Quote from: just_Alice on April 17, 2021, 06:32:02 PM

Quote from: praine on April 17, 2021, 12:38:49 PM

Quote from: just_Alice on April 17, 2021, 12:05:22 PM

For me, there's nothing better than Poker if we're talking about skills games, but there are other options. There's also blackjack and, I'm quite surprised no one mentioned Spades, it also includes a lot of strategic thinking, no less than Poker, perhaps. And, of course, there's Yahtzee. While it includes dice, which brings an element of luck to the game - a strategy should also be applied and you need to make a lot of decisions, evaluate your risks, which is why to play this game it's better to understand probabilities first.

I love Yahtzee but a computer can show you what all the best decisions are so it's not a game you could securely play for money. The OP is looking for PVP games that aren't solved by computers and can be +EV for players. Not easy criteria to fulfill.

I think Rock Paper Scissors is the purest and best PVP game but it's hard to call it a skill game since you can just let an RNG decide the throws to neutralize any advantage that might exist between the two players.

Yeah, but from that point of view Poker also isn't the best choice, because computers can calculate the best decisions in poker as well. But I see now, that's what OP was stating in the first place. IMO these calculators mean nothing because in games like Poker and Yahtzee the calculated best decision isn't always the right one. I remember my experience in playing Poker with bots, which were programmed for these very best decisions and they suck.

Any skilled player can outplay these calculators because it's not only about playing with the best odds, sometimes it's about knowing when to take the risk, which is also a skill.

I'm starting to think that what OP asked for is actually impossible because for any games that require skills the best option can be calculated (in one way or another), and the only games that can't be solved like this are those, which depend purely on luck Undecided

Bots have improved a lot during that last years. This is a great issue and I am very sure that in a couple of years poker will be mainly a game where bots fight against other highly-complex bots. In this case also owners of bots have a higher advantage with better computation power.