Question
Is it best to think like a Go, chess, or poker player?
Answer
I don't play any of the games. In fact I suck at most of them. But (perhaps because of my lack of skill), I am fascinated by (and seriously study) the role of metaphor and narrative in how games map to real domains, in particular, business and military. I also spend way too much time thinking up new game ideas.
Andrew Nguyen has an excellent answer supporting Poker, but by clearly highlighting the conditions that favor Poker, he has actually also implicitly made the case for Go and Chess. Each excels as a metaphor (and therefore as a training ground) for a different regime of decision-making.
Two other answers are interesting, both from people who claim expertise in all 3 games. Scott Abrams thinks this question is splitting hairs, while James Altucher takes the distinctions seriously. I think James is correct. The distinctions matter.
Incomplete information and uncertainty of outcomes with respect to particular moves (Poker) is characteristic of real-time tactical and sub-tactical decision-making. This is the "fog of war" and FUD ("fear uncertainty and doubt") regime of decision-making. As Eisenhower said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Poker is the skill you need when the best-laid plans are shot to hell and you have to think on your feet, under intense time pressure, and lie and bluff to help you win.
Poker and other games perfectly model decision-making under the conditions: "how do you best play the hand you are dealt?"
But ask, how WAS that hand dealt in the first place? The real world does not have strictly random rules about dealing hands. If you ask this question, you get strategic decision making, which is best modeled by Go.
I won't attempt a full decision here, but strategic decision making is characterized by three things:there is more time, there is more information symmetry and global visibility (everybody can look at a map and realize that the straits of Gibraltar are important), and perhaps most important, this is the stage when you deal yourself your cards. You decide whether to spend your money building a bigger navy or a bigger army.
Poker would not really have helped Chinese thinkers decide whether a Great Wall was a good idea or French thinkers figure out if the fortified Maginot line was a good idea (the latter, as it happens was not. The Germans simply went around the north end via Belgium in WW II). Building a capital-intensive defensive line is too big a move to be hidden, but is still a kind of move that involves thought. The biggest known bluff in history is probably Eisenhower's Calais v. Normandy bluff. Keeping the location of D-Day secret and fooling Hitler was the largest scale probably, at which Poker has been played (unless you count the Bay of Pigs as topping it in potential threat terms). That's the exception that proves the rule. Poker is normally NOT played at such high levels. At large temporal scales, information asymmetries are lessened. The board is more visible to all.
The French got it wrong in the case of the Maginot line (we'll see why in a second), but such "Go" thinking usually pays off. The British thought controlling Gibraltar was crucial. They were right. The Russians waited till the winter had crippled the Luftwaffe in WW II before counterattacking: again not a move that can be hidden in the sense of Poker, but because changing the capabilities of an air force is like a 10-year project, they could still win by making that move openly. The key here is the level of abstraction. Controlling straits or using the weather in your favor are not things that change for thousands of years. That's why Go pieces, unlike Chess or Poker pieces, are all the same.
This sort of "Go" dynamics would be the rough equivalent, in Poker, of being able to choose your cards, knowing that your opponent will be watching your choices and choosing his in turn. In fact you could make up a game: spread out all 52 cards face up, and let 4 poker players pick cards in turn. Do this four times, starting with a different person each time and going clockwise. Since all the info will now be known, you don't have to actually play, but you can just analyze who WOULD have won based on the hand quality, and assuming equivalent or strength-weighted playing skills. This is what war-gaming is like. Kids do this when 2 captains pick teams for a pickup soccer game.
To study how Go maps to this world really well, study Alfred Thayer Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" (or study Walmart's strategy). Naval strategy and geographic market penetration strategy, more than other kinds, is almost entirely about preparatory positioning.
The specific capabilities and power projection abilities of different classes of ships did not really begin to matter till the aircraft carrier was developed. Every decisive naval conflict in history has actually been pretty much decided before the first cannon broadside. In some cases, like Hannibal v. the Scipios in the second Punic War, Rome arguably won using its navy without there ever being a significant naval encounter. Just by controlling the Mediterranean, and having the ability to cut off Spain and forcing Hannibal to march through Gau (and cutting off his line of communication with his left-behind brother in Spain)l, naval positioning and control won the day. Go teaches you things like this.
Sure, not every naval encounter has been a fait accompli based on positioning and fleet sizing/deployment choices. Some encounters did matter, but positioning eventually won the day most of the time. Mahan's analysis of Nelson v. Villeneuve at Trafalgar is particularly illuminating. What appears to be a hard-fought subtactical battle (i.e. a poker game) turns out, when you do a longer-range analysis, to have been primarily a Go game. Nelson managed to set himself up to win. On land, Napolean showed equal mastery of positioning-based play, and you should check out William Duggan's "Strategic Intuition."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/0...
