Is there such thing as "luck" in chess?

@diogenesdue

A random threshold that is somehow supposed to define luck according to you, with no explanation. I guess thats a reasonable way to refuse a logical discussion I attempted. Also I don't remember making a claim regarding the "amount of luck" like you suggest here.

Oh well, you accept a blitz game?

I don't play on chess.com anymore since I became active more on the forums and started getting challenges from trolls on a regular basis. I haven't really played anything but votechess here for many years. It's a lose-lose proposition. If I won, they'd just try to hound me on the forums that much more. If I lost. they'd want rematches and accuse me of cheating, etc.

Now I play on a Lichess account that has no association with my chess.com account. And that's the way it will stay...so I get the best of both worlds. Trolls can gnash their teeth here while I am peacefully enjoying chess elsewhere.

The OP question is an interesting one and, having forgotten my previous posts in this thread, I think I will start from scratch again.

Chess is fundamentally a deterministic game. But firstly, if you are playing an imperfect player, there is uncertainty about whether they will blunder. So the action of them blundering is correctly viewed as "luck".

Even in the case the opponent plays predictably (say the opponent is a tablebase playing the alphabetically top move), a specific imperfect player has uncertainty about what will happen because they are unable to do a complete calculation, so uncertain if _they_ will blunder. Whether they do may be their responsibility, but it is still accurately described as luck.

The uncertainty being in the beliefs of a player, it is appropriate for them to have a probabilistic model of what will happen, either a precise one (eg based on the player Elos) or a rough one ("I have a 70% chance of winning from here").

Luck is no more and no less than the variation in outcomes within the uncertainty of a specific viewpoint.

So the answer is "yes".

Fair enough, I also do most of my playing on Lichess. What I meant tho was your request for a game between a 1500 and a 2700 gm, that would justify the discussion for you. Would a blitz game qualify?

I agree with you on the latter point. I've found that those who control vote chess games play what THEY want to play much of the time. It's useless.

Regarding the former point, when I beat people in blitz or when I used to beat them in Daily, virtually no-one ever accused me of cheating. I've always blocked those who trash talked, in any case and maybe that's a tiny minority and I blocked them all, more or less. I don't think it's a problem except for someone to whom it may happen for some secondary reason?

Logically though, any perfect move is merely a good move: one that doesn't change the objective game state assessment from a draw to a loss or from a win to a draw or a loss. Of course, a move that changes the assessment from a loss or a draw to a draw or a win is impossible.

If the game is a draw to start with, then any perfect move is one that doesn't change that to a loss. The point is that different players prefer different strategies and different types of game. Therefore many human games have consisted of perfect (that is, good) moves throughout. There is usually no objectively perfect move which is "better" than all others available and when moves are forced in a long term sense, it's usually possible to identify them by analysis.

So we often can't work out what a perfect move might be and it doesn't make sense to base any rational argument on a myth or a non-existent ideal wouldn't even be a useful ideal were it to be available.

I'm far more intelligent than you are, Dio. I thought you might have learned that by now. You are certainly not able to explain WHY you think my position is silly with a properly reasoned argument, are you. 
I'm pretty sure you haven't understood any of what I explained to you. When will you grow up?

Yes, I purposefully chose to take the meaning that does not continue the discussion, because I've already ended it twice ,

Blitz is to chess as ping pong is to tennis. Fast and exciting, but ultimately lacking.

Oh come on. You have some positive qualities .... decent rhetorical ability and self-confidence are two of them. You can be pleasant to people you happen to like and who don't challenge you. You are not a great intellect. That's just a fact and I'm sure you actually know it. You're not stupid so don't act like you are because a lot of people here think you are.

I wasn't making a claim. I was explaining my view about something. You couldn't understand what I was talking about even though I was being clear and keeping it simple. End of.

I'll recap for you, so try to actually understand what I'm talking about.

The question as to whether "chess is or is not drawn with best play" is nonsensical, when we don't know what "best play is". It's merely hypothetical. The question changes when we posit a similar question regarding "good play", which we can define as consisting only of "good moves" which themselves are defined as "moves which do not change a game state asssesment" (or other words to that effect).

Current positional assessment cannot be altered in a positive way by any possible move. We can only make good moves which maintain the assessment, or those that reduce the game state assessment on the scale "win -draw - loss". Note that this applies also in the hypothetiocal situation where the initial position is a win for either black or for white. Therefore it isn't at all contentious.

Unfortunately, the theory, such as it is, has been addressed in an unhelpful way by so-called experts, which is why the nonsensical obsession with "is chess a draw with best play" has come about. In exactly the same manner, many people here refer to their rating as "ELO" even though C.c uses Glicko, which is an inferior (less accurate) rating system to ELO but which approximates to a potential rating more quickly. Nothing is going to get people to stop talking about their "ELO" and it's the same with "is chess a draw with best play?"

You have to learn to think hypothetically, which means considering all the implications of an hypothetical premise such as "chess is a draw given good moves on both sides" or "chess is a win for (either side) given good moves etc". Then it's necessary to determine what the evidence is. Evidence does not consist of some person's hare-brained hypothesis that "there might be a zugzwang for either side". That is not evidence. There is no evidence that chess is a forced win. All the evidence we have is that chess is drawn. We can only go off evidence. If the evidence is systemised and a theoretical structure is found which incorporates it, then theory may be built on that structure and people may then talk of "theoretical proofs that chess is drawn".

But ALL theory is based on evidence, or it's worthless and cannot be considered to be "theory". There are some people who don't understand that. In return, I'm not going to place trust in their intellectual abilities. I would not wish them to be in any position of leadership where their decisions could affect the futures of us all. Obviously, they are not going to be in a position where they can influence people who themselves are intellectually accomplished. It really does boil down to that. If you talk rubbish, no matter what your rhetorical ability or debating skills, you will never inflence cleverer people than you. Only duller people. I'm sure a great future might be built on influencing dull people. That's called advertising and propaganda.

The two subjects are very strongly related with one another. You answered me (badly) and I think that argument is over now, as is the one about luck in chess. It's been definitively shown that luck exists in chess as it exists everywhere there's a human observer to interpret apparent chance events as luck or bad luck. Equally, I have demonstrated that solving chess isn't about some fake theory advanced by half-baked "experts in game theory" and neither does the argument depend on some specious claim that chess MIGHT be a forced win for black or for white, since there's no evidence at all for it. Pigs might fly. Arguments like that also depend on luck .... that there's someone dim enough to believe you.

Also the discussion has apparently moved to one on Risk in the solving chess thread and you're happily talking about Risk variants there. I didn't want to disturb your concentration.

Your powers of invention bear no relation to a metaphorical account of our past interactions; except, as usual, in your fevered imagination.

I expect you'll be trying to convince your very limited group of admirers that you'd meant to win your arguments every time but were tricked into always saying the wrong thing?

The reality seems to be that you flounder around making personal comments and then if the other person replies in kind it's "mummy he's being nasty to me!! He started it!!"

OK, then on that premise, what can cause an opponent's blunder? Is it always a lack of skill on his part? There are no unrelated-to-chess events that can cause a blunder?
I once went for a short walk between moves in a chess league match because my opponent was taking a long time to think. I saw someone having a heart attack at the wheel of his car, which was parked. It was a long time ago when very few of us had mobile phones. I went back into the playing hall and stopped the game and asked who had a mobile phone. I suggested to people to stop their clocks. The man's life was saved after a protracted spell of first aid by the paramedics in the ambulance. One of our team lost on time because he hadn't stopped his clock. So his opponent was lucky. It isn't the only time I've been involved in something like that in a chess match.