well put

I think poker is more complex than chess, BUT there's just too many ******s playing poker so poker is easier. Therefore less time is required for me to spend on getting relatively good at poker.

It's hard to define complexity of a game. But consider in chess that rating differences of about 100 points are easily detectable in both results and quality of play. This difference corresponds to around a 65%-35% advantage for the stronger player. And there are around 30 of these 100 point intervals between the weakest humans and the strongest. Additionally we do not know how many more 100 point levels exist between the strongest human players and an opponent capable of "perfect" chess. Andrew Soltis once estimated that it takes on average about 8 years of serious play and study for a player to reach his peak rating in chess, after which further gains are difficult.

Comparison to poker is difficult, even if you limit the comparison to one specific poker variant, because it's not easy to rate poker players as we can in chess. But I tend to doubt there are anywhere near as many detectably different skill levels in poker as there are in chess (and it's even greater for Go). I also doubt that a poker player will need a full 8 years of dedicated study and serious competitive play to reach their peak performance capability.

^^I disagree (the implication being chess is more complex because it takes less than 8 years to reach full potentials in poker or w/e). I use to think chess was more complex (however you define complex) than poker, but now I realize it's not. There's more variables in poker than chess. The decision tree in poker isn't per hand vs. a fixed opponent. It's one's whole range vs. a bunch of different opponents with different styles. It's just less difficult to get relatively good at poker due to weaker competition.

I think both games are very complex and it's impossible to find the best solution using the human brain in each case.

I think forming strategies in poker is what makes it very complex (more so than chess). What I do with my whole range against different line ups would vary a ton and I think I am far off from the best solution in every case. In fact I'm sure I blunder a lot because of this dynamic nature

In chess my strategy is fixed.

Well in the sense of how I'm looking it above, you would need to find some set of poker players where player A is 65%-35% vs. player B, and B is 65%-35% vs. player C, etc all the way to Z and maybe beyond. I don't think the gradations of skill in any particular poker variant are anywhere near as numerous as in chess.

As for your last statement, to be successful, you certainly have to alter your strategy in chess depending on what your opponent does.

We can look at huge hand sample sizes and see differences in win rates between people. I'm not sure how you can compare that to the example above.

I guess this is like comparing apples to broccolis (and I do have heavy experience in both) since we're comparing a card game with huge luck factors played with multiple opponents to a board game that's played heads up.

In live poker I'm going to play differently in 6-12 LHE than 80-160 LHE. Hands I bluffcatch in 80-160 I'm probably folding in 6-12. Hands I normally open in passive games become folds if I have aggressive players in front of me. Drawing that line is the difficult part. As humans its hard to control frequencies.

So in chess, my opening (sometimes I do experiment but for the most part I'm playing 1...e6) is going to be the same and I'll always try to find the best move. I think I'd make the same moves I'd make against a "C" player and a GM.

What if you're playing a player very proficient as black vs e4 openings, but with no experience vs c4 openings?

Then do you still make the same opening move?

idk how to play 1.c4 so I'm better off with 1.e4 since that's the move I've opened with 99%+ of my games. I think I'm well prepared against the pirc/modern, alekhine, petroff, and scandinavian. against e5 I play scotch and against the sicilian I've gone through plenty of repetoires.

That wasn't the question.

Do you really not understand the point I'm making, given the point you're attempting to make?

The best play differs depending on your opponent.

Your response only really says "I'm not good enough at chess to understand."

I'd make significantly more conservative, positional moves vs a grandmaster and am far more likely to play hyper aggressive vs a weak player. Both because of their opening choices and because the consequences of missing something several moves down the road are worlds apart.

If you can make the example of differences between a 6/12 and 60/120 game, and can't understand the differences in move choices between playing a grandmaster and a c player, I don't really know what to say.

Because player quality and specific skill set matters in both cases.

I'm playing whatever fritz tells me to play in chess. In poker I want to maximize ev

Well, then you're probably losing to Houdini o.o

You do know all a chess computer does is calculate EV, yeah?

I'd venture a guess that most people thinking that the number of players at the table somehow greatly ramps up the complexity of poker has no idea how to make a math model for this sort of thing.

Dumb LOL

Stockfish's move in chess is like GTO in poker. Now if you take exploitative play into account, I never play 1.d4 against youngster because I will kill them tactically but I never open with 1.e4 against experienced master because I want slower games against them.
I would sac my knight for fun, completely unsound, against 1200 player cause I'll win quicker but will never do that against strong opponent.

I know how fritz works...

It's harder to calculate ev in poker than chess because poker is more complex with more dynamic factors

Isn't it true I want to make the best move possible. Fritz would play the same way against a c player and a gm

If I were to bet money id beat the last 2 posters in chess with a handicap

Dynamic factors what? Stockfish calculate millions of positions per second not to mention gigabytes of tablebase.
Do you know that until now chess engines can not evaluate King's Indian correctly? It just shows chess is not solved yet and engines can overestimate/underestimate extremely complex position like KID/Najdorf/Dragon.
If chess is not that complex, you won't see wins and losses in correspondence games that take 3 day/move WITH engine assistance.

Reply with your chess.com or ICC screen name, I'll challange you.

Its not that hard to calculate EV in poker....

I'd like to see a human calculate EV in chess.

PLO ???

Source

This is HU, add in 6-9max for poker as an option as well.

So 100 bb deep blind versus blind. SB raises to 3 bb - Bb looks down at 97s What is the EV of flatting?

If you say you need to know the other guy's hand - though the whole point is you don't know, he has JTo, different suits.

You really don't know how stupid of a question that is?

Because if not, this conversation would be pointless from the beginning.


TELL ME THE EV OF PLAYING E4 HERP DERP.

Game size isn't the same as complexity. It's easy to design games that have huge (even arbitrarily large) sized game trees but are trivial to play perfectly.

I assure you, my answer wasn't going to be that I need to know the other guy's hand. And knowing the guy's hand completely negates the entire decision tree.

Are you bad at math or are you just ******ed?

This is the part that keeps driving me nuts. As if the number of players at the start of a hand has any effect at all on complexity or adds any information at all. Like you need to be aware of every aspect of information for every player in every hand from the beginning.

Guess what, everybody. Additional players can significantly simplify a game, despite each individual player having information that may be relevant while playing a hand against that player.

DUCY?

As it happens the number of players does make the game more complex in poker. I don't think anyone still believes that 'HU is the most complex form of poker, because ranges are widest'.

FWIW, I don't have a strong opinion on which game is more 'complex' and I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a whole lot of motivated reasoning going on on both sides.

The game tree is bigger in poker because of multiple opponents and variable bet sizes (in NL/PL). However it is much more difficult to find an optimal decision in chess because the difference in value between the nodes in the game tree is so different.

In chess you often have a decision with an EV of +/- 1 (difference between winning or losing the game) in a situation where the decision is not intuitively obvious even to a good player.

In poker the difference between the options is generally much smaller (whether to open a marginal hand, whether to bet 1/2 or 2/3 pot, etc.) or the decision is obvious even to a beginner (what to do with 72 facing an UTG raise).

So the game tree complexity has nothing to do with the difficulty of the game for practical purposes.