That was the question Doug Polk posed when he was joined this week by the very popular chess streamer, Alexandra Botez, on his latest podcast, and the answers may surprise you.
Poker vs chess
The two games have always attracted a similar kind of person. Basically single-player games with the idea being to outwit your opponent using not much more than your own intelligence.
Poker obviously has a much greater element of luck involved. However, the similarities are definitely there, and there has been a big crossover between the games.
Daniel Negreanu (seen playing online chess below) and Bill Perkins love chess, while Dan Smith and Mike McDonald among others are very good at the game of 64-squares, as is 2011 WSOP Main Event runner-up, Martin Staszko.
Among chess players, Russian Grandmaster Alexander Grischuk has played EPT events, top Spanish player Francisco Vallejo Pons was pursued by the tax authorities for his online play. On the other hand, Israeli legend Boris Gelfand once turned down a lucrative club offer because he didn’t want to spend every lunchtime discussing poker with his teammates!
Botez had her own views on this when Polk straight out asked: “Who do you think are smarter – top chess players or top poker players?”
“That’s a trick question…obviously if you’re a top player in anything you have to be extremely intelligent,” though adding: “how much of it is training as opposed to raw IQ or EQ?”
Polk would later explain his own position on this: “As an online poker player it’s definitely more IQ than EQ, but as you play more live poker you can add this [EQ] element in.
“I think at low levels it can be very important…at higher levels there’s just not a lot of tells going around.”
Botez had a word for chessplayers “I always get confused at people who are smart enough to be a Grandmaster but then spend their entire life being an average Grandmaster.
“You put that brainpower to use, you don’t have to be broke, you don’t have to be starving!”
So, what factors would make either bunch of players smarter?
Chess almost certainly has the higher education level. University degrees are a perfectly normal attainment for the nerdier of the two games.
25-year-old American-Canadian Botez herself studied International Relations at Stanford University. Whereas Polk, for example, dropped out of the University of North Carolina to play poker full-time.
Both have made huge names for themselves in their respective fields, though, and a ton of money to go with it, and chess, in general, isn’t going to make many people rich. Conversely, you are unlikely to go completely broke either, so that seems smarter in some ways.
Polk’s Twitter feed saw some pick up on this…
So meaning the smarter play is go where the EV is….
— Vincenzo (@WonkyVin) September 15, 2021
One commenter on YouTube split it into two sets of pluses for “smarts”:
“Chess: abstract calculations, algorithms;
Poker: probabilities, deductive reasoning, psychology
…summarising it by stating: “Probably chess, but different for different people.”
Others had different views, one Twitter fan claiming it’s all memory in the chess world…
Chess is all memorization, no skill. So much easier to abuse fish. One you seen it once you seen it all… If you lost to someone, it's because they've memorized more up until this point.
— David Smith (@dk34997) September 15, 2021
So, which group do you think are smarter? Let us know on our social media channels!
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