Chess or Pokemon: Which requires more critical thinking?

[cantab]

In a single battle, luck is important. But over the course of multiple battles, the luck averages out. Consequently, the winner of a single-elimination tournaments may get there thanks to luck, but the top ranked players on the ladder, not so much.

Use or non-use of luck is itself part of the strategy. You can build your team to be more or less susceptible to luck. The classic example is the power vs accuracy argument, eg. Fire Blast or Flamethrower.

[lati0s]

Originally Posted by Fat cantab

I'd argue there's more basic memorisation in Pokemon. You've got to remember the types, stats, common movesets and unusual moves, for each of over 600 Pokemon.

well its really more like 50-100 pokemon as so many of the pokemon are competitively irrelevant.

[Texas Cloverleaf]

But the options are there. If you don't remember things then yu can get swept by say, an Anorith with Swift Swim and X-Scissor as Vexatious explained in his warstory.

[cantab]

Well OK you can cut it down a lot actually if you take out the NFEs (though 5th gen's got prevo stone) and total junk. But even then, a Pokemon player who knows only the most common Pokemon and movesets is like a chess player who knows only the most common openings. You'll probably be fine most of the time, but as TC mentions, if you face someone who uses something a bit unusual you could be in trouble.

[lmitchell0012]

Originally Posted by Fat muffinhead

In Pokemon, you are unsure of your opponent's "pieces", and must play accordingly. You also know that your opponent may have different or "better" pieces than you.

Chess is more intellectually stimulating (not to be confused with 'harder') because you know exactly how many and of what type of pieces your opponent has, and you are completely equally matched. It is purely who makes the better moves or sacrifices, with no outside chances (crit flinch para etc). Simply put, the person who purely out-strategizes the other will win.

Until 5th generation, that is

[Deaga]

Originally Posted by Fat undisputed

It's Pokemon for sure. I think one of the biggest indications of this is people can make Chess AIs but it is pretty close to impossible to make a Pokemon AI. The vast number of variations even if you exclude team building make Pokemon a game much more reliant on Critical thinking and prediction.

Maybe that's because chess is actually taken seriously by most people? We have many teams of people all around the world who could be trying to make a chess AI for many reasons. One of them is that they'd be recognized for it. Money's certainly involved too.

Now you make a Pokémon AI. What happens? People at Smogon praise you, and that's it. There's no Pokémon AI simply because there's no interest in making one.

[cim]

Originally Posted by Fat lmitchell0012

Until 5th generation, that is

You're unsure of pieces when building your team (the largely important part)

[Delibird1]

chess is harder you need to think harder about it. and with pokemon you just need remember what smogon says 90% of the time. with chess its way harder and more complicated

[Kristoph]

Originally Posted by Fat MrIndigo

What it means, though, is that the strategy arises only out of what you don't know. The more you memorise about the game, the better you are. That's not strategy.

Memorization is a huge part of learning Chess, which most people can probably agree is a bad thing. To suggest that Pokemon requires more critical thinking just because it tends to be more "spontaneous" is suspect, though. If the spontaneous decisions that do occur in Chess are really interesting and challenging, which, I mean, they are, it could easily be significantly more intellectually stimulating than Pokemon (or require more critical thinking or whatever other vague metric we're talking about). It would have a lot of "extra baggage" that bothers people and serves as an annoying barrier to entry for would-be competitive players, but that's neither here nor there.

In another post you add "experience" to your claim; as in, "the more you memorize, oh, and also experience, the better you'll be at Chess." This is a much different position than when you were only talking about memorization. It is pretty irritating to have a game that is memorization-based because you can literally read books on Chess and get just hugely, hugely better based on that alone. Like, I am utterly worthless at Chess compared to my theoretical "read a bunch of books and memorized openings" counterpart. And his "read even more books; memorized even more openings" counterpart would probably make him look like crap by comparison, too (I haven't played enough Chess to know just how much of this stuff there is to actually memorize, but I don't think this is an exaggeration considering that there are books on Chess openings, and I often hear people talking about doing "drills" and stuff to improve, which is mildly insane to me), without even having played a game. So memorization is pretty bad (a game can still be great and have a lot of memorization, it's just that normal people will be really bored during the memorization parts, waiting for the "actual game" to start), okay.

But "experience" is a really broad term. It can encompass boring stuff like memorization, but the interesting mid-game intuition stuff is there too. I mean, you're kind of attacking the whole concept of "learning," and the basis of competitive gaming itself. That includes Pokemon and its double-blind decisionmaking, though prediction is obviously an interesting sort of skill that we should differentiate from anything found in Chess.

Now if by "experience" you just mean "hours of time put into the game," and you're talking about us literally being able to look at an expert-level match and distill the cause of victory to "player 1 has put 100 more hours into the game than player 2," then it makes a lot more sense to be annoyed by a game that rewards that sort of "skill." But that's an absurd situation that only exists in weird RPG-like games (like Wi-fi Pokemon, if one player beats the other by having better IVs). There's no way it applies to Chess. In Chess (and most competitive games), if you won "by having more experience," that's basically a slightly conniving way of saying that they're a better learner. Both are insanely complex statements to make and say laughably little about who "deserved" the win, was "more skilled," or whether the game required more or less "critical thinking" than some other game.

Originally Posted by Fat undisputed

it is pretty close to impossible to make a Pokemon AI.

Even if this were true, which I'm really sure it isn't, what would it have to do with the issue at hand? Double-blind decisions are probably difficult for AI, okay. That really has nothing to do with human play, where double-blind decisions are obviously much more intuitive.

[Lance Burrito]

As far as I'm concerned, they ca not be compared.

[popemobile]

Originally Posted by Fat BlakBlastoise

Are you comparing a classic game, that's been around for like thousands of years, which has been used by some of the greatest minds of all time, to chess?
No, but seriously. Chess. Period. Pokemon has thinking, but chess is... chess.

but seriously, this. They aren't even in the same league

[Google Knight]

Chess. But just because it's more difficult than Pokémon for me.

[NatGeo]

Saying I have minimal experience in chess up front.

I personally believe Pokemon and chess are compatible. HOWEVER, the only way this would be possible would be removing luck factor. Pokemon is mostly luck, and without it, its porbably liely rthat someone with a mind oriented toward math could figure out how to crack the system of sorts.
Though still, even if one takes the luck out of the game, it can be compared to different playstyles of chess if there are any ( :/ ). Like stall, offense, Baton Pass, etc. There are those who excel at their certain playstyle, and others in a different one.
They may not be compatible, but still, one may try.

Also, chess requires more think imo.