Chess, poker and bridge: an aesthetic comparison

This may be of interest to that tiny intersection of the population that have played chess, poker and bridge. Chess, king of classic board games! Bridge, queen of all card games! Poker, the most intellectual of gambling games! If you’re going to sink countless hours of your life into one of these games (as many have), which is the most deserving?

In all cases I’m comparing classical time control chess, with duplicate bridge, with Texas Holdem poker, and I assume a basic knowledge of the games.

The role of luck

Before diving into a comparison though, are these 3 games even comparable? One big difference is the role of luck.

Poker involves the most luck. It is a casino game, after all. Recreational players are willing to sit down at a casino table, surrounded by poker professionals, with the casino taking a cut (‘rake’) and they will still win often enough to come back! It would be unthinkable for a recreational chess player to play a chess tournament with a gaggle of grandmasters, for large sums of money, in the hope that the grandmasters will somehow all have a bad day and blunder away their queens.

There is so little information provided in poker, at least initially (just your 2 ‘hole’ cards), that to be halfway decent you need to play the player and take into account how your opponents have played before, any ‘tells’ they might have, and perhaps the red t-shirt they’re wearing that day means they’re in a loose aggressive mood? It is even legally a game of luck in many jurisdictions, and online poker is indeed illegal in Australia where I live, based on the law regarding remote gambling.

Nevertheless, poker is a highly mathematical game — MIT even offers a course in ‘poker theory and analytics’. In the long run skill will dominate luck, though as Rick Bennet said, “In the long run there’s no luck in poker, but the short run is longer than most people know”. A ballpark estimate is that skilled players can expect to do better than their relatively unskilled counterparts at least three quarters of the time after 1,500 hands have been played. Or, less statistically, “Poker is 100% skill and 50% luck.” ~ Phil Hellmuth.

Bridge also involves randomness and imperfect information, though in bridge you get to see the 13 cards dealt to you plus the 13 cards in the face-up dummy; all 52 cards in the deck are in play. If you can’t see the King of Spades, say, you have a 50% chance of guessing whose hand it’s in (and this percentage improves as the play progresses, depending on how reliable your memory is!). Bridge was also a gambling game originally though the saying goes, “Bridge is the light wine and beer of gambling.” Even if you and your partner are dealt a run of poor cards, in duplicate bridge your result is compared to the results of other partnerships that were dealt the same poor cards. Luck is largely eliminated.

Finally, chess is a game of full information. I would still argue that chess remains subject to the intrinsic luck that all humans face. The best player in the World may not win the World championships if they’re unlucky. Maybe they get the flu the day before the final game of the competition. Maybe they’re healthy for the finals, play 39 out of 40 moves better than their opponent, but the 40th move is a terrible blunder and they lose. This contrasts with a game of tennis, say, where you can miss the ball completely in the 3rd point of the 2nd game of the 1st set, but this 1 point is unlikely to derail the entire match.

So all 3 games involve some skill and some luck, and anyway, luck may be seen as a feature rather than a bug. “I think the problem with Chess as a social game is that there isn’t enough luck in the game.” ~ Unknown.

Popularity of poker, chess and bridge

The opinion of the great unwashed on which game is ‘best’ is perhaps of dubious value (surely watching reality TV is a better use of recreational time than any of these games?). Nevertheless, we might consider which game is most popular.

Chess.com reckons that 600 million people around the World play chess regularly — it is a very popular game. I have personally spent many thousands of hours, over decades, playing chess at somewhere above recreational level and somewhere below expert level (depending on the decade). It is a beautiful game. “Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for.” ~ Hans Ree.

It is played Worldwide: FIDE, the World chess federation, has 195 member countries. In most countries it’s a geeky pastime, except in Russia where it has high social standing.

I didn’t find good statistics on whether chess is growing or shrinking in popularity. On the one hand, when I was at school in South Africa in the 1980s there was chess team at every school. This wasn’t so at my kids’ schools. On the other hand, online chess is staggeringly healthy these days. On 8 June 2021, chess.com’s 67 million members played 10 million games of chess, with 175 thousand players online at a single moment in time. The 2020 Netflix mini-series “The Queen’s gambit” has led to a surge in popularity.

