Does Luck Come into Chess?

I'm saying that skill is still likely going to shape the winner. He might not know too much, but he can draw from ideas like getting his pieces active, not missing simple tactics. You don't agree with that? Haven't you been in situations where pieces are flying everywhere and you just try to pay as much attention to tactics as possible? Surely how well you do at that is likely to have a huge impact on the game.

Sure...but isn't the notion of the game supposed to be that you deliberately went into that because you "knew" you were going to come out on top?

You can't always "know," but indeed it is a sort of claim. You might play a move because you think this is what will make the position work, and don't feel you have to prove it with variations, but instead justify it with principles. Sure, it can be right or wrong, but that doesn't equate to random chance. It just means you're either right or wrong about some truth sitting out there.

Maybe my thesis is this attack will work because his kingside has no pawns there. It is a claim based on what is considered to be evidence. You don't know if the claim is right or not, but the way in which you justified the claim could be considered the skill. If it works, I was right; not lucky.

A skill game doesn't need to imply that everyone plays perfectly. It just means you can shape your fate depending on how good your skill is. Sure, if you have bad skill there will be a lot of things you will be uncertain about.

Well, that's precisely what we are arguing about:  that "random chance" is only (perhaps) one species of what might be termed "luck."

Anyway, guess it's my perception against yours. I just feel like even intuitive moves you play with some sense of control, not necessarily in exact variations but in the confidence that favorable tactics will come. You are still shaping your fate in that sense, just in a more general way. Not to mention calculation. Even when you miss a move you can usually play in a way to complicate it for the opponent. There's just so much skill is able to do, even in unexpected situations.

Yes, but you only have that feeling against lower-rateds.  That's my point.  Against higher-rateds your intuition will most likely turn out to be wrong, and your sense of control (and confidence) will fail.

Now clearly there is something to all of this "feel for position" and intuition and whatnot.  I mean, time and again the better player's grasp of that semi-intangible is proven correct.  It's just that I don't believe it's all so ironclad as chessplayers generally like to make it out to be.  It all seems a bit mysterious and subconscious to me...and no doubt gives you a nice warm feeling (as it does with us all) until you go up against a GM. 

Yes, it's not exactly "luck"...but my point is that what we all too easily call "pure skill" isn't really (exactly) that either, I don't think. 

All I can agree on is that Looby should be in bed by now (he's probably got a ton of classes tomorrow). 

Is this true:

The longer the time control, the lesser the "luck" factor?

We defined at least two forms of luck:
- random chance luck (oppenent gets heart attack/disconnected during game)
- serendipity luck (stumbeling upon something that was not intended, but ends up being very usefull)

Nope, greater (more time in which to have a heart attack). 

True, but other forms of random chance luck, like having a bad night of sleep, are virtually eliminated when a player has 3 days/move or even 7 days/move.

And also the chance of serendipity luck seems to decrease, because players have more time to calculate moves and thus giving them "more intent". Chess is so exponentially complex however, that even if you add extra years for a move I don't think it'll make a player look 10 moves deeper then he/she already did. Rather just 1 or 2 moves. In other words: I think the number of moves a player is able to look deep is an asymptote (no matter how much time you add, you'll never look deeper than that border - unless you improve).

So:

- random chance luck can appear in various ways. In some cases the chance gets bigger (heart attack) in other cases chance decrease (making an error due to fatigue in snail chess).

- serendipity luck decreases with longer time controls, but it cannot decrease to 0, only to the asymptote that is limited by your skill.

Or am I typing plain nonsense again? :D

No one calculates it all.  We always get to a certain point and make our best guess.  That's where skill comes in, sure, so it's not random.  We reference positions and book knowledge to make the best educated guess we can.  But it's still a guess.  Sometimes we play the right moves for the wrong reason and successfully move across a patch of moves where we didn't actually understand the position.

And all the other myriad, unquantifiable, chance factors that reduce the players' skill level even further below 'perfect'.

How can you exclude extraneous factors where human players are concerned?

I think Long Island Man touched on a very good point when he said it's how you define "luck". Luck in chess could mean so many things, and may, ultimately, have nothing to do with chess at all but may be to do with if you are a lucky person in general or not. How do you explain Carlsen? Yes, maybe you say he's a genius, gifted, talented.. but isn't that lucky that he got the edge on everybody? Or is just that the people in Carlsen's family are incredibly prudent and intelligent people who have been steadily improving their intelligence over generations so that one of their offspring may be a great genius? Of course not! Carlsen's father may be very average at chess. Luck could be that you were lucky enough to have parents who taught you chess when you were young, or that you joined a chess club at school, or that you have a very sharp and clear mind that does not easily make mistakes. Their are so many ways I to describe "luck" , not just the random chance type of luck that people imagine when you say the word. Why do some people seem to win more than lose? It seems to be as if their fate is already written, that they were meant to be great at what they did. People like Kasparov..

If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. ;)

As I have said, you can justify something with generals or specifics. If my thesis is that white is winning, I could be saying that based on a forced variation where black gets mated; or, I could be saying that "the positional advantage should be enough for the attack to eventually break through." You're either right or wrong on that. You can of course misperceive or misunderstand, just as you could with science, but that doesn't mean the truth is simply determined by chance, just that your lack of skill can not guarantee that it will land on the truth. Indeed, you might think there is a 50/50 chance your logic was actually correct; but the 50/50 chance is only relative to you; the truth is not making a coin flip, and doesn't care whether or not you think it's right.

So it's weird to call all of this simply luck. I agree however that the game is not pure skill because it is possible for a person to make a thesis that doesn't make sense, yet still come out with the "best" move. However, like in poker but to a much greater intensity, in the long run the player with more overall skill is heavily favored. A good player takes into account randomness before he even goes into such positions for example; a good player can alter the luck to his favor if you will with the positions he strives for. If you are sad you lost in a tournament due to imperfect luck for you, well, hope for better "luck" in the next one

im to lazy to read Elubas post,but its obvious that there is luck involved in chess how else could an inferior player beat a stronger one. Whatever the reason is, its definetly luck for the weaker player to have won.

I have a pretty simple answer: Form. If you are tired for example you are more likely to make blunders than if your brain is full of energy. All of us can vary in how "strong" we play, perhaps by a few hundred points in either direction of our actual rating (which is essentially an average of our high and low performances).

Of course maybe you call that luck too. I just say that if your opponent is in bad form, it means you don't have to show as much skill today; nonetheless, for that particular game, you showed more skill than your opponent, and that is your task in the two player game of chess. I guess it's about how you define it; I can see why people might consider that luck but for me that doesn't seem like the perfect label.

Tetsuo had an awesome argument.  Elubas, I'm too lazy to read your post, but what I said was right, so if you were disagreeing you are wrong.