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[WanderingWinder]

So we've had a lot of discussion on this topic, and I think its time it went where it belonged!
Okay, so here's a question I have for everyone who says bridge is by far the most complicated trick-taking game, etc. Which of these games is more complicated: Texas Hold 'Em, or Hearts?
I think Texas Hold 'em is no question more complicated, even though the rules are simpler.
In the comparison between bridge and other trick-taking games, I think that in the case of most of the other games, it's not clear which one is more complicated. They play quite differently. Certainly I doubt that bridge is twice as complicated as most of them. Twice as complicated is a lot. But I'm also not trying to argue that Spades is more complicated than bridge either. There are a lot of things that spades has that Bridge doesn't, such as nil, double nil, bags, and an almost entirely different bidding strategy which has its own complexity, among hundreds of other subtleties. But Bridge is almost unquestionably more complicated, primarily by virtue of being able to choose the trumps. However, there are a large number of other trick-taking games for which this is true, and it's not at all clear to me that bridge is more complicated than all of them.

[ARTjoMS]

I don't like any of these games, but i think that Texas Hold 'Em is more complicated.

As to bridge, people already tried to explain in other thread why is bridge far more difficult than other card games and IMO did it well. If you want to understand reasons already stated then learn bridge, else just follow this quote.

   It is not necessary to be able to understand the
underlying reason or reasons for the existence of a fact in order for it to be true. The fact still exists, regardless of whether you know why it is a fact or not.

[mcshoo]

I guess the question that has to first be asked is, "what do you mean by complicated?" My working definition is: The complexity of a game is proportional to the amount of time and effort it takes for a person to learn the basic rudiments of the game enough to not make a fool of himself. 

I am also wondering what you definition of a trick-taking game is, as Hold Em isn't a trick taking game to me. 

I would argue that of all the trick taking games that I'm aware of (main ones being spades, hearts, euchre, 500, rook, up and down the river), bridge is significantly more complicated than all of them.  I've tried teaching most of the games (and been taught all of them).  No contest. 

[WanderingWinder]

Hold 'em certainly isn't a trick taking game, and I'm sorry if I at all implied it to be one. My point was that there are different kinds of complexity.
Your definition is valid of course, but I disagree with it on gut principle. By that definition, Hold em is actually really really simple, as its not hard to not make a fool of yourself. It's really difficult to actually be good though. Hearts would be more complex, as it takes a little longer to not make the foolish plays (allowing easy moon-shooting being a big one that people don't grasp all that quickly).

BTW, as I said in the other thread, I'm going to try to pick bridge up simply to have a more informed position on this issue.

It is not necessary to be able to understand the
underlying reason or reasons for the existence of a fact in order for it to be true. The fact still exists, regardless of whether you know why it is a fact or not.

Absolutely right, but you aren't going to convince many people this way. I'm also not sure that complexities, at least in the conversational sense (in the grammatical or mathematical senses are different stories) really fall into the realm of 'facts' though.

[DG]

I suspect there will be more complicated card games than bridge but none of them are widely played. The main era for card games (based on a standard deck) is over since many more games and entertainments are available. Game makers also don't make any money inventing new games based on a standard 52 card deck, which is probably why there are a great number of little boxed games sold with cards in 5 suits or running from -10 to 10, when in fact the same game could be played with a basic pack of cards and amended rules.

Bridge is much more complicated than solo, whist, hearts, spades, all the rummy variants, solitaires, bezique, poker, and anything else I can think of. The bidding for the contract is complicated as you have the levels of contract, variable suits and no trumps, doubles and redoubles, and limited bidding space. That's just for 'natural bidding' and the bidding systems make it more complicated still. Card play also requires a lot of skill and can hinge on information gained in the bidding. There are also opportunities for bluff, sacrifice, misdirection, gambles, and many other competitive plays. An understanding between partners is also needed. Duplicate bridge provides tournament scoring for this game even with random initial deals.

[mcshoo]

Your definition is valid of course, but I disagree with it on gut principle. By that definition, Hold em is actually really really simple, as its not hard to not make a fool of yourself. It's really difficult to actually be good though. Hearts would be more complex, as it takes a little longer to not make the foolish plays (allowing easy moon-shooting being a big one that people don't grasp all that quickly).

If you disagree with a definition you should at least suggest a different one so the conversation can continue =p. 

