Bobby Fischer

[LuckyDevil]

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P.S. If I had a gun to my head forcing me to stake someone to the 2005 WSOP, I'd take any random reader of this thread over any chess GM and a copy of SSHE, or SuperSystem, or <insert random poker book here>.

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I think you underestimate how hard GM's train. I'd take the GM over a random poster.

[curtains]

I really wish I could in good conscience produce a list of GM's who are some of the worst poker players I've ever seen. And I promise you, these GM's want to be good at poker, they just never will be.

[TransientR]

Good post.

Top backgammon players have made far more of a mark on the poker world than chess players.

Do you see why?

Frank

[curtains]

Note however there are quite a few strong chessplayers who actually are doing well at poker. Some are not so well known yet however.

[LargeCents]

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I think you underestimate how hard GM's train. I'd take the GM over a random poster.

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It isn't a question of training. I agree that chess GMs are the hardest working people at the top of any field. But, hard work alone will not make someone a chess GM. Similarly, hard work alone cannot make someone a winning poker player. There needs to be that drive/desire/dedication as well as modest talent/instinct/mindset/whatever.

Rather than underestimating chess GMs, I think I am actually giving winning poker players a whole lot of credit.

Poker is a difficult game to become a long-term winner. It's not like anyone can just read Super System and *poof* they are magically a winning poker player any more than someone can read My System and instantly become a winning chess player. I wish life were that easy! I'd just walk down to the library and read some book called How to Become a Billionaire , and I'd never look back.

[LargeCents]

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Note however there are quite a few strong chessplayers who actually are doing well at poker. Some are not so well known yet however.



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Can you give any names? Thanks.



The more I think about it, Poker and Chess are really nothing alike! The biggest difference is that in Chess you've got exactly one opponent, a very strict time control, a very specific understanding of everything relating to the game. Poker is almost the exact opposite. Poker is extremely dynamic with so many different varieties and structures from tournaments to home games. Winning at Poker is like wading through a rushing river, whereas Chess is like climbing a mountain. In Poker, everything is dynamic, it's all about change. Chess is completely static, it's a matter of who's the most proficient calculator/memory/technique, it's almost as if your opponent doesn't matter, because you are really just playing the board. In Poker, if you just "Play the Board", you'll never advance past the micro-limits, if that.

[MicroBob]

There are chess-greats who have talked specifically about the necessity to 'play the man' and not just the board in chess.


Chess isn't just memorizing the techniques and the openings.


If I played against curtains in a new form of chess that had a 9x9 board, randomized placement of the pieces on the back-row, and a new piece called a 'prince' which could move like a Knight OR a Queen there is little doubt in my mind that curtains would wipe the floor with me simply because he is a better player than I am.


There are MANY variations of chess out there actually.
Just like NL hold-em is the main form for tourney poker, regular 'slow' chess is the main form of chess.

There is Kriegspiel (where you cannot see your opponents' piece), loser-chess (try to lose all your pieces) and a couple forms of it where it does or doesn't make a different whether or not you are in check or get check-mated


also Fischer-Random chess which Bobby Fischer wanted to become more popular. Randomizing the back-row pieces to do away with the advantages of memorizing 'book-openings'.

Basically, the strongest player in the world wanted to prove how much stronger he was via a game where opening-memorization would be taken out as a factor.


This doesn't even include the differences between kinda slow time-controls like 40/2, SD/1 (40 moves in 2 hours followed by sudden-death in 1 hour) and even slower such as something that doesn't have sudden-death at the end and just keep going....as opposed to action-chess like game-in-30...speed-chess of game-in-5 minutes...and bullet-chess of game-in-2 minutes of game-in-1.


Not to mention the different formats for tourneys and championship matches which can make a big difference as to what types of players are at an advantage of disadvantage.




I generally agree that the differences between the two games are significant....but somehow it feels to me like they both appeal to the same general section of my brain.

[LargeCents]

MicroBob, I love your posts and comments, I love your cat picture, but I've got to disagree with you about poker v.s. chess.


