Terms of the $500 Poker Challenge: Start with $500 and build your poker bankroll over one year into a substantial bankroll. You may only play live games in casinos and poker rooms; no online or home games.
Uninformed players tend to consider chess a game of skill and poker a game of chance. I disagree. Poker and chess are both games of skill, and at a very high master/championship level, both are games of chance, but with very different tactical characteristics.
To get some more perspective on the problem, this past Thanksgiving weekend I decided to head over to the 46th annual American Open Chess Tournament held at the LAX Radisson Hotel.
The Tournament is run by Randy Hough, of the Southern California Chess Federation (SCCF). Randy does a fantastic job coordinating all the details required to pair players in the various rated sections from novices to grandmasters; from ages five through ninety-nine.
The SCCF, is an association of Southern California chess clubs, which includes the Los Angeles Chess Club (LACC), on Santa Monica Blvd in West Los Angeles. LACC was founded by Life Senior Master Mansour “Mick” Bighamian, and the club is rated among the 10 most active US chess clubs.
A few years ago Mick told me that LACC lost a number of chess players to poker. Most poker players know the reasons for this exodus: 1) the Moneymaker effect; and 2) there is more money to win playing poker than chess.
Long before the Moneymaker effect, “Action Dan” Harrington and Howard “The Professor” Lederer were chess players. Besides being a former champion backgammon player, Harrington is a US chess master and won the 1971 Massachusetts State Chess Championship.
Here’s a simple example of the difference between chess and poker. If you match up “Joe Public,” a highly-rated chess player but novice poker player against “Pete Anonymous,” a professional poker player but novice chess player, the chess player will usually beat the poker player in chess.
But if you change the game to poker, the poker pro beats the chess player. While it is true that expert chess players may occasionally luck out against the poker pro, in the long-term the chess player who is unskilled at poker will go broke many times over against the poker pro in any type of poker game.
When you review grandmaster chess games and listen to a grandmaster’s game analysis against equally matched opponents in a tournament, you discover that chess players, like poker players, play the player as well as the board.
Andy Bloch, puts it succinctly in No-Limit Hold’em: Play Before the Flop, Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Tournament Edition (chapter 6): “Play before the flop in no-limit hold’em can be studied like chess openings.”
Likewise, the experienced chess player knows that equally matched players can obtain an advantage in chess by learning the style and mental state of their opponent. Chess can learn from poker the dynamics of playing the player, and poker can learn from chess how to more clearly define the difference between unskilled and skilled players.
Meanwhile my poker education continues at the Poker Academy, where I encounter novices to advanced players in a structured and controlled environment. In addition, Frank Locascio, father of Stuart Locascio, the founder of the Poker Academy, is teaching me poker math and Brian “The Bear” McCann, also a chess player, is teaching me how to play the player.
I invite you to take the $500 Poker Challenge with me and report your results!
Contact “The Scientist” at highstakespoker@hotmail.com.
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