Luck in Chess

hi hi lets see

https://youtu.be/4guiyiwyXrg

bobby fischer best videos.

https://youtu.be/vIgEpc7z-Ns

Granted, what your opponent will do is not something you have control over. It's just that people take that, and then they immediately say they got lucky after they won or something. Well, I would think the person who didn't blunder should win, but anyway. People just tend to be careless with their usage of that word and don't really think about what they mean by it.

I would just say that's why they lost. On the other hand I wouldn't necessarily think the game was a good indicator of who was more skilled in general, but that doesn't mean using your knowledge isn't skill, whatever knowledge that may be.

I just mentioned the term "Complete Information Deterministic Game" because that is how the games like all variants of Chess, Checkers, and Go are categorized. What is meant by complete in this case is that the board is fully seen by both players and there is no intentionally withheld information such as cards that only the player who is dealt those cards can see. I think Dominoes, most card games where each player is dealt cards, mahjong, fall into are incomplete information games.

No. Strategy in chess and probability are not at all exclusive characteristics of a game. Poker is more heavily based on chance but there is a very deep strategy players use to win and to minimize their losses. Backgammon uses two dice to also have an element of probability/chance. In Backgammon chance plays a smaller role and strategy is more significant. Further to reduce influence of chance in backgammon a match usually consists of five, sometimes more, games. So chance and strategy (however flexible) are not mutually exclusive at all. I would say that the lottery where people pick 5 to 7 numbers from 1 to 40something is almost 100% chance. I am not sure if there is actually any strategy that can increase one's odds despite the fact that people believe that there are strategies (such as picking numbers they think are more random or not picking the same numbers multiple draws in a row).

My example of the strategy in chess in which a player tries to make moves that lead to more paths, or not castling early unless pressured to me seems to stand. I do not see how you are refuting it by saying "there is a correct way of going about thingsplay in a way that would likely be good against either" (side I assume). Of course the opponent can try to cover both sides and I am sure a very advanced player knows how to respond to the position in which the king has not castled yet. But there is clearly a strategy to confuse the opponent who will have to either play slowly and give an opportunity to the un-castled player to develop more, or will have to attack the castling line on one of the two sides to prevent castling. Fro beginner to average player this can very well work as a trick.

I've also read that the famous Immanuel Lasker intentionally resorted to what can be called tricks to mislead the player. There is a number of ways to do that. But whatever the trick is is not really relevant. The point is that it increases uncertainty of intent for the other player. Uncertainty carries with itself probability.

Of course if your main point is to illustrate that chance is not built in into chess as a part of gameplay itself, like it is in poker or backgammon, then of course you are right. But, not being a part of the rules of the game, does not eliminate chance from the game itself, whether it is intentional use of chance or not. At least that is how it seems to me.

I was responding to the video.

The guy was saying that there is just as much luck in chess as in backgammon, because if you paired two players with the same rating difference you would get the same win/loss ratio.

I could be mistaken but Robertie said there is as much probabality in chess as backgammon but in a different way.  He talks about players of different ratings with the same probabilistic results.  He said that the lack of randomness found in chess compared to backgammon is why many don't see the blind "luck" when someone playing chess makes a move right or wrong and can't see beyond a certain horizen.

"But there is clearly a strategy to confuse the opponent"

Yeah. Psychology. This is perhaps an example of why I don't always find it easy to take the luck people seriously. It's not even that they're wrong -- probably no game can reward a person's skill 100% proportionally since it can't know whether you "intended" to play the right move. But it seems like a lot of these people will just decide something is luck when really it's just a type of strategy. Even breathing on the opponent, not something you should do, that's not luck, that's a conscious choice made to try to win I guess. Trying to confuse the opponent, while not a purely scientific approach, is as much a strategy as anything. But I guess when the strategy isn't in the right format a lot of people want to just call it luck. Or if people don't like why they lost, then that reason is now luck. Other reasons they are ok with, but if some move pissed them off, now it's luck.

Simply not expecting something to happen doesn't in itself mean anything since humans can choose to feel that way whenever they want. I was surprised that my opponent played a line I studied last night... ok? Cool? No one really cares? I hope you can sleep at night despite being surprised? Your hands still made the moves; you still used your knowledge base. You may have felt surprised too; maybe you were hungry; maybe you were lonely... I'm not really sure why I would care. We can just "decide" that we are interested in these things enough to put them into the pile of "luck," yet we are putting in conscious decisions into this pile alongside with mindless coin flips, which seems rather strange.

I mean, I don't know if I will win the next chess game I play; does that mean if I think I will lose but then I win that it was all chance and probability? If I think it's luck does that make it luck? :)

"Uncertainty carries with itself probability."

Hmm. Not necessarily. Often, but not necessarily. If I "feel" there is a 75% chance of something with no rational basis for thinking so, this does not correspond to anything in the world. Even the feeling we get of a 50% chance of a coin flip isn't justified by us feeling that way -- it's justified by the actual physics around us, that suggests no particular side (although with more info, maybe we could derive more). If I merely thought there was a 99% chance of getting heads but then I got tails the first try, my opponent did not get particularly lucky. In the fucked up probability game I created in my head, perhaps, but that is indeed, only in my head.

One could of course say that chess is a game of incomplete information after all, because we don't have all the tools necessary to predict human behavior. So is there some non-zero luck factor there, yeah, there seems to be, although I'd be conservative in estimating it. But as regards the more perfect info components, I think a lot of the luck is what people just decide to make it. They think by not knowing something (e.g., a move) they can fundamentally alter the nature of chess. A little arrogant perhaps :)

I mean, yeah, if you take an imperfect human into a perfect information game, you're not going to get perfectly logical things happening all the time. But that all stems from the human. Humans make bad moves. That doesn't change what chess is. If God decides to create imperfect humans, that doesn't make God himself imperfect (he can still make perfect things or imperfect things if he wants)... God is not those humans.

But yeah, I guess in a more general sense I still think we have some kind of responsibility for ourselves regardless of our intent. If a person accidentally kills someone, there is something negative about them I feel, even if that accident could have happened to anyone. The feelings of ignorance don't seem to be related to you, nevertheless, killing someone. We wouldn't call this a murder, no, yet we do think that you are obligated to check if the person is ok, call the police, etc., more so than someone not involved.

So if you made a good move, it's a good move. Did you know it was a good move? Maybe not. Ok. That's an interesting but separate fact.

I don't really think of myself as a logical positivist.

Yes there is...

http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=1233489682