Is there such thing as "luck" in chess?

A great point from BC about the clocks and luck in chess.
Why is the Guy avoiding BC?
Because he's afraid of BC.

There are dice, there are cards, and there are lotteries.. When, before a game of chess, your opponent hides a black and a white pawn in his hands and holds them out in front of you, this is the random drawing of colours. Now, within a game of chess, candidate moves will show up, and you will proceed one way or another in your game. Sometimes, you will not be able to evaluate the choices, for lack of depth of vision and lack of intuition. A choice between Ng5 or Bf4 or b4 can equal a green, a blue and a brown door leading to different rooms. The doors even have windows, but you can only see that much. A few moves ahead at best, and you don't know which move is really better. This is clearly a moment of lottery in chess.

The game, being made in a way to exceed our faculties to read the perfect information in width and depth, presents us two or three future boards with two or three different next moves on them, all plausible, but indeterminable for us from the surface that we have to deal with, due to our horizon in the time given. Over and over again in the course of our games we face this situation, where we have to pick a direction arbitrarily. This is the random element beyond the control of the players. It is like a lottery where we are allowed to plough through the lots in the urn, open them, read what they say and walk over in our minds to the next urns indicated by the lots we opened. Eventually, we run out of capacity and time for our mind games, minding the first 40 lots must be drawn on the actual board within 2 hours time, sharp. And often, it takes only a few moves out on the board until we see what we have gotten by our choices. It's a lottery. It's a special lottery with as much transparency as you can imagine but there is a lot of luck in it, as chess holds so many lots.

That would defeat the whole purpose of opposing him by allowing him to abuse other posters, as you have seen these past 2 weeks.

Here's how this system works:

- Optimissed can reform his behavior.

- Optimissed can keep doing what he does, and being opposed in kind by myself and many others, but in my case intentionally without me escalating past the threshold of his own behavior.

Posters can get sick of it, but they can't stop it from happening, all they can do is report it if they find it unbearable. That should produce one of four results:

- Optimissed is eventually banned.

- Both of us are eventually banned and moderation guidelines change in order for that to happen.

- Nothing is ever done, and Optimissed is opposed until he is no longer physically and/or mentally capable of posting here.

- I die first (odds are about 75% in my favor on this front).

So, this designed system has 3 viable results for Optimissed, and is similar to designing a game ala game theory where the only options are changing for the better, maintaining equilibrium and suffering thereby, or removing oneself from the system. If you know about the Prisoner's Dilemma and the computer simulations run on a host of various strategies in game theory, it proved that the best strategy for any competitive standoff (ala nuclear weapons) is for each "player" to be nice and cooperate with all the other players, but without becoming a complete doormat.

Now take that system, but add a new mechanic that says that the most obnoxious player of the game has an alert that rings every time they do something "bad" and mirrors the bad thing, so that all other players become painfully aware of the behaviors. This makes it effectively impossible for the obnoxious player to win even the individual engagements unless they change their strategy.

The logic of this system is inescapable, but some people are not logical or observant enough to see when they are participating in such a system.

P.S. Note that the talk here about game theory recently is way off base. Game Theory is about the kind of stuff you see in this video above and is more applicable to economics, diplomacy, etc. It's Combinatorial Game Theory that addresses chess and similar games, in spite of Optimissed's and others' inability to understand how the two are different.

I feel that it's kind of poetic justice that Optimissed is trapped this way, since his own toxic ego is the cause of him not being able to see it, much less escape it...but certainly things would be better if he just stopped being obnoxious. It would be even better if moderation was enforced consistently and in a timely manner. Feel free to help make that happen.

The Guy talking about 'the trouble with BC'.
Definitely the guy has 'trouble with BC' and a lot of other people.
I didn't read the guy's post further.

manus carl is cool

Regarding the reference to 'the Guy' getting banned - I've occasionally wondered why chess.com doesn't ban him instead of just muting him as they have several times.
But 'wondered' only lasts a second or less.
It seems clear that chess.com would be aware that people such as the guy - if and when banned - will simply just return under a new account name.
So they just mute him instead.
Knowing he has invested so much in his account name.
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And now time to click on the buttons and links in Dio's post just now.

That's just it...banning would actually work for Optimissed because he values his appearance of being right more than his trolling. By all examples, more than anything in his life, seemingly.

you guys know what this forum is about, right?

ya lol

I would say the guy values his trolling pretense of being 'superior' more than his pretense of being right.
Recently he proclaimed to the effect 'AI makes internet searches impossible' in another forum.
A typical kind of knee-jerk pseudointellectual nasal thing from him.
Point: its too late for him to take it back.

It's about a neverending impasse on a matter of definitions and one that was delineated several years and a couple hundred pages ago...what ware you doing here?

Unless you have something new and unique to express (unlikely for anyone at this point), there's no point in reading this thread.

i mean there is no luck in chess. simple. you cant prove there is, i can counter your points if you think otherwise.

Lol. So you haven't read much, then.

Hi PD !
Suggestion: If you are interested in the forum subject - then you Will talk about it.
Right?
For those who 'don't know and don't want to know about 'what's been happening'' and should people be passive to it?
Well if you're like Octo - you'll make a false equivalency between 'the Guy' and Dio.
Others have made that mistake too but then realized their error and corrected it.
Regarding 'luck in chess' in other words the forum subject -
there's nearly always a situation when the Guy is in a forum ...
He trolls those who disagree with him - or who he disagrees with and then tries to bait them into a situation with a double standard. Then he lies about it too.
Its been going on for ten years now.
Most people like the Guy just go to the chess.com clubs - where fair-minded chess.com moderators don't operate much.
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And I just clicked on the two buttons supplied by Dio ( @DiogenesDue ) and invested some time there.
An interesting video that compared various simple games and them playing each other - with 'Tit for Tat' coming out the winner among many.
Under the button regarding 'combinatorial games' some interesting points being made about 'games with perfect information' (poker isn't)
and 'infinite chess' is mentioned there.
And 'Nim'. First time I've heard that name mentioned in so very long.
.......

no i did im just sticking to the original topic.

Then why tell me, of all people, you think that there is no luck in chess? I just got done expounding on why, less than 24 hours ago .

One of those funny situations where two people are 'at odds' over something they happen to agree about?
But maybe the rationales would differ ...

i mean where is there luck in chess? someone tell me.

There's been many postings about that. Here.
Are you saying you can't find them - because of the personal arguments?
There's a lot of luck in chess - but people are in disagreement about what the terms mean.
'chess' 'luck' or even the word 'in'.
And recently there was a phrase about 'not intrinsic to chess' but there was also a concession that chess has 'players' and chess is not solved.
There's both external and internal luck in chess.
But PD - its not my intention to sell something to you.
I guess I could point you at some posts here in this forum about luck in chess.
There's hundreds if not thousands of such posts though.

First of all you have to define what you mean by "luck" before your question can be engaged on that level, but if you mean that one is not knowledgeable about the outcomes to deliberately choose them, and all outcomes no known, this happens 100% of the time. However, skill creates luckier players than others, and it is going to happen that if one can calculate 7 moves deep, and the result foreseen, this will usually be better than the best move at 6 moves deep, although such values do flip in engine evaluations. Furthermore, positional evaluations do matter, but, again, they are going to be subject to pragmatic re-evaluations at certain levels. Just look at how an engine changes evaluations at different depths in many positions, and see that one's search depth will look like look all the time, unless one actually sees the checkmate.