Yeah
1. d4 d5
2. c4 (doesn't take pawn sac)

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So u don't mind being misquoted, since u didn't make any informational difference anyway? Or, did u'r eyes miss the combination completely and thus face semantical checkmate?

I didn't read the quote at first. Haha that's actually really funny. Nice job
I also missed your text at the top. Sorry

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Although it sounds unlikely, it could be a forced win for black. At least no one can prove that wrong yet

Yes, and thanks for repeating me.

I would have hoped it went without saying that there are ways to win other than zugzwang, but apparently not. It could be that black has the advantage right from the first move. Black does have position after all.

Are you trolling in the Poker Theory subforum ?

Poker and chess is kind of wierd to compare, because poker is so luck and opponent based and chess is 100% skill based. In chess you can you are given a number and is now a 'master' or a 'grandmaster'. But in poker you can really never know how good you are, as many factors play in, especially the level of opponents which will change the game completely, which is not the case in chess.

So the psychological espects is clearly much harder in poker, you will fool yourself to think your better than your are, only notice when your unlucky and not lucky, you wont know who the good players is, and so on. And in chess its much straight forward, as you sit down and play against players with x rated skill number and get your ass beat, you very quickly find out how good you really are.

That being said i think the actual difficulty of mastering the game is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder in chess. Really. As a ELO rated chess player (about 1800), i can after thausounds and thausounds of hours of playing, studying and so on, not even call me a master of the game (1900 ELO, we call master at least in denmark). I was very fascinated with the game as a kid, I red like 50 chess books, played houndreds and houndreds of live tournements...
When you think of all of this, and that im only a 1800 elo player, people like to say that for every 100 points you raise, you have to expand your knowledge and skill with the DOUBLE, and the grandmasters start at 2500-2600 elo, so a poker player thinking that poker is harder or more complex than chess should really stop talking about stuff they doesnt know anything about, that just makes you look stupid and silly...

I think most people are in agreement that being a top chess player requires more "analytical skill" as mentioned in post number 1, and by any reasonable definition it is more difficult to be really good at it. Both of which have almost no relationship with the question posed in the title of this thread. Hence the convoluted discussion that has taken place, without any real definition of what the OP meant by "complex".

complexity != difficulty to master
>complexity != >analytical skill required

OK technically that's zugzwang, it's just not the usual context it comes up in in chess.

I'm not totally sure that's true though, because the starting positions are mirror images of each other. White making the first move might not be the same thing as Black having the first move. When you're Black your King is on the left and when you're White it's on the right. Can't figure out if that makes a difference or not.

If you played chess next to a mirror, and only looked at the mirror version of the board instead of the actual board, would strategy change?

No need to use a mirror, just switch seats and let black go first.

Obviously the answer is no.

That was his literal question though, whether black going first would be tactically different. So your version doesn't really answer his question (mine should, and yes, it's fairly obvious)

There's no shame in having a brainfart from time to time. But just stop digging your own grave.

Poker in infinitely more complex than chess, and chess is amazingly complex.

But every position in chess has a best move.

You can look at a position from Paul Morphy game from over a hundered years ago, see where Morphy made the best move, and make that move...and that move will still be the best move, regardless of who plays it.

But you can run the exact same situation in a poker game twice, and the best play will not always be the same thing two times in a row.

Chess is much more objective than poker, and not as dependent on human psychology, therefore it's less complex.

Chess should be 100% objective, since it's a game of complete information. The only psychology is in knowing where your opponent might make a mistake or how you might influence them to do so.

There is still an element of psychology involved in chess.

Mikhail Tal and Alexi Shirov are two examples of top-tier chess grandmasters who would play piece sacrifices which, while were objectively unsound, created positions which were so complex that their opponents could not find the correct move.

Veselin Topalov recently defeated Vladimir Kramnik in the Candidate's matches by making an objectively inferior move that caused Kramnik to respond incorrectly.

There is a subjective element to the game of chess. It just is not as prevalent as it is in poker.

FINALLY, SOMEBODY ****ING UNDERSTANDS.

Everyone who has posted so far obviously have very little experience with chess.

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Babarberousse has a ~2150 FIDE rating. You call that "very little experience"? You must be a GM, right?

Two other things you've overlooked:

1) Babarberousse didn't say that chess has zero element of psychology; he claimed that it is a relatively insignificant part of the decision-making process on a move-to-move basis.

