I believe I stated that poker was probably more complicated. As for recognizing facial expressions, that is not an analytical task. We are able to do it instantly precisely, because it is not. We have it "wired" into us the capacity to do this. Even a infant is able to do this. It is not effortful to recognize facial expressions.

Contrast that with computing 79*53. This is not a complex problem, but we cannot do it instantly. It requires more effort. Much more than recognizing faces. 79*53 is an analytical, error prone process. The poll question is about, which requires more analytical skill. Chess is highly analytical in sharp contrast to poker.

ok, maybe i'm exaggerating with every move, cause there are easier moves than others or u are already following the right plan, but i dont think these are the most, cause u always have to be aware and trying to visualize your plan or opponent plan

It amazes me how many poker players just don't get this very important concept.

lol at anyone thinking poker is more complex than chess.

Reaching grandmaster level requires studying 10 hours per day day in day out for years and years.

It wouldn't surprise me if most elite players did spend 10+ hours a day studying/playing poker.

Analytical skill is the ability to visualize, articulate, and solve both complex and uncomplicated problems and concepts and make decisions that are sensical based on available information. Such skills include demonstration of the ability to apply logical thinking to gathering and analyzing information, designing and testing solutions to problems, and formulating plans.

Is there really more Analytical skill in chess?

Outstanding..........

I hadn't even noticed that the poll question was different than the title question... I think poker is a more *complex* problem. As for the question of which requires more analytical skill - it depends on exactly what we mean by "analytical skill" and how we are measuring its use. Then the whole debate is just over semantics, and it's really not a very interesting question.

I will follow ForexTrader line so it will be easier to explain my thoughts.

Your analysis on poker strategies is extremely simplistic. I will try to explain my view on poker complexity on what kind of analysis the perfect player should do to achieve the best possibly "strategy" (ps.: I am assuming that the perfect player will not play GTO , but exploitative poker):

Let's assume this perfect player is on a NLHE HU match against an opponent that he has played before.

While preflop game may seem very simple, it's actually extremely mindblowing diabolic complex to play perfectly. Just like in chess where a master will try to setup a winning position from the very first move, a perfect poker player should take into account every single variable to construct his preflop range and betsizing. This goes from stack sizes, to villain´s check raise range on the river. The profitability of every action a player takes preflop is affected by how his opponent will react on future streets. This by itself requires a giganormous ridiculous amount of calculations and analytical thinking. Quoting wikipedia> A somewhat less trivial exercise is an exhaustive analysis of all of the head-to-head match ups in Texas Hold 'em, which requires evaluating each possible board for each distinct head-to-head match up, or 1,712,304 × 207,025 = 354,489,735,600 (˜354 billion) results./quote. That is just the number of different cards combinations. If we take into account stack and betting sizes the number of calculations approach infinite (Theoretically there is no limit to the size of stacks).

The fact that poker is a game of incomplete information only adds to complexity. While all the calculations above would still take place, the perfect player have to estimate his opponent´s range before making such calculations. And the process of estimating someone's range from preflop to river, considering all variation of moves and betsizing, is probably more complex than to construct the perfect range to play against this estimated range, just in a different way. The perfect player will use statistics, pattern recognition, psycology knowledge, metagame and a lot more stuff to make the best estimate possible of what villain's range will be on the next hand, and with infinite knowledge he could actually make the perfect estimation every single time. We know that is impossible in the real world, given the number of variables, but there is virtually no limit to how accurate someone can estimate another player's range.

The point is: There is no limit on how much analysis you can put into a poker game, while in chess there is probably a point where it doesn't matter if you make more calculations or analysis, the result won't change (will draw against another extremely capable opponent with approximate the same knowledge, and win against every other).

I am sure high-level chess players put much more analysis on each game, than high-level poker players overall. But that is just because professional chess has been around for many years, there is countless books and studies on the game and more important: there is almost instant feedback on someone's skill. If you lose a chess game you are probably worse than the other player, while the variance aspect in poker will give very slow and possibly not meaningful feedback, making its learning curve much bigger.

Is Pelé better than Michael Jordan? Is Magnus Carlsen better in Chess than Phil Ivey is on poker?

99% that reach any decent level in chess ( around 2000+ elo ) , will say chess is by FAR the more complex and the game that need more analytical skill.

its not even close btw..

for all those supposedely expert in poker thinking chess is easier and w.e, take a chess board , invent an endgame position ,put only 2 kings 2 queen and 3 pawns on each side and try to see who wins by analysing.... GL!!

meaning after u add all the pieces that missing and pawns to create a middlegame than u face the immensity of infinity .

has for M VALENTE whom i respect a lot .

his quote is wrong and i suspect he isnt an adequate chess player to really answer this poll.

the answer to his reply is simply this:

1. more effort have been put to try to make computer play better in chess than in poker until now.
2. if we consider GTO in poker is at least a decent solving solution to the game, GTO in poker will be found much quicker than a solution to chess ( finding a way for white tomake a certain win or find that black can make a certain draw).

only guys like curtains and maybe dan harrington with cunningham ( please not lederer...), could really answer that question anyway since they succeed in poker and seem to be decent in chess ( obv. Curtains is the other way around ).


ps: btw, i never heard a player playing for like 3-5 years in chess , even 10 hours a day in chess and reach a GM level but i heard this plenty in poker ( that is to reach a very high degree of skillz in poker ).
to keep it simple, if lot players can do it in poker but almost none can do it in chess, to reach like top 5% , shouldnt this be proof enough to show chess is much tougher in every aspect of both game .

it can't really be cuz poker boom was like 8 years ago but chess has been played on a pro level over a century

your statement lacks logic. There is no connection between the two. If there were 2 chess players in the world it would not be very hard to be the best. Chess is also studied from an early age so there there is just so much information on the subject now.

