How much of chess is luck?

10% luck
20%percent skill
15% concentrated power of will
5% pleasure
50% pain
100% reason to remember the name

+1 to LadyMisil for post #179.

We are obviously not in full control of our opponent’s brain. We can try to confuse him by going into less familiar or more complex positions but it has limited application.

It might be less obvious but we are also not in full control of our own brain, especially the subconscious (intuition, pattern recognition). Even conscious activity can slip from our full control - for example when you try to calculate a long variation the future position becomes so blurred that it's like shooting in the dark.

I think you're looking at this wrong.

You say, "If the players doesn't know all outcomes his decision isn't based on skill but luck".

I say, "Skill in chess is the players ability to manage the known and unknown and make the decision they feel is strongest" If a player knows 100% of outcomes, then his decision isn't skill, its arbitrary". Skill in chess is surly defined as the players ability to make the strongest move possible using his own judgement. If the 100% strongest move is known to him at all times, what skill is he utilising? What judgements is he making? Skill is the ability to make a judgement.

In no other sport does a player 100% know the outcome, if they did, everything would be a stalemate or a draw. Skill in any competition in any sport is about minimising the risk of the unknown, and making moves the other player will or wont be able to counter.

Luck in my view appears in chess in three ways
1. You opponent missing things they would normally spot
2.  The random strengths and weakness of your opponent on any given day
3. External factors (weather, sleep, environmental factors) that impact on a players ability to apply their skill.

* Yes, skill is making the best judgement, I agree.  Luck is how that judgement turns out.  Sometimes the judgement will win, sometimes it will lose.

** When the world champion checkers players fought in their title bouts, they determined that a draw is the best result.  Black to move can never force a win.  Checkers, as much a sport as chess back then, started to die out.

*** I like your summary.  I agree with this.  There might even be other luck factors involved, especially in the process of a beginner player acquiring chess skills.  For example, a woman born centuries ago had no luck at being a very good chessplayer simply because they were a woman.  Unlucky to have been born in those days.

If there was absolutely no luck in chess, every game would be pre-ordained and chess would die out like checkers did.

For me, the openings are getting to be too much pre-ordained, so I stopped playing chess.

I think I understood you just fine.  So, which is it?

trust me this is a sensible answer. accuracy is defined as the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard. In my opinion the only form of luck in chess is which color you play as, as white has the first move advantage and in tournaments colors are assigned.

LadyMisil statements that are clearly not thought through/inaccurate/fuzzy:

- "To the original question - How much of chess is luck?  Clearly not 0%.  There is some luck involved otherwise weaker players would lose to stronger players 100% of the time."

Demonstrably false.  It is funny that you cannot conceive of any game where an on average (the key here) "lesser" player can win a game without random chance intervening.

- "Still, luck is involved.  How much?  Maybe only 10-20%.  Maybe more or maybe less."

Maybe 10%?  Maybe 20%  Maybe more or maybe less?  So...maybe any number from 0% to 100%?  Why even make the statement?

- "But yes, even among the very top players, there is still some luck involved.  But between two novice beginners?  Almost all luck.  Whoever makes the last blunder loses."

So, play between beginners is luck...not lack of skill.  Blunders are a function of luck.  Fascinating.

- "How can a stronger player play worse than a weaker player?  Stronger player had an off day.  Weaker player got lucky.  Stronger player made a bigger mistake(s) than weaker player did, or the last fatal one.  Does not make the weaker player more skilled than the stronger player.  Only in that one game they were stronger."

So...you admit that the weaker player in general can play a stronger game after all.  But that is luck...

- "A person can be subpar that day.  Why?  Because most people are basically human."

Most people are basically human, as it turns out.

- "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."

Ahhh, but Carlsen et al say they got lucky, they are really talking about luck...not playing to an audience or sparing their opponents feelings?

- "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."

You contradict yourself twice in this single paragraph.  You admit one player outplayed the other "move by move", then attribute it to 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."

So, he gambled and got lucky?  Or he played a planned strategy relying on superior knowledge/ability in one aspect of the game and won?

- "In checkers, the world champions have worked out that red (black moves first) can force a draw no matter what opening black chooses."

No, computers worked that out.