2) Your examples don't contradict Babarberousse's claims at all--in fact, they are the exception that lends credence to the rule. You've cited three players with atypically pyrotechnic styles (Tal, Shirov, Topalov), certainly not representative of most GMs as a whole. Even if we were to grant that this trio willfully seeks complications through objectively inferior moves 2–3 times per game on average (a massively charitable overestimate), how would you explain the rest of the moves?

How is this different than my statement?

Barbaceusse made valid points, and I was never trying to discredit him. Our discussion was dialectic. My point is that chess is subjective and not as easy and clear like 2+2=4. Chess is a game of logic and imagination. If it was objective, then it would be solved. The element of uncertainty and endless possibilities makes it subjective.

People keep making claims like "you can see what's going on, so it's way less complex in chess and purely objective." That right there tells me a lack of experience in chess. There's so much more going on in chess than your mind could possibly comprehend. After every move you make, the possibilities increase exponentially.



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The distinction is that the player guiding the action is actually committing a mistake himself in order to induce another mistake which he can exploit later.

Another distinction is that in chess, the player making the unsound sacrifice might not even realize that his move was incorrect.

Mikhail Tal liked to calculate long variations in his head before making a sacrifice. Mark Dvoretsky, possibly the best chess trainer in history, analyzed Tal's variations and concluded that they were often inaccurate.

Shirov also comes to mind. His sacrificial style of play was absolutely baffling to almost every other chess player he faced in his prime. He won some amazing wins against Vladimir Kramnik, who I think was probably the most "objectively correct" player of the 2000's.

But Shirov could never win a single game against Gary Kasparov. Presumably it was because Kasparov excelled at calculation to the point where he was able to always find the correct reply against Shirov's play.

I have played both chess and poker.

Chess is harder to get good at, because it seems like everyone is a genius that plays it. Just log onto Chess.com and see for yourself. I thought that I could become a grand master quickly, because I am smart, but damn. There are some really good players. Sometimes I lose, because I can't move my mouse fast enough in the time games, but even still. Advancing takes some serious dedication and time. One mistake will **** up the entire game and put you on tilt... chess tilt.

Poker is difficult, because there is so much stuff going on. You have to construct ranges in your head for what you will do with different hands in different spots to maximize EV. You have to level your opponent and make sound decisions or you can lose all your money. Also moves aren't so concretely set in stone like they are in chess.

Chess becomes kind of a memory game where you memorize moves. There isn't much psychology at higher levels of play since it is usually better to play the board. In chess there are people that have memorized openings 30+ moves into the game. How much thinking must one do when they use a database and memorize moves to play perfectly against an opponent. Certain things in chess kind of become instinctive. If you ask a good chess player why they made a move. A lot of the time it is just kind of instinct, because they subconsciously remember a situation like it. In poker you do this too, but it can change what is correct based on your opponent where as in chess it does not.

In my personal experience Chess is harder than poker. But......

....the question is which one is more complex not which is harder. Poker is more complex, because if you were to build a game tree of moves. There would be more with poker than with chess. Chess will be solved sooner than poker IMO and in a lot of other people's opinion as well. That is because poker is more complex of a game.

Poker is so much less analyzed, then chess. And also, most of it's "analysis" so far, is mostly useless for solving the game. Much less smart people really put hours and hours STUDYING the game, also because the history of chess theory is 400-500 years. I can't imagine any poker player, that has been doing complex EV calculations, and range constructions for 8 hours a day 10 years in a row. In chess, this is pretty much the only way to become a GM, and so far thousands of people have done that. So, those, that think, that poker is easier are only right to the extent, that yes, it is probably much easier to become a top poker pro, than to become a GM, or at least it was like that a few years ago.

We probably can not imagine how complex poker will become in 10 years.

Also, why do we allow chess players 2 hours for 40 moves, and poker players have to move instantly? Many moves oin poker are kind of automatic, and probably good, but if someone really put a lot of math into calculating the EV of that 85s resteal, and found out, that it is just slighltly -EV because the (bayesian) estimate of BB's cold 4bet frequency is now 5% as opposed to 4% as we previously thought... who can do that in his head? Or who even bothers to calculate that on paper and/or on computer? Exaggeration? But in chess those "slight" mistakes are what costs you hundreds of ELO points. Probably poker will get there eventially. Maybe then, poker will become as respectfull a profession as chess.