Last Saturday I was playing poker at the casino when I met a very interesting guy called Jaan Ehlvest. At first I thought he was just another holiday maker having a good time, after a few hours of conversation he explained he was here for a chess festival. It wasn’t till the next day when I looked up on the internet, I came across a long list of articles and results. I had been sitting next to one of the best chess players in the world, from what I have read there is only about 1000 or so grandmasters. Here is a little section of information I pulled up:
“Jaan Ehlvest was born on the 14th of October 1962 in the USSR. He was awarded the IM (International Master) title in 1982 and the GM (Grand Master) title in 1987.
“Jaan Ehlvest—International Grandmaster and World Championship Candidate. Fourth in the world in 1989; currently in the top 60.
If you are interested in reading more, you can visit his official website Ehlvest Chess Gates.
On Sunday evening he invited me and my girlfriend for dinner just after he won the chess fesitival in Curacao. A lot of the chess players at the table seemed to be interested in online poker and I was more than happy to answer any of their questions. The main interest of the evening was about the possibility of online chess for money. I explained although it wasn’t impossible the main worry for the general public is the use of bots (programs with some artificial intelligence that are sent to do a task in lieu of a real person).
Poker is a game of imperfect information; perfect information is a term from game theory. It basically means that information about other players’ actions is always available on the table. For instance in chess, you can see all of the moves that the other player makes, and he can see yours. In poker this is not the case, one of the most popular forms of poker is Texas Hold’em and by far the most played form of poker in the world. The main reason for this is because it requires the most amount of skill. You are dealt two cards which are faced down and you must use those two cards (hole cards) and the board to make a five card hand. I don’t want to go in to great detail but if you want to learn more about Texas Hold’em you can read or play for fun at PokerRoom.com.
Poker is a simple game when compared to chess; the odds of each hand occurring is easy to learn with very limited experience, which puts the human on the same level with what a computer can do. However I am not saying poker is an easy game, it’s far more complex than just understanding odds. There is a large essence of bluffing, reading and psychology of the game which I won’t go in to today.
In chess the computer has an advantage because as I explained before it is a game of perfect information. Humans do not have the speed of calculating ability that computers have. Today’s home computers and software are capable of calculating the perfect information of chess. However a computer will never be able to comprehend the imperfect information in poker.
However I wouldn’t give up on the idea, working in online poker for some years I know it’s possible to detect a perfect playing pattern with the use of a computer to prevent the use of bots even though they are pretty useless. So in theory it could be used for chess but proving it would be another problem.
I was just about to finish this article and I just read about another player that was also sat at the table, Alex Shabalov another GM.
The Poker articles that I’ve been posting over the past few months are free content for your site. All I ask is my name (Oliver Jon Cross) and a link to eDrinker (
www.eDrinker.com).