Chess and Poker

Anybody with any experience in poker would realize, that a bad player who justs gets lucky, playing against good players, the vast majority of the time, will not win near as much as a good player with the very same hands would have.

Funny thing is that there must be some poker champs around looking down on chess players for putting so much effort on a game that will earn them exchange money in obscure tournaments (to the majority, not even that), when compared to big poker events.

 That might be true for just one hand, but good poker players don't play poker like they're shooting craps. If you played like that all night, you would end up being out more more money than you probably make in a year.

I am definitely not arguing that poker is not a game of skill, it definitely is. 

In my opinion, poker players need to be good at a wide range of mostly unrelated skills (statistics, psychology, patience, self-control, the ability to gain information from other players, the ability to disguise your information and mislead your opponent,… ) while chess players need have a more limited and related skill set(analyzing, calculating, planning, ect but all concerning 32 pieces on 64 squares).  In a chess game/tournament , the winner was a more skilled chess player than whomever he was playing at that time.  The same is not true of a poker game/tournament.  Any particular poker hand/game/tournament can be won/lost by luck (“random variation”); of course most hands/games/tourneys are won because of skill.  Because of the prevalence of luck in the short run however, a poker game/tourney is, in my opinion, not as much of a test of skill as a game/tourney of chess.  This is why amateurs can win major poker tournaments, but no amateur chess player will win a major chess event.  In the long run the better the poker player the more they win, but in chess the better player wins consistently in both the long and short run.  I think it is subjective which game one believes to take more skill to be great at in the long run (I think chess though I my opinion may change when I get back into poker).

 Yes you can. You should always go home when it stops being fun.

Many like to point out how much more money one can win in poker than in chess but they never talk about what the " entry fees" ( buy ins ) are like in such big poker tournaments. Why ?  Arent buys ins for these big poker tournaments thousands of dollars ?  If you dont win then you lose all that buy in, right ? 

 I agree with most of what you say, but one thing people aren't seeming to realize on here, is that just because somebody is an amateur poker player doesn't mean they're a bad poker player. Two completely different things. I've played poker all my life, and am very good, if I do say so myself. As far as the amount of study it takes to master chess, and poker, I think it's obvious that chess takes a lot more study than poker. It's a more complicated game.

some good comments some stupid comments.

As someone who has played both poker and chess for years there is a big difference!

A GM will beat me 99.9% of the time whilst if i play whoever you want (Brunson, Negreanu, Hederer, Hachem) i can still beat them in poker even though they are evidently hugely better than me! 

This difference is a huge impact on it and distinctly shows the element of luck! Any fool in poker can outdraw to make the winning hand and they often do!

Depending on your definition of a "poker game" poker is a game of luck.

Why? Because the luck factor is too great if you play a FEW number of hands.

The "edge" for a better player is too small compared to chess. 

Any poker pro will tell you over a large number of hands, poker is a game of skill, but over a few hands ? its just a crapshoot.

A skilled GM can face off a strong club player in once rapid chess game and win almost always. The equivalent in poker for 10-30 hands of poker can go either way.

So, depending on how much poker hands are played poker can be mainly a game of skill or a game of luck.

 You were right about stupid comments, so why did you, and the poster right above you have to add two more?

For those who claim that chess is 100% skill, consider this:

I once played in a poker tournament with some friends (no-limit hold'em). When there were only two players left, one of whom makes a lot of money playing on the Internet, and the other who was only along for the ride, they went all-in with the semi-pro having a slightly smaller stack. He had pocket aces, while the other guy had 32 offsuit. The flop was A45 - and no, the board didn't pair on the turn or the river (I swear this really happened). So the worse player won.

Now, consider a noob playing chess against Anand. What if he picks a move at random every time, and it turns out that those moves are always the top move recommended by Rybka? The odds in favor of that would be infinitesimal, but non-zero. So, a noob could win against Anand, just like going all-in with 32 offsuit can win against aces - the only difference being that the odds make the chess noob's victory almost impossible, while the poker noob can actually win once in a while.

Add to that the factor of skill, which reduces the complete randomness of the chosen chess move. In fact, it eliminates a huge portion of the worst possible moves - a player rated around 1800, for instance, might only choose between four or five moves instead of the dozens of possibilities, many of which lose instantly. In a game of around 30-40 moves, it becomes quite possible for a mediocre player to beat a champion, and only because of "luck".

Both games can be considered as a series of choices with different expectation values. The only difference is that in poker, the odds of losing when making the best choices are much greater - great enough to allow bad players to win once in a while (though not in the long run). In chess, these odds are so infinitesimal that the better player usually always wins.

