6. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect.
Yeah, IF you had infinite processing power, it would be a nearly trivial exhaustive search program. IF I had a way to read my opponents emotions, etc like humans can, then I could write a fairly trivial program to do well at poker. But those are two very big "IF"s.
The problem is the two games are very different. Chess is a game of perfect information, where both players know the entire state of the game. Poker is not, plus it has an element of chance.
I'd say you can in terms of how knowledge plays a role in the game. In chess, the computer can calculate the best move given a situation. It doesn't need to know anything about the opponents strategy. In poker, it is pretty much the opposite. Your move depends partially on purely deterministic criteria, what people likely have, but more so on what you think everyone else thinks. Here you enter a realm I'd say computers are inherently bad at.
What I meant was you can't really compare the "easiness" of the two for humans based how well a computer would do. Computers are theoretically good at chess, and theoretically bad at poker, but that says nothing about how easy or hard the two are for humans.
You can't say that A is easier than B for humans just because a computer can do A well but not B. For example, computers are excellent at doing large calculations very fast but terrible at recognizing objects in a scene visually, but humans are the exact opposite.
I'll still try. Both games have a philosophical and a computational side. The chess philosopher could ask questions such as
"everyone knows that dominating the centre is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"
But even if he understands this better than others, it won't help him that much because chess games are decided on the computational side. This is why you have to start at an early age in order to become a great chess player. And it suits computers.
Poker's computational side includes, for example, odds (trivial) and ICM. In most forms of poker, though, it is far outweighed by the philosophical side, at least as of today. The poker philosopher could ask questions such as
"everyone knows that being in position is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"
If he's willing to work hard on his understanding of the game, he might, in theory, learn the rules at any age and become the world's best poker player in just a few years. Getting direct monetary value from one's philosophical insights is an attractive proposition. Unfortunately there are big psychological drawbacks, which Matt Maroon describes so well.
Yeah, IF you had infinite processing power, it would be a nearly trivial exhaustive search program. IF I had a way to read my opponents emotions, etc like humans can, then I could write a fairly trivial program to do well at poker. But those are two very big "IF"s.
The problem is the two games are very different. Chess is a game of perfect information, where both players know the entire state of the game. Poker is not, plus it has an element of chance.
You can't really compare the two.