Inevitable mathematical solving of chess, and Limit / NL hold'em

[Siegmund]

I expect to live to see all of the above.

HU holdem will go first. (Limit vs NL, cap vs no cap, will make a very tiny difference - maybe a few months between one and the other being solved. I wouldn't even speculate whether NL or limit will be solved first.)

Chess will take longer - maybe a lot longer - but more and more endgames are being catalogued, which leaves fewer and fewer midgames left to worry about (all you need is to show one path by which both players can force a draw, from those middle positions) ... then the dust will settle quietly as the remaining variations are sorted out, so that a list of fatal errors vs. harmless deviations can be made.

Three- or more-handed games require assumptions about coalitions to be made. Under the assumption that every player cares only about maximizing his own stack size without collusion, these will only take a few years longer than HU holdem, and probably happen well before chess does.

In the context of numbers of possible positions, HU holdem is among the easiest of as-yet-unsolved games, just a few orders of magnitude simpler than cribbage.

[jogsxyz]

In chess every move is a sub-set of the optimum move.
In poker this isn't true. Every newly dealt card changes
everything. Inferior plays are rewarded everyday, every
hour, and every minute. Playing optimal strategy
guarantees nothing.

[bigpooch]

CHESS
=====

I don't expect a solution to chess for at least a century
even though it is a finite two-person zero-sum game. There
are simply too many legal chess positions. The complete
database for endgames can be estimated below:

3 man Nalimov Tablebase...80 kB (measured)
3+4 man Nalimov Tablebases...30 MB (measured)
3+4+5 man Nalimov Tablebases...7.5 GB (measured)
3+4+5+6 man Nalimov Tablebases...1-2 TB (estimated)
3+4+5+6+7 man Nalimov Tablebases...200-600 TB (estimated)
3+4+5+6+7+8 man Nalimov Tablebase...40-180 PB (estimated)
...
Complete 3+4+5+...+30+31+32 man Nalimov Tatablebases...????


POKER
=====

Draw, 5-stud or draw-like or 5-stud-like games are more
easily solvable than hold'em. I agree that HU LHE is the
first "complex" kind of poker that will be solved and I'm
not sure that anything 3-handed will be solved anytime soon.
Also, there may already be strategies that have been
developed that are balanced (unexploitable) and very close
to the right level of aggression used in practice for HU
NLHE now.

Also, once PL is solved, it may not be big a leap to solve
NL, but again, for 10-handed NLHE, it's very unlikely to be
"solved" in the same way that checkers has been.