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Comment by kevinwang | Hacker News Reader

A quick take:

> reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.

You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.

Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.

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> You could say the same thing about chess

No, chess is on the opposite side of the spectrum! In chess, at all times you have perfect knowledge of the entire state of the board; in poker, you know 2 cards.

If you consume any chess media, you would know there's a fair amount of crossover in chess players who enjoy playing poker.

That is because although chess appears to be a game of perfect information, it is impossible to calculate anything but a small fraction of possible future game states in a limited time. So skilled chess players must make educated guesses as to which lines are worth calculating, whether their opponent has already studied the current line, and what moves to play to get them out of their memorization.

This is effectively a game of limited information where solid Bayesian reasoning wins, just like poker.

The point being made was that a chess player is not able to foresee all possible future combinations on a chess board (at least until close to the very end), so they must make "educated guesses" as to the best move to make.

Not quite, in poker you know all cards except for other players' hole cards. Have you ever played variations like seven card stud which used to be popular at home until Texas hold'em became cool?

There's always some missing information but it's not quite as bad as you make out. In chess you don't know what the other player is thinking.

The person you're replying to was reacting to your "reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess" statement. Not about perfect/imperfect knowledge.

at the top level, chess players do prep, and need to take guesses about what prep to do, vs what their opponent will do.

you dont know what lines your opponent has studied, and they dont know which lines youve studied

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