A few centuries later, the Japanese began WW II with a poker move (relying on information hiding). But once the starter poker phase was over, and the American war machine began cranking out new pieces to be positioned, the game shifted to Go dynamics, and the Japanese basically lost long before Midway. They simply did not have the resource depth to play an extended positioning game, even if they had the intelligence. Go may be a Japanese game more than an American game, but you could say that in the Pacific in WW II, the Americans simply had more counter.
But what if, in addition to picking your own hand to play, you could actually change the rules of the game? Like which card trumps which one, or something else?
In some ways, neither tactics nor strategy change over thousands of years. The Romans wanted to control the Mediterranean, so did the French and British after the fall of Spain, and the same considerations mattered in WW II. The Go game on the board that is the Mediterranean has not really changed. Neither has the tactical game: the same concepts like flanking and pincers apply no matter what technology you are using.
But war-making DOES change in fundamental ways due to technological evolution, and this is the part that chess models best.
This is a curious regime of decision-making in which the lowest-level details get coupled with the highest-level framings. This is chess, which is neither a tactical game, nor a strategic game really, but a game of doctrines and operations.
Operations is all about optimizing your systems and processes to match the specific tactical capabilities of what you have to play with.
A "pincer movement" is a tactic that can apply to either cavalry or tanks, but understanding exactly how to execute a pincer movement with those two different "pieces" is where chess-thinking helps. A specific endgame may have variants depending on whether you use castles or bishops to do a given job (assuming it is within the capabilities of both).
Sometimes technology changes can be so radical that they make certain tactical patterns irrelevant, but this is much rarer than you think. Air power makes control of ground perimeters less relevant, by changing a 2d perimeter game into a 3d perimeter game, but not irrelevant. And long before air power, cells of spies on sabotage missions behind enemy lines provided a weaker version of the same capability: striking beyond enemy lines, without breaking them.
When you are able to abstract general principles from a given situational tactical vocabulary, you get a doctrine to guide strategy. So the decision-making stack loops back on itself: specific tactical capabilities support operational use of "abstract" tactics, and the general principles of such use inform the doctrine which in turn frames the strategic game.
Example: moving infantry at motorized speed, aided by preparatory bombing was a pattern of tactical operations that Germany perfected via a beta test in Spain. This doctrine (blitzkreig) then led it to use a classic, zillion year old specific tactic (outflanking, which even wild wolves use), to simply blitz around the French defensive Maginot line, a kind of high-speed flanking movement that could not have been attempted with infantry, but was enabled by motorized infantry.
The "strategy" decision of course, was to use the "outflank" tactic against the Maginot line as a decisive move to anchor the invasion of France.
The Germans won a chess game, while the French were busy waiting for the wrong Go game to start.
In fact, the entire first phase of WW II was all Go and Chess, with almost no Poker on the battlefield (there was a lot of poker in the diplomatic world of course). The first true poker games were the war in the Atlantic (wolfpacks vs. allied shipping) and the Battle of Britain. Both were games of information and real-time decision-making, and real-time information leverage (cracking Enigma and radar) helped the allies win.
Chess therefore trains you to think in terms of the specific implications of rules and special, differentiated properties of different elements of a situation. While all games are friendly to "rule variations" as a way of developing your thinking around the tactical capabilities of a given technology set, chess is particularly good, since unlike Go counters or poker cards, the pieces don't all behave in the same way in either uniform or simply-ranked ways.
A simple example illustrates this. My chess-playing friends in college occasionally played a variant called "superchess" where one player had a material disadvantage (he only had a king, queen and four pawns against the other guy's full force), BUT was allowed to make 2 moves to every 1 by the opponent. This was a 2x tempo advantage. A big aha moment in my study of decision-making was learning from my friends that the tempo advantage was nearly always decisive.
This particular thought experiment would not be nearly as impressive if you tried it with Go or Poker.
Bottomline: decision-making is a complex world with lots of different regimes. One-size-fits all is a very dangerous attitude. Sure, figure out your regime and learn the most relevant game first (for startups, this might be poker, for the CEO of a competitor to Walmart, this is probably Go, for somebody trying to open up the Asian market using a tweaked set of product offerings, Chess).
And of course, other games, especially field sports, teach you a whole other set of skills.