I'm going to restrict myself to discussing trick-taking games, because my experience with Hold 'Em is with low stakes online play, where there is no complexity at all, just play a few good hands and rake in the chips against people out to have fun.  I suspect that high level hold 'em is different. 

I think you're trying to argue for "skill-intense" (skill-rewarding?) rather than "complex."  I think my definition for skill-intense is: A game's "skill-intensity" is proportional to the number of levels [this should be fleshed out some more] that skill continues to be more significant than luck.  War is not skill intense at all.  It's all luck.  Hearts is somewhat, as you need to be able to avoid the queen and stop someone from shooting, but then at higher levels of play, it boils down to the cards that you get.  Spades is more skill intense, as now you have a partnership to work with, and a good team will consistently trounce a weaker one.  But unless you have some duplicate mechanism (which I'm unaware of), it would seem that cards make a big difference.

But yet, even measuring "skill-intensity", I think duplicate bridge is still far and away the most skill-intense.  Everyone plays the same hands, so the "luck" of the shuffle is removed.  It's all dependent on whether or not your bidding system gets you to the right contract, whether or not you draw the correct inferences from the bidding and the play, and whether or not you play for the best chances.  You can get lucky by drawing bad opponents, but even then, the opponents rotate around so that's averaged out. 

BTW if you're picking up bridge, I've found the learn to play (free) software a great starting tool: https://web.acbl.org/LearnToPlayBridge/

[guided]

I don't have anything about bridge to add beyond what I said in the other thread, but let me do say I'm not intending to make any argument about the strategic complexity of poker vs. bridge. I play both, I love both, and both are extremely high-skill games but mostly for different reasons.

[timchen]

For the question in the OP, I think it is good to note that the nature of the two games mentioned are inherently different.

For Texas Hold'em, the technical difficulty of the game stopped after the chances are calculated. It is difficult for human being to calculate those on the fly, but a table can be made.

On the other hand, there is no absolute best strategy at how you place your bet, besides some really bad moves which are just against the odds. To win the game more often than not, depends more on reading your opponents.

If you compare Bridge to Texas Hold'em, the technical difficulty is a lot higher. However, the "reading your opponents" part is significantly reduced, especially when there is some skill difference between the two sides on the technical part of the game. Comparing Spades and Bridge is a different question though. The two games are so similar in nature that I could say that bridge is the more interesting game in almost every aspect.

I'd like to say that luck is not that greatly reduced in duplicated situations, however. Sure, you don't get punished by holding bad cards, but that is probably the only luck factor cured by playing duplicate. In a pairs game, even this luck factor is not completely thrown away. Let me provide a very simple example of luck in a duplicate situation: suppose you are declarer, in the trump suit you have AQJxx in dummy vs. Txxxx in hand (total of 10 cards.) What should you play from your hand? Without any other information the correct play (or the percentage play) is to play to the Queen (unless the King drops from the left hand opponent of course) which will succeed 50% of the time. But roughly 1/8 of the time this play will lose to a novice who just play from the highest card he has.
 

[WanderingWinder]

Sorry I didn't elaborate more in my earlier post, I had some things I needed to take care of this morning.
What I call complexity is similar to what you call skill intensity. My definition of complexity of a game is something along the lines of "a game is more complex to the extent that variations in skill have bearings upon the outcome for wider variations in skill" i.e. a complex game could have Player A who beats player B 70% of the time, while player B beats player C 70% of the time (and player A beats C more often than that)... on down through the most different levels. More of these levels, and higher percentages, are the hallmarks of more complexity.
Your definition is quite different, and that's fine. Mine is what I care about for gameplay though, in general, because in general it's what I find more interesting.

[HiveMindEmulator]

The thing that makes bridge stand out from other whist-like games is that bridge is all about sharing and using large amounts of information. It thus lends itself better to analysis, allowing people to write books and newspaper columns about it. In spades or whist, you do make interesting and strategic decisions, but they are based on small amounts of information, so there is less to write about. In Bridge you have several rounds of bidding during which time you have to communicate where and how high you want your contract to be as well as possibly giving a direction for your partner to lead should you lose the bid, all in a limited alphabet, which you can further limit for your opponents via your own bids. Then you play the game with all this information as well as vision of half the cards (your hand and dummy). So you have to synthesize all this information together in order to make the correct play (during which time you try to share or obtain even more information building on the picture you already have). It's not being able to choose the trumps that makes bridge complex. It's the massive amount of information exchange and synthesis involved.

[drg]

The skill set in poker is entirely different from those of other games after you know the percentages.  It's all about people reading and taking chances that are favored to pay off, and certainly a rank beginner can beat a seasoned pro on any given deal.  Every poker player has more than a few bad beat stories.

You cannot judge a game's complexity based purely on how frequently the best player will win.  Bridge and poker have much larger random elements than many other games, poker due to it's nature, bridge due to the fact that a lot of percentage chances work into it as well.  If you played hearts with 3 experts and 1 beginner, the beginner will never win unless intentionally allowed to, period.  With 3 beginners and 1 expert, the expert will win the vast majority of the time.  It doesn't mean the game is more complex than bridge (even though it is undoubtedly one of the toughest card games).  A grand master at chess is going to beat a beginner 100% of the time too.  Yet a computer can be programmed to play chess perfectly, while it cannot play bridge or poker perfectly if it is not cheating and looking at all the cards.

If you want to see complexity in a game, check out relay bidding systems in bridge designed to tell one partner the complete distribution and high card values of the other in order to decide what is trumps and how many tricks their side can take, then have a look at Adventures in Card Play by Ottlik.  Most bridge players could not understand a single chapter in that book - it's all about complex play of the cards, mostly squeezes, which are quite interesting and not things that tend to come up in other games, and less than 1% would be able to execute the positions talked about in it while playing.  The 'dummy' in bridge makes it possible for one player to visualize the layout of all the cards much sooner than in other games (and it only takes one person doing it to pull these things off)

The way I judge a game's complexity is if your average person played the game intently for a month, a year, 10 years etc whether or not they could become competitive at it.  I've seen many people who have played bridge for 50 years and really not have much of a clue what's going on other than the rules (which are often simple in complicated games).  I could take a lot of trick taking card games (standard deck or not), and if I (or a number of my friends) played them with any group of people I know that without including at least one other expert bridge player (so they can target each other) I (or they) would basically win every time as long as the game isn't designed to be very random (like euchre).  These games tend to have a much more finite skill set to learn than bridge does (doesn't mean people who 'get' bridge play them perfectly, but concepts that are foreign to most people are picked up on quite quickly, and they play them well enough to beat the people who don't).  They are certainly not more complex than bridge.

[Razzishi]

The rules for bridge are actually quite simple.  I was really surprised when I was a kid when I read them and wondered what the whole fuss was about, but after reading the bridge column in the newspaper for a while I came to understand just how much analysis the rule set of bridge allows for.  The rules for bidding are hardly much more complicated than other games, and the play of the cards is rules-wise basically the exact same as other trick-taking games.  What makes the game so complex strategically is the interplay of the bidding, scoring, and the dummy.  The bidding allows for significant information to be interchanged between players, while the scoring rewards those that bid themselves to more difficult contracts.  The exposure of dummy's cards leads to each player now seeing half the cards outstanding instead of just a quarter, and along with the information from the bidding lets all players read a great deal into the cards that their opponent(s) play.

There definitely still is some luck in the realm of duplicate bridge, but at least you can't complain that you got worse cards than your opponents as the people you're competing against will hold the exact same cards against the exact same opponents.  Apart from guessing on a finesse that could go either way, I suspect that one area of luck is in choosing a bidding system. They are effectively lossy data compression systems; there will be some inputs on which they will do poorly.  I downloaded a very very complex and detailed bidding system once and tried a bunch of random partnership hands with physical cards to see how it played out; it was quite frequent that some situation came up for which there was no exact bid prescribed and you had to stretch the meaning of whatever bid you made. 

edit: I find it amusing that while I was typing up a reply to a 2 week old thread someone else posted in it with very similar comments.

[WanderingWinder]

If you played hearts with 3 experts and 1 beginner, the beginner will never win unless intentionally allowed to, period. 

That's just not true. Hearts is not so complicated or difficult that a bright beginner is going to have absolutely 0 chances.

A grand master at chess is going to beat a beginner 100% of the time too.

This isn't true either, but it's much closer than the hearts example - the probability is going to be less than 1 in 1 billion against this, probably more, depending on how you define beginner - but anybody can just luck into playing good moves.