I have played bridge since my parents taught me as a teenager and I’ve played socially all my life. In 2020, during COVID lock-down, I played about 1200 hands of online bridge. Bridge is unfortunately declining in popularity and the average player’s age is ever increasing. When I was growing up my parents, grandparents, relatives, all my friends’ parents, and so on, would all play bridge as a regular social activity. Today however most of my friends wouldn’t know the rules of the game. All is not lost though. Bridgebase.com regularly has 10 thousand tables (of 4 players each, 40 thousand players in total) playing at a single moment in time.

I’ve only being playing poker for a few years, mainly at a monthly low stakes game with friends. Due to COVID normal routines were shattered and in 2020 I played about 2200 hands of online poker (actually a modest number compared to the ‘grinders’ out there). My goal in poker is to know enough about the game to break even at this social level. I’ve definitely surpassed that requirement in theoretical knowledge of the game but haven’t really translated my knowledge into ‘real time’ speed of play.

Poker has experienced a boom in the past 20 years, the seeds of which began with the film ‘Rounders’ in 1998, the growth of televised poker (with viewers being able to see the players’ hole cards), and growth in online poker. The victory of the appropriately named Chris Moneymaker, an amateur, in the 2003 World Series of Poker, has been credited with launching a poker craze. The World Poker Tour (WPT) estimates that there are 100 million poker players World Wide. While relatively few people play live poker in casinos for large stakes, there are many home game low stake players. Most of my non player friends would still be able to tell the difference between a straight and a full house.

Rules of the game

How do the rules and scorings of the games compare? Do they appear contrived, or if we started from scratch would we likely come up with the same rules again?

Starting with poker, the rules are deceptively simple, such that a complete beginner can be playing (after a fashion) within 15 minutes. This is always useful for a casino gambling game! “The beautiful thing about poker is that everybody thinks they can play.” ~ Chris Moneymaker. Or, another one, “Besides lovemaking and singing in the shower, there aren’t many human activities where there is a greater difference between a person’s self-delusional ability and their actual ability than in poker.” ~ Steve Badger.

If one was inventing a game from scratch that fundamentally involved betting on the value of a card hand, one might very naturally stipulate that multiples of a rank, multiples of a suit, and sequences are ‘good’ hands. The lower the probability of receiving such a multiple/sequence, the more valuable the hand. And poker is designed in this way. Perhaps for a reinvention we might go with 5 suits of 10 cards in each suit, instead of 4 suits of 13 each, and the Ace being ranked both high and low is a bit offbeat (and wasn’t always the case), but these are minor points.

A strike against the rules of poker is that they have never consolidated into a single format. While Texas no limit holdem is the most popular variant, players still play stud and draw variants, and pot limit Omaha is available in many casinos too. Some of these other variants may actually be more skilful than Texas holdem, which is arguably most popular simply because it is telegenic: it is very easy to show the player’s 2 hole cards and the 5 community cards on television & online.

The rules of bridge are much more complicated than poker. While the building block of trick taking is simple and intuitive, the game has two phases — the auction and the play — which beginners have to learn. The various bridge conventions are not officially part of the game but are the language of bridge; the beginner can’t communicate with his or her partner without them. Reaching basic proficiency in bridge is measured in months, if not years and is a big barrier to entry. For your partner’s sake there is some pressure to not play too badly, “If you play bridge badly, you make your partner suffer, but if you play poker badly you make everybody happy.” ~ Joe Laurie, Jr.

The scoring of bridge feels somewhat arbitrary to me. There are different points for making tricks in minor suits, major suits, and no trumps. There are various bonuses and penalties for under- and over-tricks, differing for vulnerable vs non-vulnerable contracts. Arguably this adds to the richness of the game, as players have to take whatever scoring applies into account in their play.

Famously, however, the scoring needed to be changed in 1987 following a single hand played in the final of the 1981 Bermuda Bowl, the World championships of bridge. The USA team calculated that it was cheaper to have their contract defeated by 11 tricks than allow Pakistan make a vulnerable grand slam. Many correctly saw this as a farcical outcome, and the penalty for heavily defeated contracts needed to be bumped up.

Part scores in bridge are also a nuisance, and few people now play the original rubber bridge version of the game. It’s telling that in duplicate bridge, the score for each hand is mapped onto a new score (viz. either match points or international match points) to reduce some of the deficiencies of the original scoring.

