Is there such thing as "luck" in chess?

cannot … nor

can’t make heads nor tails

Just a grammar query.

Luck and chance are really the same thing. Luck is just a subjective way to describe whether something was unlikely given the chances and who it benefited.

This is a great recap. Doesn't leave much room for argument if you understand what you're reading.

Same old, same old. Caruana and Negreanu are players, and not qualified to speak on luck *as it is defined for game design*, though I like them both.

Subjective perceptions of luck exist everywhere in life, of course.

There's little point in re-capping a position that didn't end an argument definitely. Somebody else tried to do this in the "Chess is sport?" thread. Just waiting a long time and then hoping nobody notices is kind of silly.

The argument has been lost for a long time on your side and the post was a good recap on some of the reasons. You didn't have a counter argument then (because it doesn't exist) and you bothered to reply without one now.

I was lucky in my round two game today. My opponent gave me a free knight.

Getting lucky in chess is tough. Before I met my future wife I did not get lucky that often. Many chess players don't...

If you cannot calculate deeply enough to see a given correct continuation in an endgame, you will have to make an uninformed choice. You will not even know how to choose- you will have to will chance Let's say that two moves later, you can see that you chose the wrong or the right path- all because you came two moves closer to the essential manoeuvre you unwittingly enabled or disabled: That is a moment you understand you were lucky or not.

Yet there are some people who will select good moves--and usually the best move--move after move, game after game, tournament after tournament, year after year. To ascribe this to their "stumbling on a good move by chance" every time stretches credulity. Skill in evaluation and selection of chess moves obviously exists; occasional lapses of skill occur. It is more reasonable to think that a strong player's mistake was of their own making and a poor player's brilliancy was a moment of inspiration than to assume random chance played any part in their decisions.

This does not mean I subscribe to the theory that there is NO luck in chess, just that the making of moves is an exercise of skill. Even in this case luck can play a role; should a strong player miss a move that they would see 99% of the time is a failure of their usual skill, but the opponent who benefits is lucky to be the one in a hundred.

Yet Capablanca (or Magnus, or many GMs) would have seen the move in the first place, or even steered the game into a position where the move could be played, because they are more skilled and knowledgeable. Even the less skilled player who chose the correct path without knowing for certain what the outcome would be saw something in that plan that their experience and intuition told them would be favorable.

That is not what I meant to imply (that good players are just continually stumbling on good moves by chance), quite the opposite!

Rather it is through those repeated trials that true skill is shown. In other words, because multiple trials (the move after move, game after game, year after year) are a necessity to determine skill, luck must be involved (otherwise, we could determine relative skill with a single trial).

I enjoy the simple analogies, so imagine a fair roulette wheel with numbers labeled 1 through 100. Now imagine that two players A and B both have to guess which number comes up after a roll, but player A is informed that the number 1 on the wheel has been changed to 42 (i.e. there is a 1/50 chance 42 comes up, and a 1/100 chance any other number between 1 and 100 come up). With this information, player A is strictly a better player... but it will take many rolls to prove it, and along the way player B will win some games too. Those wins aren't evidence that player B suddenly becomes a better player than player A.

We are on the same side but this is the major problem with understanding the real argument here.

"To ascribe this to their "stumbling on a good move by chance" every time stretches credulity"

Nothing close to this was ever implied. Now everyone here understands not every move has to be calculated till the end to apply chess skill and understanding to your decision.

The very simple point here is, that making a move is a multiple choice exercise where the choices are laid out in front of you. You MAY or MAY NOT use skill at all to make your choice. Both variants can end up with the same result; optimal or not. This alone proves luck in the nature of chess game itself.

In reality the situation is mostly in between those variants depending on the skill level.

"should a strong player miss a move that they would see 99% of the time is a failure of their usual skill, but the opponent who benefits is lucky to be the one in a hundred."

This I would consider a weaker argument. Having a certain skill level will determine you win on average x/100 vs another skill level and are able to spot a certain move x/100. The occurence that you lose can be a rare event to your opponent but it could be also argued that it was purely based on skill, if this is all that the argument contains. When broken down more we will ofc discover luck once again.

My argument is as valid now as it was then, no need to recap since your viewpoint is not new and is still an opinion. The argument was never resolved, it just reached an impasse and people stopped commenting. You and Lee Euler are still both using the broad definition of luck, not a board or video game designer's definition of luck.

Chance or odds work the same way in the context of games as in any other context. So does luck. There is absolutely no difference. Involvement of chance (and therefore luck) in chess is an objective fact, not an opinion.

There's no luck (meaning luck as a game designer uses it) inherent to an instance of a game of chess, unless you purposefully choose moves at random...which is not "playing chess". Your opinion about objective facts here is just that, an opinion. It hasn't magically mutated in the past year or two.

Just lack of understanding (or denial). You don't have to purposefully make moves at random for the same conditions to apply.

It's fine. Why do you keep changing your username?

Once after a decade seems like a lot to you, does it?

Of course, there is luck in online chess : )

In my case given, the correct sequence could not be visualized, nor could it be intuited. Just imagine a position that you cannot see through, and where listening to your intuition yields no impulse to move.

This would even happen if Carlsen played an endgame with Capablanca, as long as no one (and no thing) can get their heads around chess.

The less knowledgeable the players, the more games between them can be decided by luck. This goes together with: The more perfect players are the more of the decisive games among them will have been decided by luck.