Fascinating and powerful arguments from all of you. Excellent debate. Perhaps for a human skill is not sufficient to eliminate the blind elements from play, which would entail luck to lesser and lesser degrees as knowledge and vision increase. I will a story about Fischer, where it looked like he was losing at 12 ply, but at 13 ply the sacrifice made sense and he won! Had he made it more speculatively, not seeing the conclusion, he'd have been "lucky" to find the 13th move. Only God plays a perfect game, and certainly not Stockfish, and even a 42 ply calculation by Sesse can be outmaneuvered at 43 ply. One might say that the one calculating the 43 move win was not lucky, but failing to see the 44th move by player 1, e.g. Sesse may or may not be fortuitous. Lucky or unlucky? Neither, perhaps, and simply the less skilled? Any being of limited knowledge has horizons beyond which success or failure could be called lucky or unlucky. But isn't this all about the semantics and how one wishes to define luck? ;-) One could argue for absolute determinacy on some level, which I do not wish to do.
Hi SK !
The subject itself might have been already 'beat to death'.
But there are new arrivals to the forum.
Luck and chess and 'in' and skill and internal and external could each be whatever whoever wants them to be.
If I had to pick which term is the most 'loaded' I'd probably pick the word 'skill' ...
because of certain 'resonant sentences' that live in minds ...
in a vast array of circumstances far bigger than chess ...
like this:
'Hey that wasn't luck that was Skill !!'
or the reverse:
'That was Luck not Skill!'
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in other words - binary dichotomies get set up.
And then when those dichotomies are challenged -
two well known reactions occur ...
Cognitive Dissonance and its big younger brother Cognition Bias.
They're as old as the hills - thousands of times as old as the terms that describe them. And like so many things - they're everywhere.
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'Hey that wasn't luck that was Skill !!'
or the reverse:
'That was Luck not Skill!'
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Also as old as the Hills.
Challenge: No ! The Hills could be older than that ...
Try wolves coordinating for the kill of their prey ...
they can't talk but what are they trying to do?
They're trying to make it about skill not luck.
How do you know? (I didn't say I knew but are they trying to make it about Santa Claus?)
The issue: Thinking that skill and luck couldn't combine in the same situation.
Why couldn't they?
The wolves are where they should be - downwind of the prey and using the natural cover - working their way closer ...
How about the prey get lucky?
The wolves stumble on some birds feeding on something and there's a tremendous fuss - and the deer or whatever look in that direction and spot the threat and off they go.
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student takes a math exam - he gets lucky because on the harder questions he happend to have studied some of them on his own ... passed.
another student who's actually better at math also studied on his own and more but what he studied didn't apply to the particularily hard questions asked - failed the exam.
Luck and skill aren't exclusive of each other.
They're not in separate universes.
I think almost everybody knows it ...
but people may tend to put things in boxes - its natural.
Sometimes the boxes are good and sometimes they're not.
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What's the worst such boxing?
Its often pretty bad when people try to put science in a box ...
can cause a lot of trouble ...
For a human, the position of "no luck" doesn't seem to be held be either of you, does it... neither Diogenes nor Kotshmot?