I play both of these games but im far better at hearthstone probably because i play card games more than twelve years , i make it to legend every season and i have reached top 100 more than once , i also have won decent amount of money on open tournaments and make it to top 4-8 very often on cups like gfinity,zotac and strivewire.


I make money from poker too , cashouts and bills hold me back so far but nevertheless i dont think im as good , if i was as good at poker as i am on hearthstone then i would make some serious money or be able to move up fast or at least be as confident.

Is it that i lack talent at poker or poker is harder? i cant really judge because reaching the top on hearthstone seems much easier to me than winning at poker , if you compared reaching legend or top 100 to a poker online stake what that would be?

I don't think it is reasonable to compare the two when it comes to skill. They're separate beasts.

In HS you can tell decks immediately when seeing a few cards being played.

In Poker it takes a lot of hands before you start getting a sense of the table around you.

Yes, poker has a lot more room for skill and in general is harder.

What decks do you play, OP?

Currently i play secret paladin , zoolock , midrange hunter , aggro druid and the new patron

It's actually hard to compare because poker is played for money and Hearthstone isnt. Even at legend there is no 'real life' incentive to win and no punishment for losing.

poker is way harder and i don't think it's close

This. It's not because hearthstone sucks, it's because poker is so great. Many of the top top tier of hearthstone players are the second tier of mtg players, another more complicated but simillair game. Although it would be interesting if the incentive was there( million dollar tournaments) how good the top players would be.

Nah. Pouring money into HS tournamnets wouldn't change which the skill level required to reach the top.

To me the reason poker is harder is you have to string together hundreds if not thousands of good sessions to be successful. Bad results don't do anything in HS except get you bumped out of a tournament or make you slide down the ladder. If I lose four games in a row in HS, I'm not going to have any problems getting over it mentally or having any draw backs of losing four sessions in a row of poker. Maybe some people play worse after losing. I don't think I do.

I don't particularly think playing out hands of poker is hard except when you sit down with strangers and have no clue about their tendencies is that more complicated than HS. It's just way more mentally tasking over long courses of time.

Poker 10x harder imo.

Mixed Games > Omaha > MTG > NLHE > HS

52 cards, 4 suits.

it's close since TPTK nerf

Are you talking about NLHE? If so, there are so many variants of it. The thinking that goes into each decision in NLHE is infinitely more complex than the decisions made in Hearthstone. It's not even debatable.

With that said, It's not hard to be a winning player because there are so many casual players in all stakes. However, it is extraordinarily difficult to win against the elite players who make small margins of mistakes. All players make mistakes though.

it's close to be honest hehehe but i think poker is harder imo

Much more RNG in HS.

Hearthstone is harder. New rules with every expansion. It will also get more complex over time, because there will be more viable cards in every slot and more viable decks.

Poker is so much harder and it isn't even close.

Why do you think it is harder? Just curios

There is a difference between losing $$$ and losing stars

Yes but I don't think we should count that when deciding how difficult a game is.

Then you don't get it.

A very dumbed-down, simplistic hypothetical:

You're offered $10,000,000 to help your grandma become the top 0.25% of the player pool in either Hearthstone or NLHE.

In Hearthstone, this means achieving the rank of Legend(at least according to Blizzard, no idea if anyone who plays just one game per month qualifies and such).

In poker, your grandma would need to be winning 0.01bb/100 on a sufficient sample. I looked at the current NLHE lobby on Stars and counted the players per limit.

Rough numbers:

Stake	Players	Percentile
$0.01/$0.02	5171	100.00
$0.02/$0.05	2517	66.35
$0.05/$0.10	2806	49.97
$0.08/$0.16	338	31.71
$0.10/$0.25	2012	29.51
$0.25/$0.50	1075	16.42
$0.50/$1.00	736	9.42
$1/$2	390	4.63
$2/$4	80	2.10
$2.5/$5	53	1.57
$3/$6	78	1.23
$5/$10	52	0.72
$10/$20	33	0.38
$25/$50	13	0.17
$50/$100	5	0.08
$100/$200	4	0.05
$200/$400	4	0.03

The top 0.25% player is currently seated on a 2000NL table.

Which route do you choose to give your grandma the best chance at winning the 10 million?

Since the method can be argued against in a variety of ways, I'd choose HS even over something like 25NL so it's not exactly close.

I guess that's a reasonable way to compare them. I was a winning poker player, but I didn't ever aggressively climb stakes, because, well, it didn't feel comfortable playing for so much money. Like, I was playing 25nl and 50nl with 5.5k roll that I won playing those stakes mostly (nittery ftl). There's no equivalent in HS since money isn't involved. I've finished a season in the "0.25%" but I wouldn't consider myself on that level. Any winning player can hit legend with enough games. Most of the time I just don't play 300 games on ladder in a month (which is around the amount I need to hit legend). The true best players are those with the highest winrate at legend, which we don't know those stats. Obv we have a decent idea for players with consistent top 25 finishes. Back to poker... no one will consider you a great player playing below really high stakes (rightly so).

But the games are not comparable when you use this method since not all winning poker players aggressively climb stakes. Whereas even getting high legend consistently requires no such thing. So, sure, poker is a lot harder to become world class at, but in terms of becoming a winning player at the stake you are willing to play I think they're roughly similar.

They do....