Comment by p1necone
1 day ago
Bit of a tortured example, but imagine if in chess every time you moved your queen you had to put $1 in escrow that you only got back if you won the game - do you think you'd still make exactly the same moves, or would you maybe play a sub optimal game to avoid moving your queen as much?
And if you saw your opponent move their queen would you be more confident that they probably saw a path to victory than you would be otherwise, and would you maybe spend more time analyzing moves that required that queen move instead of what you might have analyzed instead otherwise? (analogous to bluffing in poker).
Basically the fact that there's some external factor you can use to communicate what your move might mean to other players makes the mind games/bluffing/analysis work better than if you were just playing to win. The money isn't just linked to whether you win or lose - it's actually tied to the individual mechanics in a way that affects how each round plays out.
The cost/information function of moves exists in poker regardless of whether it's tied to actual money. You put your money in a hand if you believe that you have good ev, whether that ev is labeled in chips or dollars. I don't see how changing the rules of chess (therefore changing the ev - of course if you change the ev that changes players' behaviour. But that would be like changing the poker ruleset, not changing the money value of chips) makes a comparable case.
Let me give you a counter-comparison: if regardless of which chess piece was moved, after both players had made a play, they could bet on the game outcome (therefore not changing the ev of a move), I'm not sure players would want to play differently.
Your chess betting example would play slightly differently than standard chess. Since the goal becomes not just to win, but to win the most cash, you'd be trying to leverage your hidden information in order to improve your outcome, which in chess is just "things you've foreseen but your opponent hasn't", which, due to the nature of chess, you'd weaken by jacking up your bets to try and capitalize. The result would probably be a worse game of chess, since without the chance component the better player will win the chess game far more often than the worse player, and then the optimal move for the worse player would be to forfeit early constantly.