Nick is a cash game player, content creator and part of 888poker’s Stream Team. Each week he shares his thoughts and experiences as a player dedicated to the daily grind. This week he asks the question: what’s the real reason chess and poker sit so well together?
With the most difficult task I’ve ever set myself out of the way in the wake of completing my $1,000 10NL Challenge after a painstaking 3 years, I’ve been asked a lot about what's next. I do like to have something to keep me on my toes, but after what I’ve put myself through already, I don’t think I’d ever want to take on another poker bankroll challenge.
I’ve spoken before about my competitive nature and how that’s driven me to work harder on my game, but I’ve found that poker doesn’t completely scratch that itch. There are a lot of unknowns in poker that you can’t really prepare for, or be expected to, in addition to the gauntlet of variance that everyone has to run. Unless you are one of the top pros, you are bound to find yourself feeling helpless at one stage or another, as if there’s nothing you could have done.
So as luck would have it, I stumbled upon a long lost passion for a game that I never thought I’d be playing again: chess.
Are chess and poker really all that similar?
At the recent 888LIVE event in Barcelona, I was lucky enough to be involved in shooting content with some top chess players and content creators. I used to play as a kid, but somewhere along the road it became less important to me as other hobbies took over. Presented with a chance to play again, I quickly rediscovered what drew me to the game all that time ago.
In my opinion, there has been somewhat of a forced narrative drawing parallels between chess and poker over the last few years, as crossovers with content creators of each game have become more prominent. Interviews often ask questions designed to paint similarities that are vague at best, pointing to similar mental capacities required for both games and an overlap in the cognitive elements of chess and poker.
Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate how, in a loose sense, some of the same skills could be transferable from one game to another. But I think this tends to completely miss the point of why chess players are intrigued by poker, and vice versa.
The real reason chess players like poker
Poker is a game of incomplete information and quite often feels flagrantly unfair. You could be the best poker player in the world (if there was even a way of measuring this), and it would still be quite common to lose; not only that, but to lose to players who have played, studied and understand the game less than you. In fact, you spend most of your time playing poker losing, and oftentimes it’s either not your fault, or you can’t figure out whether it was your fault or not.
In chess, the best player almost always wins. There are objectively good and bad moves. It’s also possible to study the game and see yourself measurably improve over time, with good play being visibly rewarded. Most notably of all, of course, is that if you lose, it’s always your fault. There’s nothing to hide behind when you lose a game, it simply highlights your weaknesses.
I don’t think a chess player is drawn to poker by the supposed overlaps between the games, in fact I believe it’s quite the opposite. It’s a break from the unenviable grind of always having to be better than your opponent to win. We all know a 500-rated chess player could never win the Chess World Championship, but almost anyone can win the World Series of Poker Main Event. Sometimes it’s just nice to play a game where you don’t have to be the best, where the environment is more forgiving to those who haven’t put their life and soul into studying. Where you can have an off day and still get lucky. That’s the real draw in my mind.
Crossing the divide
And it’s much the same for me as a poker player picking up chess again. I’ve spent over a decade taking bad beats, losing to worse players and sometimes beating better ones. There are times every time I play where I do everything I think is right and still lose, through seemingly no fault of my own.
That’s why chess speaks to me, even though I’m an utterly abhorrent chess player. I can play a game and lose because I’m awful, and it’s genuinely cathartic. I’ve no one to blame but myself, and it’s incredibly refreshing to lose purely and simply because I suck.
My rating is still only 500, but even at such a low level I’ve been able to see myself improving, and understanding why I’ve lost and what I need to do differently. I’ve been enjoying it so much that I even spent some of my hard earned $1,000 10NL Challenge profits on my first ever chess board.
So let’s not pretend these two incredible games are peas from the same pod for the sake of it. They are beautifully different, each providing a much needed dose of sanity to anyone who crosses the divide.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to blunder my queen.
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Images courtesy of 888live/Gema Cristobal/Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash
