72% (24)
27% (9)Recently, I had a very long debate with a notable BYONDer about whether poker is a game of skill. One of the tangents we took involved bringing in the game of chess.
Here is a quick summary of that debate:
B: Poker requires more skill than chess.
T: You could play 1000 games against Kasparov and never win one, you could play 1000 rounds of golf against Tiger Woods and never win one, you could play 1000 hands of Hold'em against Durrrr and win 300 hands at least.
B: Chess is solvable. There is enough parallel processing in the world to develop a program like Folding@Home to solve chess. You give me that program against Kasparov and _he_ would never win one.
T: Poker is about luck, without a computer program you can still beat Durrrr some of the time.
B: Individual hands aren't what's important, that's like saying having a two foot putt competition with Tiger Woods is relevant. If you played a million hands against Durrrr, you would go broke. If you played a million hands 1000 times against Durrrr, you would go broke every time.
All that being said, here is a passage from chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov: The Chess Master and the Computer
Perhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.
These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.
SuperAntx wrote:
Chess = Skill I'm assuming you know little about poker to claim it's a game of luck. | |
KhaosParadox wrote:
I'm assuming you know little about poker to claim it's a game of luck. I'm assuming you know little about statistics to try and disprove the claim it's a game of luck. | |
chess requires more skill/thinking unless you play braindead like I do 'cos it's soooo borin'.
poker though, is fun to play and can be more competitive. | |
Chess is all about strategy to beat your opponent without them knowing how you're going to do it. Poker is the same way to an extent, but with a different approach.
I believe Poker requires more skill because you never know what's going to happen, and you have to make an educated guess about yours and your opponents next move. However with Chess, it's a bit harder to be surprised unless you're playing a very good player. Everything is right infront of you, so you can make a better inferrence of where the game is going. So all in all, I voted Poker. | |
Popisfizzy wrote:
KhaosParadox wrote: Actually, he is right. Though Poker does have an element of luck to it, it also has some very complex strategy involved in it. Easily complex enough to rival something like Chess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_strategy If Poker was a game or luck and nothing else... Why do things like Poker tournaments exist? If it was a game or luck, anyone could enter any tournament and stand a reasonable chance of winning. (Given that they know how to play Poker) And yet there is world championship poker tournaments, and some of the winners win for several years in a row. | |
If you honestly think poker takes no skill I'd be glad to play some cash games with you.
Good players on sites like pokerstars log in for a few hours a day and they make 40k+ a year. Guess it's just luck. | |
KhaosParadox wrote:
Good players on sites like pokerstars log in for a few hours a day and they make 40k+ a year. Guess it's just luck. I'm glad you agree with me. | |
poker is as much luck and strategy as is yugioh
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Poker is a game of skill, but obviously has a luck component. In chess there is no luck whatsoever except perhaps in determining who goes first. The skills however are very different. Chess involves looking far ahead at possible future moves, whereas poker doesn't take as much of a long view (though to say strategy begins and ends with the current hand would be absurd).
Poker skills boil down to a handful of things to master, some more solvable for machines and others less so, but the latter often don't come up in digital play. The ability to spot a tell or cover up your own tells is meaningless in an online environment. The primary skill, one I believe a machine can pick up on, is getting to learn a player's betting habits. When a player bets they're sending a message about what they have, or what they want you to think they have. A computer can already know the relative strengths and weaknesses of the possible hands, and build up a behavioral model for each opponent. Humans for the most part have a pretty good skill set for reading behaviors, so poker, while complex, is an "easy" game compared to chess. Managing in your head hundreds of permutations of likely future moves is a much, much more difficult skill. However as "T" noted, even the most skillful poker player has to cope with luck, and luck aside there's just no one good enough to read or bluff their opponents 100% of the time. Chess always comes down to whose skill cracks first, but in poker a mediocre player can occasionally prevail. I submit as evidence the last poker tourney I played in. My cousin is a skilled, experienced poker player, but between a little luck, a little good play on my part, and likely plenty of bad play that threw him out of reckoning, I ended up winning the whole thing. It helped that out of seven players I was not the worst, but to say I was one of the best would have been a stretch. | |
Hmm, I would say chess takes far more skill.
