[aquateen]

To clarify, before you were comparing a tree of every possible move in a chess game against the decisions in a poker game?

That has to be a joke to compare the games that way. Even here you mention number of relevant moves at a given game state. I have to be misunderstanding that. Bet/check/fold vs say half dozen candidate moves?

I've been assuming difficulty for a human the whole time, to attain any level of skill. Since the chess community/theory is more established, it's going to be a more difficult game.

[tansey]

You are indeed misunderstanding.

A game tree search is not defined by the available options for the very next move. It's about the total possible paths to the end. In this case, poker is a much larger tree. Read the intro section of Darse's PhD dissertation that I linked to above and you'll understand.