Najdorf, you do understand the Capablanca was being whimsical when he quipped that remark? It was not exactly a well thought out philosophical statement but a play on words. Jose Raul, a diplomat and celebrity of his time, was playing to an audience of reporters when he said that.
How much of chess is luck?
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Well "forked again" what u say is partly correct but partly wrong...
No chess player can play games with 100% control every time Not even MAGNUS CARLSON ,at least 1 time a player would do a blunder or a mistake or even a inaccurate move and turn the whole game upside down....It is because we are human ...There are only a few perfect brains in this world...
So at least a few times our games are based on luck...You say that if we play chess while analyzing,calculating ,and by playing correct moves you can win a game and that you do not need luck...but what happens when your opponent does the same there is NO END TO A GAME WITHOUT EVEN A SMALL MISTAKE.....
DeirdreSkye wrote:
LadyMisil wrote:
Top players bring more skill to the game. Weak players rely more on luck than top players. So the more skill between the combined two players, the less luck is involved.
I think it's exactly the opposite. Luck tends to play a bigger role with skilled players. If a very good player misses something that he would nornally see 99 out of 100 times , then his opponent was lucky. Great players accept luck. I have seen Carlsen , Ivanchuk, and Aronian saying "I was lucky" after the game. It's those who don't understand chess that don't accept luck.
Sam Shankland even made a video "Getting Lucky in Chess".
"You may not want to admit it, but we all just get flat out lucky sometimes!" says in the preface.
I agree. I also think it's the opposite. In almost any competition of skill the old saying is the better you are, the luckier you are. While I think there is almost no luck in chess it seems like chess is no different than other competitions, the most skilled players create their own luck.
To forked_again. Okay, I will accept your definition of luck for this conversation and forum only. I already discussed luck that is inherent in the game itself when I compared the various games.
The opposite of luck is skill. A weaker player may win one game out of ten against a stronger player. In that one singular game, move by move, the stronger and more skilled player was outplayed by the weaker player. Still that does not mean the weaker player is the stronger player or the more skilled one. If you insist that the weaker player did not get lucky, fine. We can go with that.
Still, how do you explain the contradiction that weaker players sometimes beat strong players on occasion, while usually losing? Do you feel players skills change from day to day?
You can analyse your life and see what comes in the future and plan your exams, jobs ,e.t.c.
But non of it is worth if you die before your time..
and you can't decide when you will die ..only your past births can ...or mother nature..But NOT YOU and so is chess You can not decide what might happen at the end although you analyse the game with all your might ...Because who knows when it will flip upside down giving the point to your opponent
lfPatriotGames wrote:
... In almost any competition of skill the old saying is the better you are, the luckier you are. While I think there is almost no luck in chess it seems like chess is no different than other competitions, the most skilled players create their own luck.
Yes, highly skilled players give their opponents more chances to go wrong. Mikhail Tal was particularly noted for this. On his way to his World Championship title, he made many unsound sacrifices that won him matches. His aim was to complicate the position and rely on his ability to outcalculate his opponents, including the older Mikhail Botvinnik.
In Duplicate bridge, this is even more so the case for top players. Top declarers will make a play early that the defender has to guess right immediately than to make the same play later when the defender has a count on the hand and knows what to do. For example, leading from dummy to a singleton king in your hand. Will the defender break the “rules” and go up second hand high?
Chess does not have as many different opportunities as bridge, but it does have its moments.
Sep 22, 2018
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#108
IM_Serious wrote:
There is no luck. Instead of making a mistake your opponent could have chosen the best move. It's not like in poker where you don't know what cards will appear next.
That's actually not a bad analogy. There are several different ways of defining luck:
- Luck0: you can see your opponents hands and know what cards are coming. As can your opponent. Both of you know its total information, what is the correct bet?
- Luck1: given perfect information i.e. you can see your opponents cards, he can see yours and both of you know what cards are still out what is the correct bet?
- Luck2: given perfect asymmetric information i.e. you can see the opponents cards and know what cards are still out, they don't know you know what is the correct bet? (that is you can bluff or semibluff, )
after a bunch more of those we get to something like
- Luck 2*: given a probability model for Luck2 what is the correct bet over all possible combinations?
Similarly in chess. All tactics are decidable given perfect calculation just like Luck0 is a boring game given perfect information. But we don't have perfect calculation so we have to build a probability model, a positional model.
Exactly, jbolden! Chess is not all calculated out like checkers is. You can make a move and your opponent will not always have a clear cut forced continuation. Sometimes they will have a choice of moves or plans to choose from.
