Oh, and as for why it's not like Poker: In Poker there is a permanent imbalance of information, while in chess the imbalance exists but it is dynamic.
Chess: A Game of Luck?
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Better to be lucky than good?
My high school biology teacher - who I had for Bio 1 and Bio 2 said everyday "Luck favors the prepared mind." I believe he got it from Louis Pasteur who said "Chance favors the prepared mind."
So is chess a game of luck - all games have an element of luck but also skill and I believe in no other game more than chess does skill outweigh luck.
on the other hand, between even players, it is luck. Who can guess the outcome between two players who are 2695 and 2700?
They have equal information, and it is therefore a coin toss. This is why ratings are designed probabilistically. When these two players play, one will have a momentary lapse in judgment (assuming 1-0 or 0-1), but which is completely random.
It is not a game of luck. It is a game of good decisions and bad ones. Sure you cant predict your opponents decision but you both can see the board and have all the information of the position. It is a game based on the skill of you and your opponent. In the analogy given it was not luck that allowed karpov to win, but lack of skill on his opponents side to see the winning continuation.
No. That was easy.
OK, on one level, wasn't it lucky for Karpov that his opponents weren't as skilled.
But more importantly, the analogy still holds. There is an identical amount of luck in a chess game and a coin toss. If Karpov was so skilled, that only meant he was able to take the chance element mostly out of the metaphorical coin toss, but it can never be entirely removed, there was always that chance that one of the position he didn't look at, would have drastically altered his analysis, and that is in fact what happens when you or Karpov misses something in a game.
Capablanca said "a good player is always lucky."
It is not chance, whether or not you see or miss a certain variation, but rather your skill level and how good you are at calculating and seeing moves.
Akuni wrote:
Oh, and as for why it's not like Poker: In Poker there is a permanent imbalance of information, while in chess the imbalance exists but it is dynamic.
I disagree that there is any information imbalance in chess -- chess is a complete information game. Irrespective of your opponent's intentions, there is always a best move for you and all of the information you require to find it is right there on the board.
Jan 14, 2009
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#11
Phelan wrote:
It is not chance, whether or not you see or miss a certain variation, but rather your skill level and how good you are at calculating and seeing moves.
That's not true. Your skill level certainly affects the odds, but I'm sure even the best player to have ever played has a .001% (or so) chance of missing any give Mate in 2.
This is all kind of absurd. The word luck can only be applied colloquially to chess. As a game of perfect information, it is evidently not at all a game of luck in the traditional sense. It's true that not all games end as they theoreticaly should but this is a reflection of human inconsistency and skill level not of chess. If it were, I could claim that math is luck too when I miss a problem that I usually solve easily.
The only luck that comes into play is when you're opponent blunders, or, far less frequently, when you blindly stumble into a brilliant move or combination.
With perfect play, however, luck is completely extraneous. You technically don't need luck to make the best move every time because as I've said, all of the information is available on the board. If you can do that, your opponent's responses won't affect the outcome and any luck that might be attributable to your opponent's play is also relegated to irrelevance.
We talk about players who make the best move available to them every time as if that player were to exist. Everytime your opponent makes a blunder you are lucky. If your opponent was never to make a mistake luck would still come into play though, it would just be the bad luck of playing a perfect player.
Jan 14, 2009
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#15
georgeblesi wrote:
We talk about players who make the best move available to them every time as if that player were to exist. Everytime your opponent makes a blunder you are lucky. If your opponent was never to make a mistake luck would still come into play though, it would just be the bad luck of playing a perfect player.
This.
Its not lcuk, its just a lack of skill on their part. Chess is a game of skill.
There is nothing lucky about beating an opponent who makes poor moves. It should be expected.
There is no luck in chess, an opponent playing poor moves has NOTHING TO DO WITH LUCK.
I dont see it as a game that is decided by luck or chance. I see it as a game that is decided by knowledge of the game and human nature. In much the same way as most sports are decided. However the game is not without a sense of randomness. I see the game of chess as a series of moments that i call controlled chaos. Its because of this that chess is so much fun. If every move was perfect, every time, the game of chess would be boring.
Jan 15, 2009
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#20
there is some luck in anything; if you are about to lose and your opponent makes a horrible blunder and you can draw or even win, it could be said it was luck. but there is no way chess is a game of luck. there are so many subtle things to look for and beware of, so many openings, endgames can be exhausting, etc.
I thought chess was more or less a game of skill, until that is, I read this anecdote posted in another forum, I retell it here for your consideration.
'Chess,' said the Dutch grandmaster, Jan Hein Donner, 'is as much a game of chance as blackjack; or tossing cards into a top hat.' There was a pained silence, then a polite babel of disagreement: it was a game of the utmost skill; a conflict between disciplined minds in which victory would inexorably go to the more perceptive, the more analytical player; a duel of the intellect in which luck played no part. Donner shrugged, lit another cigarette and said: 'Believe that if you like.' Bent Larsen smiled the smile of a man who had heard his friend air such iconoclastic arguments in the past but was quite happy to contest them again, when the score of the fifth game of the World Championship match between Karpov and Korchnoi was brought in. Both men pulled out of their inside pockets the wallet sets all grandmasters seem to carry at all times and began to skim through the moves.
It happened that the teleprinter tape had been torn off after Karpov's 54th move as Black [...]. They studied the position for a few moments, mated Karpov in four moves and were surprised when another whole sheet of moves was brought from the teleprinter.
When they saw Korchnoi's 55th move - Be4+ - Larsen's eyebrows went up.
'There you are,' Donner said, quietly and without triumph as though some self-evident truth had been revealed, 'pure luck'.
Now, is chess truly a game of luck, much like tossing a coin, yes it is (Though it is not a game of luck in the fashion of poker).
This is because the tossing of a coin, whether it lands on heads or tails, is not really a matter of chance, only statistically so, in reality, from the moment it is tossed (And allowed to fall minus interference) the is only one side on which it could conceivably land, the forces applied to it by the air, gravity and the hand will allow for only one outcome. The only reason we perceive it as random or full of chance is because we have imperfect information, we don't know the magintude of all the forces and so we cannot predict how it will fall. So it is both random, and not.
Chess works in the same fashion. When you analyze a position you can't look at every possible permutation of said position, and so for every possible position that you don't analyze an element of chance is added.
Of course, all of this makes a chess program the equivalent of a man with a calculator who can calculate all the forces on a coin. And it makes grandmasters people with such dexterity that they can predict (or make) a coin land heads up when they toss it.
So is chess a game of luck, yes, and not only in the sense of a game with (In practicality) imperfect information, but also one played by humans, and humans are, as I'm sure Donner would agree, really quite unpredictable.