CLIFFNOTES: THe reason why we have computer chess programs is because GRANDMASTER CHESS PLAYERS HAVE BEEN DEVELOPING CHESS PLAYING ALGORITHMS/DECISION TREES FOR 600 YEARS!!!!!! This has nothing to do with "computing speed" and poker hasn't had one-millionth of the work put into it in terms of developing algorithms/decision trees as chess.


THe reason why we have computer chess programs is because GRANDMASTER CHESS PLAYERS HAVE BEEN DEVELOPING CHESS PLAYING ALGORITHMS FOR 600 YEARS!!!!!!

There has literally been BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of man-hours spent on developing chess algorithms since the 16th century. Every single time the best algorithms/decision trees were defeated by a grandmaster guess what??? A team of grandmasters would get together, study the game and then develop an algorithm/decision tree to defeat that game.

Rinse and repeat even up to this current day.

So the "computer" even to this day does not "play chess". What the computer does is utilize the chess algorithms/decisions trees develop by chess grandmasters over the last 500+ years.

The reason we don't have an equivalent to poker yet is simply because the amount of effort in developing poker algorithms doesn't even approach 1/10000 of the effort put into chess.

This has nothing to do with "computing speed" but everything to do with the base algorithms/decision trees.

And in regards to developing algorithms/decision trees,

chess players are to poker players as olympic sprinters are to crawling babies

The thread title and the poll messed me up. When I was going in I was thinking ok poker is more complex but when the poll said more analytical I have to pick chess. Really I mean it is hard to determine what is more difficult though. For some people they can pick up one or the other with no difficulties.

Poker, you have to make so many more decisions and the variations are endless in poker, I say poker requires more skill, but with that being said, it is much much harder for a novice chess player to beat a pro chess player, a novice poker player can always get lucky where there is no luck involved in chess. Put it this way, I could teach someone to become a great chess player (basing this on intelligent subjects) in 1 week, If you ask Phil Ivey he will be the first to tell you there's always more to learn and just when you think you have it mastered a new playing fad occurs and you have to adjust accordingly.

Chess is more advanced then most poker forms, many forget that the randomness in poker can be highly predictable since we have two hole cards in hold'em and a flop with three cards. We have ~70% of the information on the flop which is much more then what we have in chess after the first five moves.

seriously?

Endless variations in poker?
You could teach someone to become a great chess player in a week?

rofl

you have 2 or 3 moves available at any given time in poker. The entire game is child's play compared to the variations in chess.

ITT we have a lot of confusion regarding variance and complexity.

Limit hold em is close enough to solved -- at least far closer than chess. Most computer chess is not really playing chess -- you just build up a database of positions that tend to lead to a win for your side and make moves to reach those positions and eventually simplify to an end game that has been solved which is currently feasible for a handful of pieces.

Chess AINEC.

Developing a GTO for both chess and poker has been discussed at length ITT but several crucial facts have been left out.

1) NL Poker may or may not be solvable. A solution has yet to be found, but also, it hasn't been definitely proven that there even is a solution.

2) Chess is definitely solvable. This solution hasn't been found, but, given that it is a game of complete information, a solution definitely exists. We might never find it, but in principal, a solution does exist.

Given that chess is definitely solvable (and taking into account the 600 or so years and 'trillions of man hours' -DGIHARRIS- that have been invested in looking for this solution in vain), it's level of complexity (very, very, very, very complex) should be clear and apparent.

Until we demonstrate whether poker is solvable or not (note that we don't have to find the solution straight away, just prove that it's possible) we can't even begin to assess how complex the game is in the way that we measure the complexity in chess.

I got into this debate a while ago with one of my younger friends.

He kept going on and on about how easy chess was compared to poker. I then told him that I'd give him 20:1 odds that he couldn't beat a chess program that we set to a modest 1700 rating (considered intermediate, advanced is 1900+) . And to prove that its possible I also stated that I would play the program and that if I didn't win one game out of three he'd also win the bet. Also, he had no limit on the amount of times he could play and that the bet would be an open ended bet for three months, meaning anytime during that three months if he could beat the program in front of me or several mutual friends we had as a witness, he'd win the bet.

He took the bet and it was the easiest $100 I ever made.

Are you sure?
A Nash equilibrium exist in every form of poker, and in HU this equilibrium is a winning strategy (or a strategy that at least break-even pre-rake vs any opponent).