A major drawback in the design of the game of bridge is that is very difficult to avoid cheating, both intention and unintentional. The only way to avoid players giving unauthorised information to their partners is to put screens between the players, require bids to be made in writing and at a set tempo, etc, which naturally sucks out a lot of the atmosphere of the game. Incidents of cheating have occurred at World Championship level (notoriously, involving Terence Reese and Boris Schapiro in 1965, but also more recently).

Even at the social level bridge players will smile at, “I’d like a review of the bidding with all the original inflections”, or “we play forcing hesitations”, suggesting that more information is being conveyed in the auction than the bid alone. In the case of poker, when it comes to cheating we think of the wild west saloons or the Mississippi riverboat casino of the 19th century, where every game was reportedly a crooked one. This was maybe true, but my impression is that outright cheating is rare in casinos today. Unsportsmanlike play (‘angle shooting’) no doubt occurs given that money is involved. The biggest irregularity in my monthly social game involves cards getting accidentally overturned; a player actually cheating would not be easy accomplished and is anyway unthinkable given the guys and low stakes involved.

The main cheating problem with the game of chess is that the cheapest chess computer can now beat the strongest grandmaster. It’s quite difficult to cheat over the board but there’s always a chance that when you’re playing someone online you’re actually playing a human plus the stockfish chess engine.

Returning to the aesthetics of the rules of each game, a complete beginner chess player can be up and running in 20 minutes. The game has 1 piece that can move along the rank and files, 1 that moves diagonally, a powerful piece that moves both orthogonally and diagonally, and a piece that hops. The King’s movements are quite limited, but it would be difficult to trap otherwise (ie, checkmate, the object of the game). This is exactly what you might come up with if you invented the rules of a military strategy board game from scratch.

The movement of the pawns seems contrived at first but make sense on reflection. Pawns basically move 1 square forward, suitably modest given they are the foot soldiers of the game. Moving 2 squares forward on their first move (introduced in the 16th century) speeds up the game. The pawns capture opposing pieces diagonally; if the capturing movement was forward as well the game would quickly liquidate. Castling and en passant rules aren’t immediately intuitive but enhance the game.

The rules of chess have some drawbacks at the top level. The pieces always start in the same squares, which leads to too much opening preparation. The game takes too long in its classical format, and there are too many draws at the highest level. The last World Championship match in 2018 between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana kicked off with 12 successive draws before going to tie-break. These drawbacks are less critical for the typical recreational player, who plays a lot of speed chess (typically 5 minutes per player) and which almost always have a decisive result.

History, culture and pedigree

Contract bridge has a relatively recent history, having been invented in more or less its current form by Harold Vanderbilt in 1925 while on a boat cruise. Vanderbilt introduced innovations to the scoring of the game’s predecessor, auction bridge (1904), which considerably increased the complexity and richness of the game. Auction bridge in turn built on the 18th century game Whist. If you consider bridge as being the evolution of all trick taking games, we can go all the way back to rank-and-suit structured card games that spread westward from China nearly a millennium ago.

Texas holdem poker is a young game. While it has been dated to the early 1900s, it has only become the most popular variant in the last 25 years. If we recognise any card game involving a bet and a bluff as being poker-esque, then poker has respectable pedigree dating back to the Persian game “As-Nas” (16th century) and the French game “Poque” (15th century). Players started using the 52 card deck we’re familiar with today from the mid-1800s.

Poker certainly has a strong cultural heritage, particularly in the US. People talk of ‘going all-in’ and ‘calling her bluff’, in everyday language. It is by far the most televised of the three games. ‘Poker’ evokes images of wild west saloons giving it a slightly risqué distinction (ie, it’s more cool to play poker with your mates than bridge or chess). Gambling in general is frowned upon by the religious establishment, even though, “People would be surprised to know how much I learned about prayer from playing poker.” ~ Mary Austin.

Chess has the most impressive pedigree in my view. Chess-like games existed in India in the 6th century. The current rules of the game have remained substantively unchanged since about 1500.

Aesthetics: depth and complexity

Chess is the deepest game in my view, followed by bridge and then poker. Most individual poker or bridge hands are over in a few minutes. Meanwhile Alexander Grischuk took 72 minutes to play the single move 11 . . cxd4 in a Candidates chess game in April 2021. As an aside, Grischuk is also a top level poker player. There is a story about him arriving in Las Vegas for a chess tournament, where the winning purse was $9 thousand, and him deciding to play a poker tournament there instead as it offered $500 thousand in prizemoney!