Yet a computer can be programmed to play chess perfectly,

This is definitely not true for chess, which hasn't come close to being solved as a whole game. With 7 (combined, for both sides!) pieces or less, yes, they play perfectly. Anything else that's not true. And sure, they do outperform all the human players, but human+computer > computer if the human has a bit of skill.

the game isn't designed to be very random (like euchre).

Euchre certainly isn't designed, and it's not that random either, if you know what you're doing.

And if you use that as your definition for complicated, then I don't care about complexity.

[timchen]

Adventures in Card Play by Ottlik.

Ah. I have some fond memories of this book. I was obsessed with it for a while in my freshman year. I don't think I have ever played a board with those sophisticated coup that really matters. Some concepts are very interesting and useful to know though. If I try to recall out of my head, elopement and the suicidal communicating-cutting count-rectifying throw out comes to mind.

I think this book is actually not very hard to read. It is just very hard to become useful. And it is not entirely because it is hard or sophisticated. You just have lots of better things to improve if you want to get better, rather than focusing on those spectacular play. In contrast I actually find some parts of TBW magazine hard to read.

[cherdano]

What I call complexity is similar to what you call skill intensity. My definition of complexity of a game is something along the lines of "a game is more complex to the extent that variations in skill have bearings upon the outcome for wider variations in skill" i.e. a complex game could have Player A who beats player B 70% of the time, while player B beats player C 70% of the time (and player A beats C more often than that)... on down through the most different levels. More of these levels, and higher percentages, are the hallmarks of more complexity.

I used to think of that as a good measure (maybe just because it makes it very easy to argue that go is more complex than chess  ). But once you realize that best-of-three chess by this definition has a substantially higher complexity than a single game of chess, it becomes a bit questionable. Does dominion with identical starting hands have a higher complexity than dominion with random starting hands?

[WanderingWinder]

What I call complexity is similar to what you call skill intensity. My definition of complexity of a game is something along the lines of "a game is more complex to the extent that variations in skill have bearings upon the outcome for wider variations in skill" i.e. a complex game could have Player A who beats player B 70% of the time, while player B beats player C 70% of the time (and player A beats C more often than that)... on down through the most different levels. More of these levels, and higher percentages, are the hallmarks of more complexity.

I used to think of that as a good measure (maybe just because it makes it very easy to argue that go is more complex than chess  ). But once you realize that best-of-three chess by this definition has a substantially higher complexity than a single game of chess, it becomes a bit questionable. Does dominion with identical starting hands have a higher complexity than dominion with random starting hands?

I disagree with this... first off, I don't think that this makes it easy to argue that go is more complex than chess so much as other measures do... there are a lot more possibilities on your average go move than your average chess move overall.
Best of three chess wouldn't be much more complex at all than a single game of chess by this measure, and, well, it should be rated as more complex, no?
Also, I don't think that identical starting hands is going to make much difference here or in how complex dominion actually is.

Also, maybe my definition isn't so great as a definition of complexity, but it is what I care about more than the other definitions out there. Probably it's better called depth.

[drg]

Adventures in Card Play by Ottlik.

Ah. I have some fond memories of this book. I was obsessed with it for a while in my freshman year. I don't think I have ever played a board with those sophisticated coup that really matters. Some concepts are very interesting and useful to know though. If I try to recall out of my head, elopement and the suicidal communicating-cutting count-rectifying throw out comes to mind.

I think this book is actually not very hard to read. It is just very hard to become useful. And it is not entirely because it is hard or sophisticated. You just have lots of better things to improve if you want to get better, rather than focusing on those spectacular play. In contrast I actually find some parts of TBW magazine hard to read.

While rare, the positions do come up, but they are much easier to spot looking at a hand record with all 4 hands and a computer telling you how many tricks you can take than trying to figure it out while playing a hand.  I've pulled a couple of the simpler ones off here and there, but not frequently.  Yes, understanding them by looking at them being fully explained is not that difficult.  Retaining and translating them into effect is very difficult, and if you focus on it on the 1% or so of deals they effect, you often lose grasp of the other 99%. 

[rogerclee]

Combination dominion ladder + bridge individual to determine the world's best dominion + bridge player? lol

[Ozle]

I just had a quick word with Omar Shariff, and he says Poker!