Case in point: I know a few guys in college, paying for their way by playing online poker. It didn't take them long at all to get a general mastery of the concepts and gameplay(I'd say a year tops). These are people who aren't far above average intelligence either. I don't know of many people who can master chess in an amount of time relevant to a year without an super-human IQ. | |
Of course chess takes more skill. Perfect play in chess requires utterly incredible processing power - we don't yet /have/ enough processing power to solve chess completely.
Perfect poker play, on the other hand, is mostly a matter of being able to calculate probabilities. | |
There is a reason game theorists and information theorists (such as Claude Shannon) could go to Las Vegas, play games like Poker and Black Jack, and makes tons and tons of money, but not do the same with chess.
FYI. | |
To me I think good poker play is a lot like good sports play. You can have the best team in the league and still lose from time to time, and not just because Pete Morelli has the depth perception of a drunken pirate. But you'll at least tend to make the playoffs.
Yes, in 1000 hands against any of poker's greats an unskilled player will lose their shirt. But they could end up getting pretty far in a tournament simply as a result of random probability, accidentally throwing off the expectations of better players (who might misinterpret an irrational bet as a show of strength or a bluff), and the structure of the tournament itself. In a chess tournament not involving computers, Kasparov wins every time. | |
Poker is a game of both luck and skill.
Two players of even skill, have an even chance of winning. The more skilled you are (or the less skilled your opponent is), the bigger your chances of winning will be, and the less luck you would need to win. Assuming two players begin with the same skill, and play for an infinite amount of games, the result would be, I think, this: at the beginning they would both have an even chance of winning, and it would be a game of luck. Then one player or the other will start improving faster than the other, and eventually will surpass the other player skill-wise. It would then be a game of more skill than luck, as sufficient skill reduces much of the need for luck (so both players would need to rely more on skill to win). Eventually they would both reach the point of no improvement, and it would become a game of luck again (with equal potential). Poker, as part of its design, obviously has plenty to do with luck. That doesn't mean it's less complicated than chess, or that it requires less skill. In the first place, we should be asking what "skill" is. It's probably true that chess takes higher "computational" mental capabilities (g-factor, anyone?) to master, but poker makes use of an entirely different set of skills. I doubt all chess players would make good poker players, and vice versa. It's very easy to say poker is just a matter of calculating probabilities, but this stands only in a match between computers. A poker match between humans is much more psychological. Bluffing and risk-taking outweighs probability calculating. Against humans, the best computer poker player would be, I think, a very good lie detector. | |
In real life, I believe, poker actually requires more skill. With chess, as you said, it can be solved with equations and careful calculation. Poker depends on so much more than equations and calculation in person. Poker pros (at an actual table) play on a psychological level as well as mathematical. They factor in the chances that cards will re-appear based on what they've had/lost to, they examine their opponents and take note of any sortof tells, and every moment in the game will factor into their next decision. It's much more complex than chess, but only when it's played on a professional level.
This argument really is just based on how someone would define skill, not which game requires more. | |
If it's a question of which game involves more skill, chess wins hands down. Poker involves a great deal of skill but the skill set is one that's within human grasp. Chess involves the ability to see many moves ahead and understand an incredible number of permutations; it requires considerably more mental discipline and requires significant stretching of one's mental capabilities.
But that's not to make light of the achievements of poker pros, because mastering a competition with several opponents on a regular basis requires serious cleverness. It's really an entirely different thing, because what you're playing for is not strict win/loss, but a combination of winning more often, maximizing your winnings, and minimizing your losses. | |
Poker is only a game of skill if you are actually playing for money, because at that point bluffing and strategy in that area become a necessary reality. In any other situation where it isn't gambling, it's near impossible to not fool around and make the game seem real. Bluffs don't matter then since you can go all in anyways and it won't matter. Chess is obviously always a game of skill which I respect. Nonetheless, I love poker.
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Chess is all about memory. If you have the interest. Done.
As I sit here and ponder about the differences, I'm starting to see many similarities that I hadn't thought of before. Controlling your emotions and acting irrationally. Knowing your opponents patterns. Mood effects game play. hrmmmm... Without luck, poker would probably be as exciting as chess. In response to another comment... There are tells online. Timing, size of bets, patterns, chatting, and etc. | |
Poker = Luck
Chess is the superior game.