Is there such thing as "luck" in chess?

Again, because you have not read my posts, you are speculating on what I have said.

If you want to know why and how I consider chess as sport, you need to go to the threads where that is the focus. You’ll also need to dig a bit because I unfollowed most of those threads about the time you started posting.

As for “lower rated players only win by luck”. I observed, accurately, that I win by luck. My rating is more than twice yours. Naturally, you win by skill (its absence in the toolkit of your opponents).

     Of course there is luck in chess. It may not be inherent in the intent of the rules, but it can and does determine the outcome of games.

     Suppose two players paired for the decisive final round of a tournament are staying at the same nearby hotel. One player gets stuck in a malfunctioning elevator when they leave for the playing site, causing them to be delayed so long they forfeit on time. Does that mean the other player displayed superior chess skill and calculation by choosing the right elevator?  No, it was dumb luck.

     To those who will object that this "slipping on a banana peel" has nothing to do with chess, I can only point out that the "lucky" player did nothing to earn the won but still gained the rating points and took home the prize money.

     This may be an extreme example but similar things occur. A player may lose their glasses an be unable to see the board clearly. A player may have eaten tainted food before the game and be too sick to concentrate. A doctor may be called away mid-game by a patient's emergency, etc. Wins and losses ARE sometimes determined by non-chess factors.

     Naturally, such occurances lie outside the normal  play of the game, but the fact that they DO occur makes the premise that ONLY skill and calculation decide chess games untenable. 

     The other point that seems to divide posters here is the fact that humans do not always play to a consistent skill level. A player in a certain position may find the winning move nine times out of ten, but may come up with a mistaken idea sometimes an throw away the win. Some may say that was poor play and a lack of awareness, others may say that they knew they were but were lucky their opponent made an uncharacteristic oversight. That's just a matter of individual perspective.

chess is a game of pure skill:

it's normal for a higher-rated player to win a tournament because they are more skillful.

colors are distributed fairly evenly over the course of a tournament (competition formats have nothing to do with the game itself anyways).

attributing external chance factors to the game is fallacious reasoning:

my soccer team opponents all died in a bus crash on the way to the finals...

there is luck contained within the sport itself because now we are the undeserved champions!

i mentioned neither 'might' nor 'probably' in my post, so i've no idea what you mean:

older doesn't necessarily mean wiser, guy.     🙂

I don't even understand what you're talking about. This looks like rubbish talk.

@diskarte

I've only solved a bit over 4000 puzzles on this site. Most of my solving is in books. But also there are at least a dozen apps on my iPad that I've used extensively, as well at ChessTempo and Lichess. Playchess also has puzzles, although I rarely use this feature. Was a time that I spent a lot of time playing set positions against the bots on ICC.

And so on.

You have no way of knowing how many puzzles your opponent has solved.

In normal chess, there is no such thing has luck. There is only skill. Skill determines the blunder or inconstistency rate of any player in any given position with any given time.

However, there is luck involved in some chess variants (fog of war, free for all 4 chess games), where strategy is only part of the equation.

I don't even think you need to look outside of the game itself for luck. Think about it this way: there are only a finite number of moves to consider in a given position. It is very possible that someone who doesn't even know the rules of chess can make the "right" move in a position if their only instructions are to pick up a piece and put it on a new square. That same position could have GMs that don't make the correct move. Do people really think that the person who doesn't know the rules of chess, but by randomness selects the "correct" one, is exhibiting skill? Or that the GM who misses the move is less skillful? 

That's true. A beginner could make an excellent move against a grandmaster, without even knowing the rules of the game. So I guess my question would be, how did the beginner end up in this theoretical position without knowing the rules of the game? Was every move he made up until that point better than the grandmasters? I would have to say that probably goes way beyond luck. They probably don't have a word for that yet. 

one who doesn't consider the reasoning behind their moves isn't truly playing.

missing a strong move is rightly considered an oversight & not a 'bad stroke of luck' in chess.

Yes, of course the chances of this happening become vanishingly small when repeated for multiple moves (which is why I say that chess is a skills-based game with elements of luck), but it is just an illustration that points to the greater argument that in any position a move must be played, and in said position, there is an associated probability of selecting the right move.

So for a more practical example, consider two players of similar strength. It would be an attribution error to look at the result of the game and then say that player A was definitely the more skillful player because they won. In reality, there were likely a few critical positions that decided the game, and in those positions, since player A must make a move, there is a probability that they select the right one, just by random chance. That is why I call it an attribution error to assume it was their skill/patter recognition/intuition that led to the correct move selection, because it is backfilling the target

In the lower levels of chess (<1000), there is definitely luck. If you blunder an 800 it is much less likelier to notice it than a 1500

lack of skill isn't luck.

Suppose you took two people with zero mathematical knowledge and made them sit a complex multiple choice exam. Obviously it would degrade into two people just guessing answers until eventually a winner was decided. Would you consider this a game of skill or a game of luck?

Some people could describe (very) low level chess in a similar way. Two players just making moves with a complete lack of understanding, until player A's peices just wind up on the correct squares and he wins, and player B's just wind up on the wrong squares and he loses.

wow

that's no more 'taking a test' than those 2 woodpushers would be 'playing a game'.

complete lack of skill doesn't magically summon luck to replace one's utter ineptitude... it just makes the contest drag out longer before somebody gets declared a 'winner'.

strong moves are missed due to a lack of thoroughness when considering candidate moves, lack of proper calculation of those moves or lack of time from poor clock management:

unskillful playing, not 'poor luck'.

I used to sit for final exams in my friend's classes for fun in college, just walking up and taking a test and turning it in under a fake name to see what I would score.  My friends would tell me later when the exams were posted/handed out.

How did I score 50% on finals instead of 25% from random guessing?  The skill of observing how bad test writers word correct answers vs. how they word incorrect answers and the knowledge of how to eliminate 1 or 2 options before guessing.  

That's a lack of skill, by definition...not luck.

You might as well say that swinging a baseball bat and striking out on 3 pitches is bad luck.  No, it's a lack of skill on your part.