilities to know what it is.

That sounds more like philosophy than rigorous reason.