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There are chess-greats who have talked specifically about the necessity to 'play the man' and not just the board in chess.


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I will agree, at the GM level, knowing your opponents opening repetoire is life and death. But, we aren't really talking about psychology or tells here. I still claim that you are playing the board, despite this type of opening preparation for specific opponents. I know there is such a thing as style and affinity towards certain types of play and positions, but there is only such much you can take this into account when making moves at the chess board.


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Chess isn't just memorizing the techniques and the openings.


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In a nutshell, yes it is. I've played at the intermediate tournament level (1600-1900 range) during the majority of my life. I think I could make master, if I wanted to devote an extra 10 hours a week to study and training over the period of several years. Technique and repetoire would be the central part of my focus. What else is there?

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There are MANY variations of chess out there actually.
Just like NL hold-em is the main form for tourney poker, regular 'slow' chess is the main form of chess.


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Yes, variation in time control is the chief variant in chess. But, it's still just chess. I've played standard tournament time controls all the way down to bullet on ICC, and yeah, it's like night and day. But, it's not like switching from Hold 'em to draw poker. It's still just chess. Blitz chess is basically analogus to the "Turbo" online poker tournaments where the blinds go up at ridiculous intervals. It just adds a higher variance.


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If I played against curtains in a new form of chess that had a 9x9 board, randomized placement of the pieces on the back-row, and a new piece called a 'prince' which could move like a Knight OR a Queen there is little doubt in my mind that curtains would wipe the floor with me simply because he is a better player than I am.

There is Kriegspiel (where you cannot see your opponents' piece), loser-chess (try to lose all your pieces) and a couple forms of it where it does or doesn't make a different whether or not you are in check or get check-mated


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Nobody takes these chess variants seriously, except as a momentary novelty at best.

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also Fischer-Random chess which Bobby Fischer wanted to become more popular. Randomizing the back-row pieces to do away with the advantages of memorizing 'book-openings'.


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I actually love Fischer-Random, but can rarely get anyone to play it. Same note as above, nobody takes it seriously.

Fischer invented his random chess to avoid chess becoming a battle between duelling opening analysts, which the Russians used to their advantage, and decades later, IBM used against the last of the Russian machine, Kasparov! Assembling a team to concoct opening analysis specifically designed against a particular opponent, Kasparov. Chess has really moved out of the playing hall, and into the laboratory due to this fact, especially at the highest levels.

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Not to mention the different formats for tourneys and championship matches which can make a big difference as to what types of players are at an advantage of disadvantage.


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I personally don't feel that tournament formats are a huge aspect of the game. I mean, you're still just playing chess. There aren't that many tournament formats, and they aren't really that much different from one another. They definitely don't significantly affect strategy.

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I generally agree that the differences between the two games are significant....but somehow it feels to me like they both appeal to the same general section of my brain.


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Well, there's a lot of similarities between poker and chess as well.

For one, in both cases you are sitting there hour after hour "analyzing" data. But with chess, it's actual material data in the form of chess configurations on the board. With poker, it's presumably dealing mostly with analyzing what type of players are sitting at the table with you. These are two very different types of things to assess!

Both poker and chess seem to have tools available in the form of books and computer software which are integral to understand key aspects of the respective games. This is probably the biggest similarity. It might be what got me interested in poker, seeing all of the strategy laid out for me in the form of a book like HEFAP. It felt natural, like going through Silman's Reassess Your Chess . It's nice to have a roadmap to success, even if it doesn't always show the best way, and may even be missing key roads. Computer software, similarly helps sharpen and hone what you've learned, and analyze what you know/don't know and where you are doing things right and wrong. The "study" aspect of both games seems almost identical to me. But, that's where it starts, and stops. Period.

[MicroBob]

Your disagreements are valid.


When I was pointing out the different variants, time-controls and tourney-formats of chess I was pretty much just addressing the notion that 'all chess is the same'


I haven't been following chess that much for the past few years....but what about that world-championship tourney-bracket thing for the chess title a few years ago?

With the tie-breaking game being a 6-min vs 5-min where black has the advantage to try to draw...or whatever sillyness they had.
Surely some players are better off in different formats.


