does luck exist in chess

i say it does. the only luck in chess is your opponant not identifieing your tactic.

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Well, it changes exactly at the point where everything can be calculated: if it can be, that is complete information fully taken advantage of, and thus devoid of luck, but if it cannot, it still doesn't know all of the information and so is flawed and can make decisions for poor reasons, which again may or may not be punished.

"An inability or failure to understand the underlying deterministic causality behind an effect does not mean that it does not exist and the effect is therefore non-deterministic"

Why not? I mean yes, the game is deterministic, but in practice our flawed understanding of it creates luck, for reasons already mentioned. If luck was not involved, then should not the stronger chess player never lose to the weaker player (assuming no huge intangible factors at work here), as the stronger player simply must play higher quality moves? Yet sometimes the weaker player plays a crazy move for the wrong reasons but turns out to be really good! Neither player could forsee the truth behind it, but the weaker player still came out on top.

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That's also being modest.

Luck is when chance is in your favor.  There is an extremely small chance that one could play a perfect game with random moves.  This would be considered lucky in my opinion.

the better you play the luckier you get , thats all.

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Good luck

luck has no place in a chess game... it's all about being smarter than your opponant!

Kramnik on his recent Candidates match with Radjabov:

"In the end, of course, it was just luck that decided things. I ended up luckier. The match was completely even, but someone had to win and someone had to lose, and it turned out I won. We both fought very hard, the struggle was fierce, and again, I repeat, I was simply luckier." quoted on TWIC.

I sort of agree that the lower the level of play, the more luck there will be. That also means that the faster the game, the poorer the quality of the games. I came myself to think about the luck factor after having good and bad runs in blitz games and getting tilted about it when I was running bad, and then when I was running good, I was thinking things were back to normal, but that really wasn't it as running bad is also a part of the normal. I think I have seen all level of players fluctuate like +/- 100 points, and more only because of some unrelated reason perhaps. So, there are some other reasons too why the better players too might fluctuate just as much though they are not likely to make as many bad plays but their opponents are better and a smaller mistake is enough. If there is a skill difference between players, then the bigger it is the less fluctuations there sort of is, but it's possible to fluctuate sort of badly there too, like losing two games in ten rather than the expected one game in ten.

David Parlett has a very interesting discussion of the role of skill and chance in games in general on this page on his site.

Of course there's luck in chess, here is one (extreme) example where a player thought he had passed the time control and lost on time in an endgame that was winnable but impossible to lose. If you win like this you're definitely lucky:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1485960

I think there's pseudo-luck, but in fact, I think even so it's legitimate enough to count.

It's just that the "probabilities" we come up with are purely arbitrary, inexact, and immeasurable.

Still, they're not always totally inaccurate. A meteorologist says things like "there is a 50% chance of rain," even though we can't measure something as vast as weather in percent; in fact, there is only one thing that will happen -- we just are not sure if that thing is raining, snowing, or shining, which is determined by natural law of course! Yet the 50% prediction can have some merit, depending on how experienced the weatherman is -- he's saying that he's about as confident as he would be calling a coin flip. When we say "I have maybe a 50% chance to hold this game," we are also about as confident as we would be calling a coin flip. When we say "I'm 99.999... etc. sure this will work," we are saying that we are so confident that we would nearly be comfortable with betting our life on it.

Another form of luck is something that happens often in knockout style events. Gelfand has had very bad results against the top players for many years, but the three opponents he faced in Kazan were Mamedyarov, Kamsky and Grischuk. At the moment Grischuk is the highest rated on the live rating list where he is 12th, and most people would probably not include them in the top ten. But still beating these three players was enough to reach a title match, and that's probably what Kramnik referred to when he said that Gelfand was lucky with the draw.

A position from a game in my first OTB tournament. A pretty big stroke of luck if you ask me :

Some more examples of luck: Navara and Ivanchuk have offered draws in winning positions to be nice to their opponents who definitely were lucky not to lose. Malakhov allowed Azmaiparashvili to take back a losing move and because of this the latter won the game and the European Championship, he was lucky to get away with breaking the rules. Sasikiran and Radjabov have dropped pieces on the floor when making their 40th move, their opponents were lucky to get a better result because of such unusual incidents.

No.

simple. luck cannot exist in general because randomness doesn't exist. everything has a cause. If threw an apple at you and it hurt. did you get unlucky or did you get hurt because I threw it at you. you don't need to write an essay, its this simple.

The only part luck plays is in matching you to an opponent.

no because it is caused by the computer, not randomness. the computer is trying to find you a match as fast as possible. but since thousands of people are trying to create a match at the same time it takes a few seconds. It can't be randomness. randomness can't exist. it makes no sense.

not in the slightest chance... unless your opponent blunders that's lucky..