Poker is more complicated than chess. You are playing against 8 or 9 opponents at the same time. You have to study them, watch everything they are doing, observe their physical mannerisms analyze them. Is the hand in front of the mouth a tell (he's bluffing) a reverse tell (he's got it) or just noise (meaningless). In multiway pots you must compute the action in front of you and the potential action behind you. You have to constantly run very complex risk reward analyses for multiple events. While there are psychological components to chess they pale in comparison to the depth of the human soul which you must divine while participating in our beloved gambling contest. That's a lot more complex than hopping a bunch of knights around.

In a typical chess position there are thirty to forty legal moves on average, although it's possible to have as many as 218.
In poker, you can check, bet, raise or fold. I think it's pretty obvious which game has the bigger decision tree.

If you ignore anything other than HU limit holdem that may be right. If you take different betsizes and multiway pot scenarios into account you probably have a similar huge decision tree in poker.

I think both games are pretty complex at the highest levels, but chess takes more effort to get marginally good at.

Poker is so much easier to analyse as a human. Yes the game tree complexity is pretty huge if you consider a betsize of 1.1 and 1.101 to be different decision points, but it's very easy to compare these decisions with each other. NLHE is not that much more complex than LHE. Whereas with chess you need to draw upon your experience with the position, and possible future positions to make a decision about the current best move, where a lot of moves drastically change everything.

In Chess there are many legal moves, but most of them are obviously bad. Experts decide between 2 or 3 candidates, so at least this is rather close to Poker.

Typical grandmaster games start with 20-25 moves of memorized computer moves, followed by 10-15 moves that the players actually have to find over the board and then the game turns into a technical phase, which can usually be reduced to known patterns that have been analyzed before. The by far most likely result between players with equal Elo-rating is a draw.

The reason why Carlsen beats pretty much everyone is that he cuts the phase of memorized computer moves short and then keeps the position alive forever, so his opponents get the maximum opportunity to make mistakes. You could call him a grinder.

magnus makes a mil+/year with no varience, pretty good

I agree. And sometimes it's even more basic than that, such as when you are faced with a bet for all your chips. In that scenario you have exactly two options, call or fold. You can literally flip a coin to determine your decision. And when you have either the nuts or 5 high, the decision is automatic. Holding the nuts facing an all in, call. 5 high facing all in, fold. Chess is never that easy. Even when the decision seems simple, mistakes can be made. Here's a video of a grandmaster missing mate in ONE! It really illustrates how tough making the best play can be sometimes. This guy is so caught up in all the possibilities that he doesn't even see an automatic game winner in a single move. Skip to around 7:00 into the video to see the blunder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtSPhginkNQ&app=desktop

Interesting discussion.

Chess has been described as a game where a gnat can drink and an elephant bathe, and i think it applies equally well to poker.

The whole debate is a bit like which is harder: pschology or maths - but ignoring that...

From my perspective Chess is deeper, in the sense that at the board you know however good you are the horizon of your vision isn't far enough and you can endlessly try and improve this. The same could be argued for poker too, but the maths problem is more finite

I also think that chess creates a legacy of beautiful games which are looked at by vast numbes of people, I don't think you see a similar legacy in poker

On the other hand poker clearly has the human element that doesn't play as strongly in chess, where understanding your villains plays a much more significant part, and i think is a substantial part of the appeal of the game.

The hidden information angle also is something chess also clearly lacks.

Score draw for me, both great games

Once you get to a high enough level chess is just much harder/complex than poker.

In highstakes cashgames there really isn't much psychological warfare going on as much as you like to think there is. They are all waving their swords around that they worked on outside of the game (shoutout to adrianfenix), and are still working on.

The advantage of a typical grandmaster over the amateur in chess is much more that he understands more positions than the amateur. The fact that he memorized so many opening moves just comes from playing so long and understanding such openings naturally (ofc he can study them as well). He would know what to do in a lot of situations through experience and has better logic.

There is just so much room to study/improve in chess compared to poker due to the complexity. As I said before, poker is so much easier to model using maths/logic than chess, and you can use backwards induction to solve everything. With chess you prob have to study thousands of endgame themes alone to be on par with a grandmaster.

It says something that if you show a grandmaster a position from a real game for 3 seconds and he can reproduce the whole board, but he won't be able to do the same if you take a truly random position (illegal positions included). A grandmaster will subconsciously see the important factors in a position and link everything together instantly. This is how such crazy feats such as blindfolded simultaneous displays can occur.

also poker can be beautiful http://www.pokerhand.org/?6485619

In my day as a young amateur GM Michael Basman was still a hero among young British players for 15 years earlier having opened b4 against Karpov, at the time the world champion, and going on to beat him.

That opening was called the Orang Utan and Basman wrote a book on it.

Along with the St George defence (1 e4 a6) memorably employed by Miles to beat Karpov

Agreed. Some of the greatest sacrifices in particular are so counter-intuitive that they are sublime. The most memorable poker hands, by contrast, tend to be coolers. i.e. they depend on luck, not skill.

One notable counter-example: Tom Dwan's raise on the T22 in that family pot on 'HSP', where Gabe Kaplan said "I don't know what he's doing."
That was like a chess move in an immortal game.

EDIT: Now I've posted, I'm suddenly remembering some "unbelievable" hero-calls. Maybe poker is just as complex/interesting as chess after all.