This is a very quick-and-dirty thumbnail application of an approach to decision making, spanning 3-4 chapters, in my upcoming book, Tempo (planned release Feb 2011). While I don't actually use the chess/go/poker metaphors in the book (the only game I use is actually Tetris), sign up for the launch announcement if you want to dive in deeper into the theory behind such questions.
http://ribbonfarm.com/tempo
Andrew Nguyen has an excellent answer supporting Poker, but by clearly highlighting the conditions that favor Poker, he has actually also implicitly made the case for Go and Chess. Each excels as a metaphor (and therefore as a training ground) for a different regime of decision-making.
Two other answers are interesting, both from people who claim expertise in all 3 games. Scott Abrams thinks this question is splitting hairs, while James Altucher takes the distinctions seriously. I think James is correct. The distinctions matter.
Incomplete information and uncertainty of outcomes with respect to particular moves (Poker) is characteristic of real-time tactical and sub-tactical decision-making. This is the "fog of war" and FUD ("fear uncertainty and doubt") regime of decision-making. As Eisenhower said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Poker is the skill you need when the best-laid plans are shot to hell and you have to think on your feet, under intense time pressure, and lie and bluff to help you win.
Poker and other games perfectly model decision-making under the conditions: "how do you best play the hand you are dealt?"
But ask, how WAS that hand dealt in the first place? The real world does not have strictly random rules about dealing hands. If you ask this question, you get strategic decision making, which is best modeled by Go.
I won't attempt a full decision here, but strategic decision making is characterized by three things:there is more time, there is more information symmetry and global visibility (everybody can look at a map and realize that the straits of Gibraltar are important), and perhaps most important, this is the stage when you deal yourself your cards. You decide whether to spend your money building a bigger navy or a bigger army.
Poker would not really have helped Chinese thinkers decide whether a Great Wall was a good idea or French thinkers figure out if the fortified Maginot line was a good idea (the latter, as it happens was not. The Germans simply went around the north end via Belgium in WW II). Building a capital-intensive defensive line is too big a move to be hidden, but is still a kind of move that involves thought. The biggest known bluff in history is probably Eisenhower's Calais v. Normandy bluff. Keeping the location of D-Day secret and fooling Hitler was the largest scale probably, at which Poker has been played (unless you count the Bay of Pigs as topping it in potential threat terms). That's the exception that proves the rule. Poker is normally NOT played at such high levels. At large temporal scales, information asymmetries are lessened. The board is more visible to all.
The French got it wrong in the case of the Maginot line (we'll see why in a second), but such "Go" thinking usually pays off. The British thought controlling Gibraltar was crucial. They were right. The Russians waited till the winter had crippled the Luftwaffe in WW II before counterattacking: again not a move that can be hidden in the sense of Poker, but because changing the capabilities of an air force is like a 10-year project, they could still win by making that move openly. The key here is the level of abstraction. Controlling straits or using the weather in your favor are not things that change for thousands of years. That's why Go pieces, unlike Chess or Poker pieces, are all the same.
This sort of "Go" dynamics would be the rough equivalent, in Poker, of being able to choose your cards, knowing that your opponent will be watching your choices and choosing his in turn. In fact you could make up a game: spread out all 52 cards face up, and let 4 poker players pick cards in turn. Do this four times, starting with a different person each time and going clockwise. Since all the info will now be known, you don't have to actually play, but you can just analyze who WOULD have won based on the hand quality, and assuming equivalent or strength-weighted playing skills. This is what war-gaming is like. Kids do this when 2 captains pick teams for a pickup soccer game.
To study how Go maps to this world really well, study Alfred Thayer Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" (or study Walmart's strategy). Naval strategy and geographic market penetration strategy, more than other kinds, is almost entirely about preparatory positioning.
The specific capabilities and power projection abilities of different classes of ships did not really begin to matter till the aircraft carrier was developed. Every decisive naval conflict in history has actually been pretty much decided before the first cannon broadside. In some cases, like Hannibal v. the Scipios in the second Punic War, Rome arguably won using its navy without there ever being a significant naval encounter. Just by controlling the Mediterranean, and having the ability to cut off Spain and forcing Hannibal to march through Gau (and cutting off his line of communication with his left-behind brother in Spain)l, naval positioning and control won the day. Go teaches you things like this.
Sure, not every naval encounter has been a fait accompli based on positioning and fleet sizing/deployment choices. Some encounters did matter, but positioning eventually won the day most of the time. Mahan's analysis of Nelson v. Villeneuve at Trafalgar is particularly illuminating. What appears to be a hard-fought subtactical battle (i.e. a poker game) turns out, when you do a longer-range analysis, to have been primarily a Go game. Nelson managed to set himself up to win. On land, Napolean showed equal mastery of positioning-based play, and you should check out William Duggan's "Strategic Intuition."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/0...