These are about as different as a regular golf tourney as opposed to match-play.
Or the poker heads-up tourney as opposed to a regular tourney.


I agree that most of the different forms of chess are pretty much novelties though....and this includes Fischer-random which nobody seems to dig.



When I mentioned 'playing the man' in chess I was just disagreeing with the notion that chess is ONLY 'playing the board'. Basically, pointing out that at some levels this is not necessarily considered to be true. I certainly wasn't saying that you play the 'man' more in chess than in poker....or that playing the man is even necessary at most levels. Just that it isn't ALWAYS the case.



Poker has some different variants of course....but for the most part good tourney players are going to be decent at any of these if forced to play them.
You will be hard-pressed to find a great hold-em player who isn't at least reasonably competent at omaha (assuming he has played it a few times).

Obviously some will excel more at stud than hold-em and others will excel more at triple-draw than omaha....but it's not like the games are that markedly different.

Not many of the best omaha and stud tourney players are exactly going to be fish at hold-em.

I don't know enough about triple-draw lowball or 5-card draw to really comment....but I suspect that any of the top hold-em players (Ivey, Greenstein, Reese, etc etc) would do pretty okay at whatever variation of poker you put them in to if they wanted to put just minimal effort into learning that particular game.



Good response though....just clarifying some of my earlier thoughts.

[LargeCents]

Thanks MicroBob. I have to admit that I haven't been playing much chess the last few years either. Poker has essentially taken over the hours that I used to spend going down to the chess club. Now, I rarely even allow enough time to play a handful of blitz games on ICC. Last week, I had a poker session that really got inside my head and under my skin, so I got away from poker for well over a week, and kinda picked up chess again for a while. But, the more chess I play, the more I wonder how I ever enjoyed the game. I guess my dad and I used to love challenging each other to name a state's capital city. To this day, I can still name the state capital for any U.S. state. I can't believe I used to find this game fun, but hey I was 5, and it's just one of those father-son things, I guess. Chess is about the same. I think way back long ago, it gave me some satisfaction knowing I could wipe the board with just about anyone who wasn't fairly hardened with tournament experience. Now, I just don't really care. There's no +EV! lol

I guess this thread has somehow helped me "understand" my transition from chess to poker. My last post was mostly a catharsis, trying to express myself, somehow validating all of the hours I've spent staring at those 64 squares.

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With the tie-breaking game being a 6-min vs 5-min where black has the advantage to try to draw...or whatever sillyness they had.
Surely some players are better off in different formats.


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lol, I forgot all about FIDE and their stupidity. You are right. I was thinking more in terms of tournaments I've played with single-swiss or double round robin, etc, it never mattered to me. I worried more about dropping a piece in time trouble. But, yes, FIDE is so infinitely stupid as far as organizing matches and tournaments. As if chess didn't have enough problems with the game "dying" through the shift towards computers and opening analysis paralysis, FIDE seems unable to keep tournaments competitive and interesting. I'll grant that I'm not a GM, maybe these rules make sense on some level, but it just doesn't interest me anymore. Fischer was right, that chess is dead. Right now, it's a rotting corpse along the side of the road.

Maybe with the King of chess, Kasparov, announcing his retirement earlier this week, chess will somehow gain new life. I don't see it, but with Kasparov in charge, nothing dynamic was going to happen. World champions, historically, are notorious for changing/keeping the rules to hold onto their title for as long as possible. It's pretty sad. Russian-controlled FIDE was basically Kaspy's puppet, doing whatever necessary in changing/keeping the rules intact to keep Kaspy happy. I speculate that FIDE will keep trying to back whoever the next Russian champion should be. I see somewhat of a movement towards rankings and "majors" similar to tennis or PGA, so maybe they'll take heed and not even crown a world champ anymore, which would really help keep the game competitive. Nothing killed the game more than the draw-fest of the mid-80's between Kaspy and Karpov, perhaps poisoning match play chess forever.

Ok, I'm burnt out on chess. Let's play some poker!