- "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."

We're talking about luck in the game of chess.  Not luck in competitive tournament settings.  Not luck with referees.  Not luck with clocks.  Not luck standings and teams.  Not luck with lag and internet connections.  Not luck with bathroom breaks and dietary restrictions.

- "Sometimes the weaker player is lucky, sometimes the weaker player had a great unbeatable game, but usually it is both."

These are, by definition, mutually exclusive.  An "unbeatable game" played does not also require luck.  Imprecision seems to be our hallmark.

- "The problem is you don’t understand what I said and so you created a model that isn’t true."

I don't understand what you say because it is bereft of logic.  That's on you.  Communicate better.

- "Winning at anything is a combination of skill and luck, not opposites like you say.  Certainly not “It’s one or the other, make your choice.”"

You mean like you say.  You said they were opposites, flat out.  Quoted above for posterity.

- "If there was absolutely no luck in chess, every game would be pre-ordained and chess would die out like checkers did."

False.  There are plenty of games designed to have the only luck factor in them be the selection of who goes first, like chess.  People play chess and all these other games and win and lose them every single day, and without any more luck involved than that.  Your premise that absence of luck must logically mean a pre-ordained outcome is just wrong.  That is black and white thinking, which you claim to be above ...

Factors like holding/losing concentration, focus, vision, etc. are not determined by luck.

"Correct value" is unknown during the game (with the exception of theoretical positions). Your average accuracy is a function of your skill level but it fluctuates somewhat randomly from one game to another.

This is true, but in most other sports there is little controversy over the amount of luck that is involved, so why should it be in Chess?

Please add intuition and pattern recognition to your list. All those are not in your full control, there is randomness in how they work. Blurred vision, failed pattern recognition, intuition not suggesting the right candidate move. Those failures can happen or not, be critical or not and you are not in full control. Don't you think it brings some play of probabilities into chess?

I suppose this is a valid argument but none of this has to with the game itself, only the players.

You are absolutely right - all I am trying to say is that the result of one chess game between two humans is partially decided by luck. And let's also exclude too big rating differences - we can safely say that 1700 has zero probability of winning against 2500, no luck involved in this case.

People forget how close Karjakin came to beating Carlsen in the last World Championship Match. Karjakin was up a point when in (I think) game 10 he missed a chance for a draw, Carlsen won the game and levelled the match and went on to win the tiebreak. Plenty of other watchers spotted the opportunity and Karjakin probably should have as well, but obviously his mind was occupied with something else at the time. Is that not luck?  You can easily imagine something prompting Karjakin to have looked more closely at the position - maybe he might catch Carlsen grimacing at the board (though he does this all the time anyway), figure out something is wrong, reassess the board and work out the drawing position. I don't see how anyone can say that wouldn't be luck.

That's another way to look at it - we can say that players skills fluctuate, and not just from day to day but from move to move. And when I beat a stronger opponent that's partially luck, because contrary to normal my fluctuating skill was above his fluctuating skill in this particular game.

After some more thinking it seems to me that even the win against a weaker player also involves luck. Because how do you actually win against a weaker player? There is only one way - you wait for his mistakes to come. If he commits no mistakes you can't win. So you are waiting for some random events to happen. If they happen early in the game - then you are really lucky, you win soon and save some energy. If they come later - well you have to stay alert, play good moves and wait. But sometimes they come too late, and then a really unlucky event happens - you commit a mistake yourself

 In standard chess we have two players, lets name them player A and player B.  Player A makes a move, now he has to wait for player B to make his move.  Player B will make a move which is either a good move, a move that is not that good for the position, but is not a bad move, or a bad move.  Player A does not have control over what kind of move player B will come up with.  Is player A lucky if player B makes a bad move, since player A does not have control over what player B does?

Yes player A is lucky, because before player B made a bad move there was just the probability of him making a bad move.

"Probability, Odds and Random Chance. ​​ Probability is the likelihood or chance that something will happen".

It's interesting how some people are willing to attribute to skill things that are clearly random chance - e.g. how you happen to be feeling on a particular day. If you reduce everything down to skill then obviously there can be no luck, but I think you end up with an absurd notion of what skill consists of.