chess or poker

[TimM]

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I can't find it now, but I once saw someone do a statistical analysis on this very question. The logic went something like this:

1) identify a skill interval such that the player at the top of the skill interval beats the player at the bottom 75% of the time

2) count how many of those intervals seperate the worst player from the best player.

The guy's conclusion was that poker had more skill tiers than chess, but Go had like twice as many as poker.

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I was going to suggest this. In chess, the rating system makes it very easy to count the number of skill classes. A 75% expected score corresponds to a 200 point rating difference. For counting purposes the difference between USCF and FIDE ratings will not be significant, so I will use them interchangeably.

At the top of the human players, we have the 2800 FIDE players. At the bottom, the USCF scale is floored at 100. There are some players (kids) who would achieve a negative rating if it were not for this floor, but we have to question whether they are playing a legal game of chess at this point. Let's just call 200 the bottom for now. That makes about 13 skill classes. Perhaps someday the world will produce a 3000 rated chess player (whether it be man or machine), and that would make 14.

Now for poker, the problem is that unlike chess, the class interval is hard to define. In chess we have single games which can be used a discrete units. In poker it would be absurd to use single hands for this purpose. One would have to define some sort of heads-up freeze-out match to serve the same purpose as a single game of chess. Then the number of skill classes would depend on the exact structure, starting stacks, and poker variant. If we assume NLHE, then we just need to pick a blind/stack structure such that the amount of "play" in this freeze-out match loosely corresponds to the amount of "play" in a chess game.

I think that in this type of poker match, it would be very difficult to even come close to 13 or 14 distinct skill classes such that A beats B 75% who beats C 75% who beats D 75% etc., down to M or N.

[FreakDaddy]

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Have you ever referred to one of your fellow chess players as a "donk?" I read a book on chess in college and am still clueless as to how to play the game. One of my buddies in third grade taught me how to play poker in about 5 minutes.

I would imagine that a high-level chess player will have a much higher IQ than a high-level poker player. All you have to do is look through this thread at all the miss-spelings and incorrect grammer usage to get an idea of the IQ of the good players on this forum.

An argument could be made that poker requires a different skill set, but its hard to argue that poker requires more skill. For example, in the hand where Raymer got knocked out of the ME last year, Raymer said afterwards that "I felt like [my opponent] was on a draw." Well, once you read your opponent as having a draw on the turn, your opponent goes all-in, and you have an overpair ... well your decision is easy. Just because a computer can't be taught to read human emotions doesn't mean that poker is a more difficult game. It's different, but certainly it is not more difficult.

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I know some brilliant people who can't spell worth a lick. However I don't want to get into a discussion about IQ and what people think intelligence is. Being a philosopher, I would bore everyone here if I even began to pontificate on the relationship between psyche, mind and intelligence.

[FreakDaddy]

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I have a question targeted primarily to the serious chess players in the poker community. I was wondering which game you think requires more skill. I know that is a very general question, but I was hoping that might generate some spirited discussion.

I am a chess master in the United States Chess Federation (though I have not been active in about three years - about the time that I have been playing poker seriously), and I have some pretty detailed opinions on this. I'll provide them later, but I was wondering what others thought on the matter.

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As far as the OP's question, I think its poker and it's not too close imho. I played chess for many years, however not at a master level, but I believe I was FIDE rated at ~ mid 1600 level when I quit. I grew bored with the game and didn't feel like I wanted to put the time in necessary to advance to a master level.

Playing long term profitable poker at a high level requires a higher degree of mastery over the self. While it's true that to achieve excellence in any realm, this is true to one degree or another, there are many more factors that come into play in poker than in chess. If you only took the psychological factors of poker into consideration, poker becomes a more complex game than chess. There are very little psychological factors involved in chess (there are some of course). If you add in the reading ability of the poker player and his precision into taking all of the elements around him and applying them to any given hand his involved in, it's a much more complex game than a linear game.

My opinion is that if you took the highest rated chess players and the best poker players, put them in a room and gave them complex random problems to figure out, the poker players would come out on top. Most Grand Masters that I've met seem to border more on savant or rain man kind of mind sets. They are so focused on one particular thing, that they have difficulty putting other complex problems together (generally speaking of course).

So what are your thoughts sam?

[good2cu]

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They are so focused on one particular thing, that they have difficulty putting other complex problems together (generally speaking of course).

So what are your thoughts sam?

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Same could be said of many poker players.

[Gelford]

LOL


And I was beating 2NL finding it kind of unimaginative and deciding that chess is a much better ... yes ... sure

[Shandrax]

There is one other important difference between chess and poker. Due to computer analysis the speed at which knowledge evolves in chess is insane. Certain openings became 100% unplayable while others are subject to a theoretical discussion around move 38. It is not too difficult to see that chess will be analyzed to death very soon - which will prove Capablanca and in an essence Fischer right. That's the downside of complete information. At one point it will be complete. I am afraid that the future of chess lies in that extremely ugly Fischer version which hurts my eyes when I look at the positions.

Stuff like that won't happen with Poker. Even if optimal strategies are known, there is still room to deviate because your opponent doesn't have complete knowledge of what you are doing.

[FreakDaddy]

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They are so focused on one particular thing, that they have difficulty putting other complex problems together (generally speaking of course).

So what are your thoughts sam?

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Same could be said of many poker players.

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Do you agree that most nearly ALL grandmasters have been playing chess since a very early age?

Great poker players generally come from all sorts of backgrounds and have many other skill sets...

conclusion?

[FreakDaddy]

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LOL


And I was beating 2NL finding it kind of unimaginative and deciding that chess is a much better ... yes ... sure

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play higher limits live.

[dardo]

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Most Grand Masters that I've met seem to border more on savant or rain man kind of mind sets. They are so focused on one particular thing, that they have difficulty putting other complex problems together (generally speaking of course).

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Good post. That's the thing about just analytical thinking. It may look great, but in the end it just serves to annoy the ignorant.

It needs to be integrated in a more general, complex kind of thinking ... broad perspective, strategy, the capacity of taking correct decisions from an infinite number of elements. Something, computers, are still way behind from humans.

This said, I don't think you can't become a real top chess player without being a great strategist ( as well as a very good analytical aptitude).

But I do think most of the good chess players aren't, in opposition with most of good poker players who need the strategy skill just from the beggining and analytical skill is just a drop.

The same you said about chess masters, I can say from mathematicians. Being one of them, I can say that a lot of them have a sharp analitical aptitude but they are far from bright.

regards,

dardo

[Shandrax]

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Most Grand Masters that I've met seem to border more on savant or rain man kind of mind sets. They are so focused on one particular thing, that they have difficulty putting other complex problems together (generally speaking of course).

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Good post. That's the thing about just analytical thinking. It may look great, but in the end it just serves to annoy the ignorant.

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No clue what sort of GMs the above poster knows, I know quite a lot and the absolute majority are normal people. The only real weirdo I can think of is Epishin.

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This said, I don't think you can't become a real top chess player without being a great strategist ( as well as a very good analytical aptitude).

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To become a real chess player you need a good teacher (GM if possible) and you must have certain abilities: You must be able to play blindfold, you must be a fast thinker, you must have an excellent memory, you must have a love for the game and last but not least, you must have the killer insinct.

If you are lacking a single one of these attributes, you will barely make it to FM level.

Funny, but it's possible that the same goes for poker.