In checkers, the world champions have worked out that red (black moves first) can force a draw no matter what opening black chooses.
In chess, many openings are not clearly dead draws. Lots of gambles and unclear experimental openings to choose from. In the middlegame, especially with two non-World Champions, multiply that exponentially.
forked_again wrote:
In chess, the players have 100% control of their own outcome.
Yes they have 100% control of what move they make. But what about quality if this move? How does it correspond to absolute chess truth? We don't know this (with exception of theoretical positions that are already in our memory). And this approximation to absolute chess truth depends on our skill of course, but as we can't calculate everything, there always will be a random part - sometimes we'll hit closer, sometimes farther. Kramnik getting mated in 1 by Fritz is mostly random event, a pecularity of human brain shortcomings.
Definition of luck from Merriam-Webster: "the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual".
So what is that circumstance in chess? That's our brain (and the brain of our opponent of course). The brain doesn't work in deterministic predictable manner. Our skill level does not uniquely define the quality of every individual move, because some of brain wokings are unpredictable and random.
+LadyMisil Indeed. Yes, Capablanca often made such remarks, as to play to an audience but that doesn't mean what I implied about that statement isn't true. He didn't believe in luck in Chess. Your comparison with Checkers is already a non-starter for me in this particular forum. Gamblers depend on luck. That's a no brainer. You know, is it luck when one solves a Rubiks cube? Is luck involved when one scores the highest score in Space Invaders? We're talking about things that take skill, determination absent of deterrence: it's just you, the opponent and the board.
Moreover, is it luck that Chess engines beats you or vice versa? Or a neural net like Leela? Riddle me that?
Not quite just you, the opponent and the board. There are the standings, the clock, if you are playing on a team, the quality of refereeing, and on Chess.com, a dozen unknown factors can come into play. Only the naive believe it is just you, your opponent, and the board.
najdorf96 wrote:
Moreover, is it luck that Chess engines beats you or vice versa? Or a neural net like Leela? Riddle me that?
I totally do not know how to respond to this sort of nonsensical argument.
Indeed. I totally get why you wouldn't understand my quoted statement. Because playing against, in your argument, the clock, standings have no bearing when playing against a chess engine or a neural net. Ultimately, it is just you, your opponent and the board.
"Nonsensical" to me is that players already accept such conditions (playing on this site) but yeah, it's not naive to say when playing chess under any conditions: tournament, casual, championship that ultimately it is just you, the opponent, and the board.
Nondorf, is English a second language for you?
This is a game in which I think you can say that luck played a significant part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92SKQuaLcE where Carlsen is beaten by a 16 year old Anish Giri. I do not get the impression from this game that Giri is a better player than Carlsen, and indeed the proof of this is that seven years after this game Carlsen is still number 1 and World Champion and Giri isn't. One move costs Carlsen the game: 11. Qd2. This is a novelty that he plays to try and surprise Giri, but it turns out to be a very weak move indeed. Presumably Carlsen didn't know this. Why would he play a move that he knew to be bad? It was only OTB that he discovered that it was not a good move. So how is that not luck?
forked_again wrote:
In chess, the players have 100% control of their own outcome.
That just it though: they don't. They don't know every conceivable continuation from a move. In chess the correct way to move would be to work out every possible continuation of a move then pick the best one (the one leading to mate in the fewest moves). Given the number of continuations, this is practically impossible for human beings (and probably computers too) to do, so they do need to employ some heuristics. But that involves a degree of randomness, and therefore luck. It is simply indisputable that chess involves luck.
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To forked_again: Our brains do not live in a vacuum. A person can be stressed out because her husband is nagging her about something or she did not have enough to eat before the game or whatever. A person can be subpar that day. Why? Because most people are basically human.
I agree. But I don't consider that luck.
My definition (which I think is a pretty commonly understood definition) is that a "game of chance" involves some random component to the chances of success, outside of the control of the players (role of the dice, draw of the cards, picking of lots, even games where weather can effect your probability of success, etc). In chess, the players have 100% control of their own outcome. All they have to do is pick better moves than their opponent. If they don't there is no other person and no other factor to blame on the loss, only themselves.
Now that's just my definition. If you don't have a strict definition then the conversation becomes absurd and everything is luck. I'm lucky I played better? I'm lucky I have a big brain? I'm lucky my opponent has no skill? I'm lucky I didn't have an epileptic seizure during the game.
Give me an alternative definition of luck that makes sense and we can discuss it from there, but right now I think I am the only one on this thread who has defined luck. And just to be clear I'll say it again.
a "game of chance" involves some random component to the chances of success, outside of the control of the players