Well if Annie Duke said that..I guess that settles it.

Chess > Poker with Hi/low > Other Poker imho

here's a "thought experiment" for you: if chess is so much harder than poker, why don't all the chess grand masters convert to poker where they can make a LOT more money? according to the pro-chess crowd, the complexity of chess so totally and embarrassingly dwarfs poker that any chess GM should enjoy a massive edge. consequently they would make millions and millions every year instead of the roughly 0 they get as chess GMs. do chess GMs not like money? (very possible ... i guess that's why they spent that much time learning chess.)

both games are complex. they're probably not comparable. there's a lot more money in one though.

Please explain how you think it logically follows that if chess is more complex than poker, a chess GM would be able to crush poker. The two games require different skill sets, so even if one is more complex, being good in one doesn't make you good in the other.

I'm pretty sure the average professional chess Grand Master (and many GMs don't make their living from chess) makes more money from chess than the average poker "pro" makes from poker. Of course in poker due to variance there are more people who make millions, but it also means there are people who are net losers. If you average it out among all players who attempt to play professionally, I doubt the poker players would come out ahead.

Thats just due to the variance aspect and that more people are on average not as good as the level they are competing at in poker. I think as a hu game its prob chess thats more complex, but when u factor more players, dynamics, metagame, and psychology it puts poker over the top.

Its hard to convince me poker is more complex...just by the fact so many of even the best players in poker are complete degens who are'nt even close to being considered "genius".
In chess it seems (or appears) that ALL the top players are true geniuses..
I have'nt read the entire thread. It would be interesting to hear competetive chess players opinions.

I dont think Deep Blue can beat Ivey heads up

Why don't all champion swimmers become soccer players and earn 100x more?

Possibly because they are good at swimming and not soccer...

Juk

Galfond and Ivey are both geniuses for sure.

NLHE = chess
PLO = crazyhouse

Top level chess is probably more complex than most forms of poker, but then again what makes a great chess player is more obvious and can be utilized by programs. I guess what i'm trying to say is that great poker players have more concepts to master in order to be elite.

Apples and oranges?

It's hard to say, really.

poker

How many poker players have spent an hour considering their next move?

Another way of thinking about this question.

Suppose there was a coin-flipping competition; trying to guess the outcome of a coin flip.

In this scenario, you have access to the coin, all scientific tools you want, information about the flipper themselves (arm strength, videos of past flips), room temperature, etc. The amount of calculations required in a fair coin to figure out which way it's likely to land is astronomical. In fact, just to get your guessing percentage above 55% (over a significant sample) is impressive . On the otherhand, just guess randomly and you're at 50%.

I think poker works somewhat like this - better players add more and more variables to their calculations, but there are tons of 'very good' players that are simply riding waves of variance without giving much thought to the complexity behind the right decision. Moreover, because skill and bankroll aren't strongly correlated (you have fish at all levels), you really only have the WSOP and tournament circuit to gauge the best of the best, and even then variance skews the results.

obv anyone who voted poker knows nothing or very little about chess

From Martin Staszko

"Playing chess taught me how to endure long sessions by the table. Chess also required much more preparation, which is not needed for poker. So compared to chess, poker playing is a piece of cake with much higher earnings."

Irrelevant. Serious analysis of the difficulties of poker requires consideration of millions of moves. A single move cannot be correctly analyzed in isolation.

Red herring, that does not render my point irrelevant, it's simply a new point. Also, it's completely false. Any move can only be analyzed in isolation. Yes, you are using information that you have gained through previous moves, but that's true in chess as well.

Poker is way more complicated than chess. Chess is a difficult game, but conceptually it is not that hard. The game is played by examining possible moves as far as is reasonable in the time allocated. Human players are good at knowing which moves to examine and which to discard at each stage. Computers cannot select moves to examine as intelligently; but they compensate by examining millions per second. Really the human/computer approaches are quite similar and if you want to be good at chess you will have to 'simulate' a lot of lines in your head just as a computer does. Chess players call this 'calculation' and it is IMO quite tedious.

A poker 'move' cannot be considered in isolation because it must be considered in the context of your overall strategy. In a given spot, what you do with a certain hand depends completely on what you do with all your other possible hands in that spot. It is not hand vs hand, but range vs range. You are effectively playing thousands of hands at the same time (whether you realise it or not), against your opponents range of thousands of hands, and also having to adjust for the effect of future flop/turn/rivers. Imagine if in chess a bunch of squares were swapped around between every move, at random, so you had to balance your pawn structure over the possible future permutations etc.

Yeah the chess players seem to unanimously think poker is simpler, well I would wager that at most 5% of chess players have any real inkling about the structure of a solid poker strategy. They don't even know what a good strategy looks like. They probably think Doyle solved the game with super system.

I don't want to tap the glass too hard but I feel that 5% statistic may extend to the posters in this thread too, be as this may a Poker Theory forum.

FWIW I have written AIs for both games and I think anyone who has attempted the same will agree that poker is more complicated. From a mathematical/game-theoretic standpoint, chess is glorified tic-tac-toe.

In chess you have to consider all of the responses your opponent could make, and your response to that, his response to that etc... to where you aren't looking at a single move in chess either. I think you are misusing the term "in isolation".

What those computers are doing that you refer to as "calculation" can also be referred to as another word, "analysis", which is what the poll question is all about.

Not to say that the argument isn't about apples vs oranges, just that you can't say an apple is less complex because it is not an orange.

I never got over 1300 at chess but I think its more complex.

As for the bots - LOL they suck because nobody put real effort/money into them. If IBM and Google teamed up with Ivey and Galfond to create a bot it would go from low stakes to high stakes and pwn the world. I'm sure there are more important projects though.

That's true but we don't have to think what white's best move is after 8...O-O in the Ruy Lopez main line while considering what to do as black on move 7 in the Grünfeld.

Sure, some things fall into pattern recognition, and don't require any consideration. Like playing a 27o with a 4bet in front of you