My 17 year old son is not interested in chess because he says that the game is solvable (meaning that, in principle, it is possible to look at every possible combination of moves and determine whether with perfect play white would always win or black would always win, or if it would always be a draw). He says that as a solvable game, chess is just a very elaborate form of tic tac toe.

There is no sense arguing with him (past a certain point) so sometimes I just find ways to tweak him. I did this by telling him that luck is a big factor in determining the outcome of a chess game.

Of course he challenged me on that, so here's what I said:

"I won a game the other day because the other player carelessly put his queen in jeopardy, not seeing that she was in the line of fire of a bishop, so I snatched the queen, and then it was easy to win the game. It was great luck for me that my opponent made that mistake."

I then gave him a few more examples of lucky occurrences in chess games. Imagine his frustration at hearing my persistent, self-assured, intentional idiocy!

There is definitely luck in the game. I had an unlucky weekend at one particular tournament - I was unlucky to feel sick and not be able to concentrate my best, so I had a bad tournament.

 

But your son is probably right about chess being solvable. But it hasn't been solved yet, and even when it is eventually solved, the solution is likely to be complicated enough that you'll have to be a strong master to memorize it and be able to play it out perfectly every time, even when your opponent varies from the "book" solution.

 

If your son thinks it isn't worth playing because it's solvable, dare him to show you the solution!

 

--Fromper 

Hi m8, your son is right but only in principal. Chess, because of it's finite limatations could be solvable but like Froper said, it's not been yet and even computers can't solve it. but your son really had no need to feel frustrated, all he had to say was, If you could see every positon then you would have seen that queen move. But I agree, there is a certain amount of luck in chess, and I've been really lucky so far.

Red

The problem is that white has the first move.  If black had the first move occasionally, things might be a little different.  Seriously though, there are always these quotes about how many 'possible' moves there are in the first few moves for each side and so on, most of which would be completely stupid.  I'm interested to know, if a top computer in a proper game, say Rybka or whatever, analyses a position 15 moves deep and finds a dead cert win, does it log that position.  Or does it have to work it out again if it comes across it again.  I.e. could it update its own database as it were.  How many possible good moves are there in chess?  I would guess there aren't really that many and if you had powerful programs working the possible games out you could effectively tabulate entire games, presumably to a draw in most cases, or occasional wins if it turns out there is some vague flaw in the defence which only becomes apparent after many moves.  I know there are supposed to be about 9 million possible positions after 3 moves each, but how many are any good. Take away all games where white plays a pawn forward 1 square or either N to R3 and you just got rid of 4.5 million of them for a start.  Then after 1. e4 d5  anything other than ed or a pawn move one square as previously discounted. Etc.  Has this ever been worked out.  It surely wouldn't take many computers to get a very long way down the line would it?

If it is ever solved I hope it is kept a secret and not even GM's are told about it.  Why do you guys think Chess variants havent become more popular? Chess 960 seems very interesting to me and so does Capablanca Chess.  These variants hold onto the essence of the game but make it infinatley more complex.  Chess960 to me seems to almost do more justice to chess than normal chess.  I love the idea of it being pointless to memorize openings and that a person's creativity and smarts on the fly must take over.  No doubt that eventually certain starting positions would have certain good openings, but a person would never be able to have all of them meorized out to the the extent they are in normal chess.

There is no luck in chess. Hahahahaha...