I don't know that much about chess, but poker is definitely not complex, because no one has ever let me raise an imaginary number of dollars.

This is attributable to a multitude of factors and computing power is not one of them. Keep in mind that computer chess is much further ahead in terms of development. Computer poker isn't nearly as far along.

With that said, there are still bots that play a very solid game. These bots are good enough to beat mid stakes NL grinders for a solid winrate (in limit poker, the bots are soul reading demons). Now imagine IBM getting into the fold with a team of high stakes players for input...If they actually put effort towards developing an NLHU super bot, I'd put my money on it against any HS pro.

Ok, now on topic. Chess is much more complex. I feel like anyone who's spent time learning both games would be of this opinion.

Funny how this is the computer age yet so many people are clueless as to how computer programs really work.

Chess computers use algorithms developed by masters. Go to your local library, grab a big book on chess with the subject "play chess" or "play against the masters". Those books are giant algorithms, you can make a move then look in the index of your move and there will be a counter move. You can play a ton of games "against" the book. Computers are little different you can just pack more "books" into them.

Ok, to all the people who say that chess programs are so strong because of the length of development and grandmaster level knowledge incorporated in these programs - this is mostly hogwash.


What I know is this -- although I have never written a chess playing program before (I have written other game-playing programs though), within a week or two, I could personally put together a chess program that uses pretty much no Chess-specific high-level knowledge, and I am absolutely certain that this program would beat me and most amateur chess players (but definitely not high-ranked chess players). This program would use techniques in a field of AI called "Reinforcement Learning" to "learn" how to play chess by playing against itself... The types of things I'd do to make this program stronger (creating an opening book and endgame evaluator and refining the search algorithm are the most important things) are all, relatively speaking, simple tasks.

The thing about a program like this is if I allow it to play on my desktop machine, it will be at one level of strength. If I run it on a much stronger machine, though, it would dramatically increase in playing strength.... So if I want my program to beat the best chess players in the world, all I would have to do is wait for computers to get faster. In 15-20 years from now, writing a grandmaster-level chess playing program will be child's play IMO.


Writing a strong poker playing program, especially deep no limit, on the other hand, is WAY more difficult. I mean, I could put together a decision tree and use all my personal poker playing experience to say "if you are in position X, do Y". After plugging in hundreds or thousands of these statements, this program would get to an ok level. But any decent player would quickly learn how to exploit the hell outta this program. It is impossible to write a program in this fashion without leaving gaping holes... And putting this program on a faster computer would do absolutely nothing for it.

So, say we go back to the ideas we used in that chess-playing program -- search, evaluation, and self/reinforcement-learning.. Well, search is immensely more difficult to program (the search space is enormous when we consider all of our opponent's possible actions and our actions and possibilities for their hole cards and for the board runout). A good evaluation function is also way more difficult to learn - this is mostly because a good search algorithm is so difficult to create... And the only way around these problems is creating different types of shortcuts, all of which leave pretty big holes in this program and make it much more exploitable.

----

Anyway, to sum up what I've said:

In 20 years from now (I dunno, maybe longer, but not much), your average/advanced computer science major will probably have little difficulty in writing a chess-playing program from scratch, in a relatively short amount of time, that runs on a desktop machine and can beat the best chess-players in the world.

There will never be a time when it's a simple task to write a poker playing program that can beat the best poker players in the world.

What does this say about the two games???

Actually, it doesn't quite work that way. Unfortunately.

It turns out that masters are very poor at describing what it is that they do in a way that is usable to programmers. Partly due to much of what they do taking place on an unconscious level. As a result, programs use a very different process to arrive at what move to play. A human player might look at about 1000 positions during an entire game. A computer program will look at millions of positions per second for every single every move. Humans are very selective at what they consider by very many orders of magnitude. Programs take a brute force approach.

Most chess programmers are weak chess players. Playing chess well hasn't been realized as a significant edge for programmers. There are some strong players that have written successful chess programs, but this has never been an important qualification to write a strong chess program. It has happened in the past that a below average player has won a computer chess championship with their program.

All those chess books are great for human players to read, but not as useful as one might suppose for a chess programmer. Chess books are not useless to chess programmers, but they are hardly a blueprint for success in developing a good chess playing program.

The most useful chess books are opening books where programs can simply regurgitate their contents during play for as long as the opponent plays the expected opening moves, but after the opening phase, the program is on its own.

Some other things to add. First multiplayer games are in general much more complex than two-player games.

Also, poker is more a game of exploitation than game-theoretic optimal play. Although chess players may sometimes look for ways to exploit the specific opponent they're playing against (e.g., playing a specific opening vs. a specific opponent, but a different opening vs. others), a chess player is usually just going to make the move they think is strongest. There is no real need to create an "opponent model".

In poker, however, the best players create a model of their opponents -- incorporated in that model, the best players try to reason about how their opponents think, their opponent's specific motivations in the context of the game, the way their opponents reason, their opponent's emotional state, etc. And this is taken even a step further and poker players start to reason about the way their opponents are modeling other people. This type of reasoning, these "leveling wars", are much more complex than anything that happens in chess.