A game of pattern recognition  pattern recognition  Α few days
ago, I was having a discussion with a novice poker player, who
asked me on my thoughts regarding how much calculation is
required in poker. My answer shocked him in so much that I said
“not as much as what you think”. The majority of the
“calculation” so to speak has been done over many hundreds of
thousands of hands that have been played.  Poker like chess when
played to a high level is a game that relies heavily on pattern
recognition. While calculation is very important in chess
because without any calculation then you would make horrible
blunders when candidate moves don’t work.  So there has to be
calculation in chess but the next question is not so much if
there is calculation but rather “how much is needed”. The best
chess players in the world freely admit that they don’t
calculate more than 3-5 moves deep and many top grandmasters
actually calculate less than that. The vital ingredient isn’t so
much in actually calculating the position but