The point about openings like this is not only that you get your opponent out of his opening book (what the earlier poster calls computer moves) early on but you have studied the particular opening more so you are still in your opening book playing near perfectly and not wasting time while he is working out WTF the pitfalls are with the particular position. So it's like trading a small mistake for a bigger mistake later.

An analogy in poker would be something that apparently Sulsky once suggested, of never raising when folded to in the SB, only completing (you can back-raise if BB raises). There are supposed to be GTO advantages but also your opponent has no feel for what the ranges are supposed to be and is going to play like a novice on later streets too whereas you are experienced in playing pots like this and know more about what the ranges are.

(P.S. I misremembered the exact details of Basman's career in my earlier post.)

Don't think Basman was ever a GM. Tony Miles is the one you should look for in terms of strong players playing unorthodox openings.

I think the purpose of openings in chess is to arrive at mid-game in an equal or advantageous position, and there's definitely some obvious parallels to that and preflop ranges in poker.

Also I read somewhere that most top chess players have eidetic memories which i think provides a bigger advantage in chess than poker. Wouldn't be surprised if that claim is unfounded. Not really relevent to the discussion but interesting thought imo

Yes, Basman was (and is as the titles are for life) only an IM. It was Miles who beat Karpov with the St. George, also known as the Basman Opening so that's possibly why I was mixed up.

That's true. The non-standard openings are rare in both cases, which is why they are called non-standard.

Supposedly the old school players like Doyle and Cloutier can remember details of all the hands you played against them years before even if they don't remember your name.

One difference though is the different branches of the chess tree can be solved independently of each other. The correct move in a given position doesn't depend on what you would do at earlier points of the tree and under what circumstances you would get there if at all, it only depends on the evaluation of the later positions. In a chess computer the task can be sent off to a different processor in the super computer to get on with. In poker you need to solve the whole tree together because you can't evaluate moves with particular holdings till you know what other holdings you get to a particular point with, which you don't know until you've solved the tree - making it a circular problem - which is why poker computers are way behind chess computers.

That's because chess engine is developed since computer is invented and how many years has computer scientist dedicated to poker?

There's some truth in this. However...
HU FLH is essentially weakly solved, despite it only being studied for a couple of decades. HUNLH will be 'weakly solved' in the next few years. Chess is nowhere near solved, despite the game being studied for centuries, and with computers running sims for decades. (Only endgames with a limited number of pieces are completely solved, but there are almost infinite ways to arrive at those endgames).
The Alberta Uni AI team chose to solve HU FLH poker because it's an easier problem to solve than chess.
In poker, everyone knows that AA is not just a better hand than KK, it's a lot better than every other hand. In chess, no one's even sure what the best first move is! Since the game is so large and complex, we likely never will.

Both games require a lot of skill. Whether one is more complicated is nit picking. It's like saying neurology is more complicated than virology, or it's like saying aerospace engineering is more complicated than geotechnical engineering.

Once you're good at either game you can successfully multi-table each stake or play multiples chess games at the same time against opponents of lesser rating. Each game may require 8+ hour grinding session throughout the day. Each game requires tactical study, and game reviews. There's a lot of preflop theory about ranges, bluffs, blockers, GTO shoving etc, just as there's lot of theory about chess openings, which moves lead to better game states. In chess you "calculate" better game states by imagining different ways the game can be played out using tactical patterns and game strategy(lots of mental work), in poker you deduce the best action based on the way the hand is played, your opponent's tendencies and history and then you may throw leveling into it ( lots of mental work ).

I achieved almost 2k rating in chess and I've built my roll up from nothing to being a $2/5 player live. Both games are hard to be successful at.

The games do use different kinds of intelligence, but whatever these intelligences are, should be respected. I respect the politician who can remember everyone's name he's ever met and has enormous relationship intelligence just as much as the physicist who can imagine what the quantum world looks like and has learned a huge portion of known mathematics to probe his world. Being a social expert is no less difficult than being an science expert imo.

Hell, even live poker and online poker are very different. In online poker, you use all sorts of hud stats to help make decisions, in live poker you have to get into the persons head to help make decisions.

Those two games are different, is one more complicated than the other? Maybe, but you're not stepping into either game in the game's mature form and just crushing the competition. Maybe in 2007 any idiot who could rub his belly and pat his head at the same could crush the masses in poker, and in 1908 any idiot who learned to read and write would crush the masses at chess, but the games have matured in their respective eras, neither game is easily crushable anymore.

Chess is solved to the degree that HU FLHE is solved, since the best bots beat the best humans in both.

Point taken here, although poker is usually played 9 handed, which is much further from being solved.

At least for human players both have the characteristic that there is a pretty much open-ended amount of work that can be done to keep getting better so it is hard to say if one is fundamentally harder than the other, it just depends on the competition in a given place and time.

Whenever someone beats a much higher rated player, it is usually because the higher rated player tried to avoid a draw (at all cost). You can witness the same exact problem in the recent two wins by Naiditisch over Carlsen.

For the very same reason Naiditisch won the Dortmund tournament many years ago as the lowest rated player in the field. Everyone wanted to beat up on him and they took way too many risks.

That's interesting. I'm not qualified to judge myself, but in this video of the Karpov-Miles game with the Basman defence:



the guy who put up the video says that one factor was that Karpov felt he had to win no matter what because a draw as world champion playing on board one for the Soviet Union with white against a weaker player who played a joke opening would be a psychological blow and embarrassing.

Maybe a poker analogy is when a player who sees themselves as stronger is reluctant to flip in a tournament against a weaker player, eventually to the point that their play is no longer stronger.