Luck in Chess

roflmao 

I guess that means: "I have been proven wrong. I´m going to laugh and pretend nothing has happened"

And you talk about intellectual dishonesty, lol, you know a lot about that!

speak for yourself 

untracking thread, you won't see me here again

if you're so interested in what i have to say, why don't you read all my previous posts again? perhaps you'll understand them sometime!

who cares?

Haha, interesting that you would derail the conversation just to tell everyone how unlogical their view is.

Did you not see that I was stipulating determinism to be true and seeing what follows from that? To stipulate something and reason from it doesn't require it to actually be true. We discussed determinism in the other thread, but here going into a huge discussion would probably just confuse the issue. There is plenty of disagreement already about what determinism would imply about chess and luck, even if it was true.

If indeterminism was true well then pretty much everything is luck, so then the question of luck in chess would be kind of trivial. Consequently I didn't find it too interesting to talk much about that.

What I'm doing is more like, comparing the "luck" in slots or something to "luck" in chess.

@Ancares: Even if you made a true 50-50 choice in your head about chess moves, it's still your subjective experience of the information in front of you. It gets stranger when it's not even really a 50-50 chance -- it's something you think is a 50-50 chance but a GM might say an 80-20 chance and so on. And again this is not the same as in a coin flipping game, because you are not provided extra info that would help your decision. In chess you are provided with all the info, but your insufficient understanding of that info creates uncertainty for you.

So, I don't know, in a strange sense, you thinking the right answer might be two moves (I'm assuming there were more than two legal moves but you narrowed it down), and you thinking you should decide on your decision with a coin flip is still taking things into your hands, because you decided that way made sense, and you decided that it "made sense" (it didn't, but one can believe what he wants) to attach meaning to heads and tails in such a way that you would play ...Kf7 upon seeing heads, and play ...Kf8 upon seeing tails. That's your own way of making use of the full information in front of you. Of course, this way will often fail due to the poor skill that made you decide on your move in such a way -- well, yeah, poor skill often leads to poor moves.

Now, sure, I'm not denying that one person can have really stupid thinking and still end up playing a good move. In that case I would say they did legitimately play that move, but that 1. it would be more impressive if he knew why it was good and 2. it doesn't confirm that his way of thinking that made him play that move will always work in other situations. But it's all an assesment of how he systemetizes the info in front of him -- just because we can make predictions about how well that will work, or how well it alligns with reality, doesn't make what he's doing inherently random. If his way of systemetizing the info in front of him makes him play an unexpectedly good move, ok, that's just who he is; that's just being human; not being random.

Elubas, what about determinism in chess? Does it exist? Are our mistakes predetermined? Are our good moves predetermined?

I think all this is not predetermined but rather probabilistic.

By the way I often use "random" just to mean "practically unpredictable," or not predictable because of insufficient information. But in chess you have the info, and you are the one who chooses not to derive the answer for one reason or another.

You don't have the info about best move in current position (with the exception of theoretical positions that are in your memory like openings and endgames that you've learned). Can you predict how far your move will be from the best one? Is it deterministic?

EDIT: I don't "choose not to derive the answer". I can't derive an answer because both my mental capacities and my time is limited. I can only derive a guess. How far this guess is from the best move is probabilistic.

But do you agree that there is luck when playing against a computer as shown in the example in comment #257?

The info can be derived. If you are in position x, there is some (or more than one) solution that must be true; it's determined by the resources in the position. It's silly to say that just because a human can't find this necessity that therefore this necessity doesn't exist. Why do people think something can only be skill if the skill of the players is perfect? When I say that I want to play a game of skill, I'm not saying I want to play perfectly; I'm saying I want to beat my opponent by having more skill than them.

It is obvious that best move(s) always exists. But it's silly to say that a human can always find it. We are limited by our mental capacities and by thinking time (same is true for computers). That's why we make mistakes. If you want to beat your opponent you need him to make mistakes that are more numerous and more severe than your mistakes. Having more skill means that probablity of this is higher. But it's still just a probability. That's why 1600 on avarage gets only 76% result against 1400, not 100%.

blunder is luck

No one argues against the fact that skill is still the more important driver of the output of the game. It´s only that it´s not 100% skill, there is a small percentage of luck involved too.

By the way, this is like saying that 2000 years ago sailmen could avoid storms, that it was not a question of luck. It was only their fault that they didn´t have the skill to build a meteorological radar because the information to build it was already there in the nature.

Perhaps a little. But I wouldn't really call it hidden in the case of chess. For example, you don't even need to worry about discovering new physical laws; the "laws" in chess are the literal rules, like a pawn can move here or here, checkmate wins, etc. And there are things that can be derived from those rules. Why don't we? A lack of skill. Not because our rules don't favor some moves over others. It's pretty easy for things not to go according to how they should theoretically: humans mess around and do their own thing -- that's human behavior :)

I just don't think that skill was meant to only apply when the skill was perfect -- otherwise we wouldn't find skill games interesting. Yeah we are not going to be sure about things -- it doesn't mean our skill isn't what's going into everything we do, and our results. It just is doing so imperfectly, and so you will get imperfect results. To a betting man, sure, they might be concerned watching two guys play chess because we don't know whose skill will always triumph. All of these concerns revolve around people applying their skill.

I actually don't disagree. I don't think it's 100% skill, but I think the % of luck is insignificant to the point where it's like saying golf is a little bit of luck because out of the zillions of ways a beginner could hit the ball, they might "just so happen" to hit it the right way. You can't always be rewarded completely proportionally to the amount of skill you put in, but skill is always at the center of things (e.g., it is what makes people play the moves they make, rather than probabilistic forces).

And a lot of things that people think are luck are skill. For example, playing a move that "just so happens to be good" often does have logic behind it, but a more unconscious logic. For example, maybe you can't explain why a move is good, but your unconscious has a hidden pattern recognition/understanding that does allow you to appreciate the move without you being aware of it.

In my opinion, the big difference between chess and other games where randomness is in the rules (like backgammon by rolling dice), is that in chess the possibility to play a game without any luck at all exists (like in the future with super computers that will be able to play perfect games calculating all movements).

I guess I think in a way, whatever "luck" happens is the result of you -- you can sort of pick your odds depending on how much you understand the position. So if you are only 75% sure of something you just have to accept what happens whether it's good or not, because you are the one who put yourself in the shoddy "75%" position when with more understanding you could have been 100% sure. That certainly doesn't happen with coin tossing. You don't "pick your odds" there.