A few centuries later, the Japanese began WW II with a poker move (relying on information hiding). But once the starter poker phase was over, and the American war machine began cranking out new pieces to be positioned, the game shifted to Go dynamics, and the Japanese basically lost long before Midway. They simply did not have the resource depth to play an extended positioning game, even if they had the intelligence. Go may be a Japanese game more than an American game, but you could say that in the Pacific in WW II, the Americans simply had more counter.
But what if, in addition to picking your own hand to play, you could actually change the rules of the game? Like which card trumps which one, or something else?
In some ways, neither tactics nor strategy change over thousands of years. The Romans wanted to control the Mediterranean, so did the French and British after the fall of Spain, and the same considerations mattered in WW II. The Go game on the board that is the Mediterranean has not really changed. Neither has the tactical game: the same concepts like flanking and pincers apply no matter what technology you are using.
But war-making DOES change in fundamental ways due to technological evolution, and this is the part that chess models best.
This is a curious regime of decision-making in which the lowest-level details get coupled with the highest-level framings. This is chess, which is neither a tactical game, nor a strategic game really, but a game of doctrines and operations.
Operations is all about optimizing your systems and processes to match the specific tactical capabilities of what you have to play with.
A "pincer movement" is a tactic that can apply to either cavalry or tanks, but understanding exactly how to execute a pincer movement with those two different "pieces" is where chess-thinking helps. A specific endgame may have variants depending on whether you use castles or bishops to do a given job (assuming it is within the capabilities of both).
Sometimes technology changes can be so radical that they make certain tactical patterns irrelevant, but this is much rarer than you think. Air power makes control of ground perimeters less relevant, by changing a 2d perimeter game into a 3d perimeter game, but not irrelevant. And long before air power, cells of spies on sabotage missions behind enemy lines provided a weaker version of the same capability: striking beyond enemy lines, without breaking them.
When you are able to abstract general principles from a given situational tactical vocabulary, you get a doctrine to guide strategy. So the decision-making stack loops back on itself: specific tactical capabilities support operational use of "abstract" tactics, and the general principles of such use inform the doctrine which in turn frames the strategic game.
Example: moving infantry at motorized speed, aided by preparatory bombing was a pattern of tactical operations that Germany perfected via a beta test in Spain. This doctrine (blitzkreig) then led it to use a classic, zillion year old specific tactic (outflanking, which even wild wolves use), to simply blitz around the French defensive Maginot line, a kind of high-speed flanking movement that could not have been attempted with infantry, but was enabled by motorized infantry.
The "strategy" decision of course, was to use the "outflank" tactic against the Maginot line as a decisive move to anchor the invasion of France.
The Germans won a chess game, while the French were busy waiting for the wrong Go game to start.
In fact, the entire first phase of WW II was all Go and Chess, with almost no Poker on the battlefield (there was a lot of poker in the diplomatic world of course). The first true poker games were the war in the Atlantic (wolfpacks vs. allied shipping) and the Battle of Britain. Both were games of information and real-time decision-making, and real-time information leverage (cracking Enigma and radar) helped the allies win.
Chess therefore trains you to think in terms of the specific implications of rules and special, differentiated properties of different elements of a situation. While all games are friendly to "rule variations" as a way of developing your thinking around the tactical capabilities of a given technology set, chess is particularly good, since unlike Go counters or poker cards, the pieces don't all behave in the same way in either uniform or simply-ranked ways.
A simple example illustrates this. My chess-playing friends in college occasionally played a variant called "superchess" where one player had a material disadvantage (he only had a king, queen and four pawns against the other guy's full force), BUT was allowed to make 2 moves to every 1 by the opponent. This was a 2x tempo advantage. A big aha moment in my study of decision-making was learning from my friends that the tempo advantage was nearly always decisive.
This particular thought experiment would not be nearly as impressive if you tried it with Go or Poker.
Bottomline: decision-making is a complex world with lots of different regimes. One-size-fits all is a very dangerous attitude. Sure, figure out your regime and learn the most relevant game first (for startups, this might be poker, for the CEO of a competitor to Walmart, this is probably Go, for somebody trying to open up the Asian market using a tweaked set of product offerings, Chess).
And of course, other games, especially field sports, teach you a whole other set of skills.
This is a very quick-and-dirty thumbnail application of an approach to decision making, spanning 3-4 chapters, in my upcoming book, Tempo (planned release Feb 2011). While I don't actually use the chess/go/poker metaphors in the book (the only game I use is actually Tetris), sign up for the launch announcement if you want to dive in deeper into the theory behind such questions.
http://ribbonfarm.com/tempo