Compared to chess there are very few decisions to be made in one poker hand. You can check, bet, call, or fold and you have just 4 opportunities to do this: pre-flop, flop, turn, and river. There are only 169 combinations of starting hands. Compare this to chess which has 20 possibilities in the first move alone; within a few moves you have more combinations than the proverbial number of grains of sand in the universe. True, in poker you can bet 1 chip, or 2 chips, or 3 chips, etc, and the bet raising can repeat until everyone is all-in. Still, poker feels more like 5 minute speed chess than classical chess in terms of the depth of the decisions you need to make.

As a counter argument, poker is in some respects harder than chess in the sense that the computer programme Alpha Zero has almost ‘solved’ chess, while the best poker computer solvers can only really manage heads up (2 player) positions with a constrained choice of bet sizes and opening card ranges, etc. The solvers can’t yet manage multi-way pots very well at all.

That’s not to say that poker is easy to play well! There is a whole meta and psychological dimension to be mastered. And maybe it’s just where I’m at with each game, but poker feels like the hardest game to improve of the three.

The path to becoming a better chess player is relatively straight forward: learn some opening lines, practice middle game strategy and tactics and examine the most common endgames. For bridge you can memorise conventions and read about squeezes in declarer play. But for poker the learning feedback signal is extremely weak: you can play badly and win money, or play well and lose money. There is a huge amount of noise (‘variance’). The mantra is to ‘reduce the leaks’ in your game, but these are difficult to recognise even with a large database (which I don’t have) of your hands.

But which is the most fun to play?

The preceding comparisons are all very well, but which is the most fun to play?

Perhaps we can ask by considering which game is the least fun to lose at? There is an element of the poor loser in all of us. Some people hate losing at bridge, I think we’re all a little masochistic. Otherwise, why would we continue to play bridge? ~ Anon. Or, another one, “and in no other game [than golf], except bridge, is serenity of disposition so essential ~ Emily Post. I personally get a serotonin kick from making that slam contract, but almost no remorse when I go 10 IMPS down. I suspect I’m just playing too socially — I’d be less sanguine in an important tournament.

Investing 3 hours in a game of chess at classic time control and then losing (particularly following a blunder) is galling. Grinding out a game of chess where you’re on the defensive and down on material can be grim. Having a dominating position is great fun though! When I was at school and we had a strong attack we’d say we had a ‘festive position’. Chess is one of the few games where it is acceptable, good manners even, to resign and go home early when your position is likely lost. “There is no remorse like the remorse of chess.” — H. G. Wells

But poker takes the cake. Winning is satisfying, even when it’s the result of pure luck and undeserved, while one can sulk over a lost pot even when the monetary loss is measured in the price of a few cups of coffee. The online poker group I play in is punctuated by quite bad sportsmanship (happily this is the definitely not the case for my regular live game, which is between good friends). Players at the online game leave the table abruptly after a ‘bad beat’, and exit the associated whatsapp group, only to re-emerge the next day as if nothing had happened.

Comparing waiting around time, bridge probably scores best. Noted, dummy doesn’t get to play, so you sit out 25% of the time. In chess it is your opponent’s turn to play 50% of the time; at least you can still think about your next move. But a good poker player should be folding 80–85% of their hands without betting (which is why most people don’t have the patience to be good poker players). Like war, poker has been described as, “interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror”.

Subjectively and personally, chess is the game I enjoy the most and am best at. This is not only because I’ve played it the most, but also because it can be played at a high level without any evaluation of your opponent, requires the most analysis and the least (short term) memory. You don’t need to be that good at the game to see the beauty of chess.

As a social game played live, I would happily return to the days of married couples playing bridge with friends, but those days are past. Playing poker I would probably have more fun playing lower variance versions of the game than holdem, and variants where there is more information, but an important requirement for any game is that you need to have someone to play against! Texas holdem is now the main game in town: when in Rome do as the Romans do. The big luck element is actually a selling point, allowing players of different abilities to enjoy it together. I conclude that there are few more enjoyable ways than to spend the occasional evening playing low stakes poker with your mates.