Which Game Demands the Greatest Human Intelligence? Chess, Go or Poker?

As eveyone here knows... This week, Google's Deepmind won the first of 5  matches against 9-dan Lee Sedol.  Which got me thinking.... we know there's conclusive studies that have proven chess players display above-average intelligence, that their playing strength is related to their individual intelligence level, and that their performance in expertise-related tasks is also a function of intelligence..  but are they (we) just a drop in the bucket of gray matter when compared to the Go and Poker pros?    

Go.... THE the most complex board game ever created requires superlative instincts and evaluation skills over chess.. and poker computers playing mateamatically perfect games, rarely even crack top top 100 in human rankings..... Are their players just smarted than us ?   Discuss....

How do you know that? I haven't seen those studies so could you give me the links. According to this article https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-cognitive-psychology-of-chess the results have been very different: "After a century of investigation, not a single study with adult chess players has managed to establish a link between chess skill and intelligence.  Intellect had little predictive power among strong chess players. "

Could. Apparently Einstein played and liked chess as well nonetheless the competitive factor of the game was a big problem.

They say.

The game with the most money riding on it...

Any game can be argued as being the most complex.  Each game has its own complexities.

Chess has different pieces that move in a different manner unlike say, Checkers.

Go has a very large board with specific ideas and tactics that many have no understanding of the reason behind them.  For example, wherever Black goes on move 1 (Black goes first in Go), White's move should be a "Knight's Move" (stealing a chess term) away from the square Black went on (we are assuming blank, standard, 19x19 board, no handicaps).

Backgammon has the challenge of figuring out permutations and combinations at rapid speed.  Leaving one chip bare might give your opponent 14 ways out to capture you while leaving another chip bare may only give your opponent 8 ways out, but you may be 18 pips in (one away from your "6") with that one versus still in your opponent's home in the other case, so going the other way might still be better!

Scrabble has the challenge of you basically needing to be a walking dictionary in order to succeed, and you better have every 2-letter word known like the back of your hand, like XI!

Chess over poker. I've heard go requires more strategic thinking than chess,but don't know about that. 

Just beggining to play chess but I have a good experience on online poker, so, just to compare the two games, one thing I know is that a bad poker player can become a pro (especially in tournaments where the random factor is bigger than in cash games), but I don't think any bad chess player can become a pro, or correct me if I'm wrong on this point.

Pro in poker is not the same thing than pro in chess, in poker you juste have to be rich enough to integrate the pro tours. This just to be clear with the term "pro".

Obviously, if we look at the real poker pros, not the lucky guys, there are lot of similarities with chess (and other games) about the strategy,mathematical theory and psychology.

In term of complexity I'm agree with ThrillerFan, each game has its own complexity, there are differents parameters and it's difficult to compare them.

I think you are comparing apples to oranges.....take for example sports.  Say there is a link between professional NFL players and athleticism (ok, thats obvious).  Then you say, ok, well you need to be athletic to play Soccer, or basketball...or tennis...etc. Now if you try to ask what sport requires the most athleticism, you will begin to see what i mean.....each sport requires a different form of athleticism, soccer requires endurance for running, baseball requires hand-eye-coordination for hitting a 95 mph fastball....and so on,

Asking which game requires the most intellegence has the same issue.  now I'm not a GO player, but Im sure its safe to assume that both chess and Go require many similar areas of intelligence such as spatial reasoning and retrograde analysis, but im sure there are seperate areas that one requires more than the other.  One example i have for poker (atleast live and not online poker) is emotional intelligence, which may explain why a computer still has yet to break ground in this arena.

At the end of the day though, whats it mean to be smarter...sure even if someone has a higher IQ, so what?  Im sure Magnus Carlsen couldn't care less what Lee Sedol's IQ is...

This is similar to questions on infinity. Is one infinity bigger than another that contains twice the number of elements? The answer is no (except in very special mathematical cases). All infinities are bigger than you can count in finite time and so are all advanced brain games more difficult than a brain can master in a lifetime. Which makes them all equally complex and equally demanding of human skill and intelligence.

Wait, Poker and Backgammon too? No, I don't think so. There is quite a bunch of players who have memorized the first 3 decimals of all the conditional probabilities in these games. The excitement comes not from the contest of intellectual capacity but from the adrenalin rush inherent in gambling and reading poker minds. By the way, beyond the analytical horizons, chess, go and draughts become gambling games as well, but the probabilities in brain games are heavily stacked in favor of the more skilled, more logical and more knowledgeable players. I guess that's what attracts us to these games, the combination of brain skill and gambling excitement.

Chess has about 10^75 possible situations, while go has 10^172 situations. I am not entirely sure about poker, though...

To get rid of their chess frustrations the Cross River gorillas have now moved on to new activities, mainly posting random anti-social comments on human websites. Such is in line with their nature and is reported to improve their mood considerably. Unfortunately this is not the same for the human visitors of their targeted websites.

Is chess.com one of the human websites?

Not sure. The latest data seems to indicate we are dealing with Cross Dressing gorillas here rather than Cross River gorillas. For comparison, have you seen the "Trading Places" movie? That's where both species matched up.

I play many complex game from card game tile games, board games . Chess is most complex and challenging. The elements of Promotion makes Chess above other games.

There were some strong chess engines in the mid 1980s. Don't know much about Go other than an AI beat the world champ recently. With poker it depends what type of game... I think limit poker was easily dominated by computers in the past but I think computers are starting to win in no-limit. So I would say no-limit heads-up poker.

'While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans,
the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.' - Lasker

Though I'm told that Tic-Tac-Toe is the most popular game in the universe - in spite of the fact that millions of its participants have perished by boredom. Civilizations are even rated by the dimensionality of their TTT-versions. Earth plays in 3D but on Arcturus the commercial Amazone packages vary from 6D to 10D depending on your social class. Gamblers prefer the quantum extensions which feature random woodworm holes. So many tastes end-to-end!

Well, I just fall asleep from playing this game.