Is there such thing as "luck" in chess?

GMs don't really make moves that only have one consideration.  That's why they are GMs.  But to a lesser degree, this is true of all chess players, whether you are conscious of it in your own play or not.

Of course not, even I play at a level to understand this. In reality it would be a long combination of moves that would lead to something unpredictable. To deliver a point I simplified the example of one chess move. Its hard to have a conversation on a forum as things get taken too literally.

I've already shown how this is not the case in my post #1379. The very title of the paper I cite is "Ludometrics: Luck, and How to Measure It". You can find it on the arXiv, look at my old post, or just follow this link.

"Its only luck when it is not based on your own actions"- You are not understanding what luck means. A person rolls the dice (their own action), but we do not attribute the result of the dice roll to the person's action, but to random chance.

This is also why the PGN argument fails. You are just recording the moves after they've already taken place, not what led to the moves. It is like saying because you can record the result of 3 dice rolls, that the result of the dice rolls isn't based on luck.

The paper I linked specifically talks about this flawed idea of what luck is ("I wanted to play Nf3, so I played Nf3, therefore it wasn't luck!"), which it calls extra-agential, when it says "an extra-agential concept of luck is neither authentic nor useful" and goes on to explain why.

That paper goes on to write "Some of this same intractability can be found in Chess’s unfathomable game tree, which suggests that Chess has at least some luck. This claim can be a sticking point for those who relish the idea of a game of 'pure skill.' However, this categorization
was hardly defensible in the first place; a random number generator could beat Magnus Carlsen once every few heat-deaths of the universe, and the reason is unlikely due to the machine suddenly acquiring a high level of skill, and then immediately relinquishing it."

I would actually give the paper more credence if it did not take that sideswipe at chess players...it indicates an underlying bias in the author's premise and conclusions.

That quote from paper makes the problem clear, though.  By stating that chess' "unfathomable" game tree must entail some luck, it falls right into the Clarke's 3rd law problem.  Complexity beyond current understanding indicates nothing more than the complexity's existence itself.  You cannot extrapolate anything beyond that.  The paper should be titled "It might as well be luck, because we don't understand what it is yet".

     Just a bit of a joke there. I turn 73 in August.

     It probably just seems that dictionaries have lost their "proper usage" function over time. When people first started compiling them only the well educated got their writing into print, and proper usage was a requirement for publication, hence the more polished usage seemed the most usual. Mich common usage was classed as "colloquialism" or "slang" and filed under "other meanings".

     Continuing research into the way language was used in the past, as well as a wider readership and publications catering to a wider variety of clientele grew the pool of knowledge. By today, with internet social media, new concepts and word usage can reach the whole world in no time at all. Lexicogrofers document the way the language is used in the quotidian world.

     You realize that a 1930s dictionary will be woefully inadequate for words like radar, byte, dioxyribonucleic acid and countless others. It's tempting to use words with more precise meaning to make your meaning clearer (I certainly fall into that habit), but that presupposes a greater degree of erudition in the readership than is likely to exist.

Are you on the side of there's no luck in chess?

When two players (accurately rated players) play a match, you can't reliably predict the outcome of an individual game, if they play a large number of games, you can reliably predict the score of the match.

This is exactly like rolling dice. You can't reliably predict individual rolls, but you can predict that after many rolls, each number will appear about 16.7% of the time.

Beyond color selection, yes I am.

Without randomness, why is it that the outcome of games can be modeled as a random variable?

(i.e. the dice example above)

It's a variable.  Skill is a range, not really a discrete value.  "On any given Sunday" and all that.  What's your definition of "random variable"?  The Elo rating system can model anything whether luck is involved or not.  But if you want a more thorough answer about my position you need to go back several pages, and then even further .

"Random variable" is a technical term.

I'm not interested in reading 1500 pages.

We can agree to disagree.

Already did.  The fact that you don't always recognize good arguments is well established .

I know, I wanted to know how you interpret it.

Disagreement is fine, my position is based on a much tighter game designer's definition of luck, and luck is a hopelessly broad term for a discussion without agreeing on the exact parameters.

I suppose its something like... the outcome of humans rolling dice is a random event, even though technically there is no randomness in the sense that with enough data you could predict the outcome of the roll before it happened.

Similarly when humans play chess, the outcome has randomness, even though the rules (much like the laws of physics on the dice) don't describe a random game.

Which is why I sidestepped that by asking a simple question i.e. how do you account for the apparent randomness of results.

I never argued that there is no luck in chess, so your point doesn't really apply.  Precision is a virtue, especially in discussion such as this about terms/concepts that people imbue with so much fuzzy thinking.

Which is why I asked for your definition of "random variable".  You qualified it this time, "apparent randomness" which means you already got the gist of where I was going to go anyway .  There's not really a whole lot of true randomness in our universe, and far less within the confines of the game of chess.  

Is it true that six appears more than any other number, because the opposite side is one, which has the least amount of holes, which is heavier. 

You're wrong.  Evidence that *you* know you are wrong: 

- You felt the need to add "chess is the one and only blah blah blah" to shore up a poor argument

- Your over-reaching "you have the right to..." disclaimers that are more than you normally afford other posters, unless you are feeling you have no leg to stand on

- Asking for me to prove you wrong, when you know full well that you don't have to accept and won't accept anything that comes from me, and ergo are at zero risk

If you had an actual argument to make, you would have made it instead of volleying the ball to me.

If you attribute any change in outcome to a change in skill, you are not dealing in reality in my opinion.

A thought experiment: ask someone to try and roll a six and record their first 100 tries. To be logically consistent in this sort of philosophy, you would need to say that every time they rolled a six, their skill in rolling a six increased.