Reb, the buy-in to the main event at the world series is $10,000 and there are now several events that cost $50,000+ to enter. What they don't also mention is that as more people play in a poker event, the more likely it is for the professionals to fall to bad luck against a poorer player. I doubt the same is true at a large open chess event simply because the element of "luck" has more to do with color assignment and opening preparation than actual statisical variations.

Chess is still 100% skill.  It is not luck but lack of skill from the opponent that
results in the win.  Poker takes great skill as well but there is a chance factor.

i'd have to disagree with a bunch of people in this thread saying that poker skill is about calculating odds and the like. speaking as a consistent poker player, figuring out the odds is necessary, but is very easy once you get used to it. there's no difficult math involved at all, and in many cases, you don't really have to know the math because you already know the odds simply because you've been in such and such a position many times in the past.

the skill in poker is in knowing when to bet/raise/check/call, how much to bet/raise (in reference to the pot, to drawing hands, etc.), putting your opponent on hand ranges (and properly comparing them to your own hand ranges), and reading the opponent (i.e. reading their bet sizes and reading their physical tells if in person).

calculating pot odds and such is quite easy and can easily be explained (which i'm more than willing to do if anyone is interested).

 100% correct!

But the Chess people are are not listening to the fact that the game of poker is not one or one session or even one tournament: it is a long term game. They are placing too much emphasis on "LUCK" without understanding that this is statistical variance.

Incidently, a good poker player can control this by the way that they play. A tight player (one that plays few but good hands) has a very low variance level while a loose player (one that plays a lot of hands including many poor hands) has a high variance level. One might say the tight player is luckier because he wins more of the hands that he plays. Conversely, people will say that the loose player is lucky because they will suck out with pitiful hands. Both statements are false: the tight players wins more of the hands that he plays because he has chosen a low variance while the loose player wins suckouts because he has chosen a high variance.

Variance (what a lot people here are calling luck) is not necessarily bad! One of the major players in the game, Gus Hanson has written that he has won  both playing as a tight player and as a loose player but chooses to play loose to increase the amount of money that he wins while accepting that he will lose more hands. Another player very good player, Annette Oberstad (known online a Annette_15) wrote that she found that she enjoyed the game and won more often by playing loose aggressive than as tight aggressive. But the point is that the luck factor is controllable if you know what you are doing.

Both Chess and Poker are good games where skill is critical to winning. They differ in that Chess is largely not a game of statistics although for poor players, one could run statistics on what moves they will play and play to their weaknesses. Poker is a statistical game.

Many of the critical skills are different so there is no basis for saying which requires more skill. Asking which requires more skill is akin to arguing whether the intelligence to be a medical doctor is more or less than that required to be a physicist. There just is not a basis for comparison.

 BS

Many very poor players enjoy playing the game allthough they do not possess the critical skills to win often. If you look at http://www.chess.com/echess/players.html

you will see that the average player has a rating of 1342. Would you consider this player skillful?

By the way, I would love to have an ELO of 1342; my Chess skills are sadly lacking. ;(

     Both games are fun but studying chess endgames can be tedious to most people,
including rated chess players. 

 Me too.

This is a bad use of the english language where what has been said in the wrong way.

If someone plays the game of chess perfectly they will never lose only win or draw.  If someone plays the game of poker perfectly they'll certainly have bad runs but will be a winning player over a suitable long run.

The main issues are the suitable long runs can be ridiculously large and the short-term variances can be incredibly large.  Particularly with $10,000 entry fee tournaments if you a world class player sufficiently skilled to get a 70-30 edge on the field, and the typical field is about 2000 players, you're still unlikely to win in any practical time frame.

For $10/$20 limit hold'em, 2 players using an identical strategy for 3 years of professional play can differ by $5/hour and have done so in tests!  If you're playing 40+ hrs/week that's over $10,000/year in differences in a situation specifically chosen for low variance.

In $10,000 entry tournaments it frequently happens that good players have 10 non-cashes in a row due to bad beats or the occasional blunder/mistake/inaccuracy (misread, etc) so $100,000 negative swings certainly do occur.

I played online poker throughout my undergrad years, and averaged about $40 US an hour at medium stakes, so I'm probably not incompetent when it comes to the game. 

I pretty much quit when the US changed its banking laws because it became more difficult to cash in/withdraw and I was much more successful against Americans than Europeans. Also I wanted to focus on several other things (U26 Bridge Championships in Australia, Masters Degree, Teaching, etc.).

But I was most successful in cash games where the variance is lower.  Poker Tournaments are the epitome of high variation.  90% of the players lose the entry fee, 5% get roughly 150% of the entry fee and the remaining 5% show solid to massive wins.