Luck in Chess

Yes it is cognitive and our cognitive processes have some randomness "built in"

Erubas, uri65 is correct. I don't see what you mean by "They are not made due to random factors. If I say I want to make a move x because of y, then I make a move." Or "yeah, it is because of reasoning. I am still thinking of sonething when I make a move."

It looks like you think thay since Chess is chess is what's called a "Complee Information Deterninistic Game" there is no chance involved. Of course when you analyze the game afterward you will see all of the cause and effect interaction. But this in no way eliminates probability. Even the computers, if they're set to think no more than x moves deep have to resort to some sort of pattern algorithms because the patterns are there in the first place to help increase chance of winning because a certain response from the opponent is expected but not determined. If there were no probability in chess , which is chance, then the game could be considered fully solved but since it isn't there are patterns that are based on projected responses.

There are even moves that are based on probability change. For example some players may tend to make moves that expand the move options and which force the opponent to make a guess at what type of attack will take place. If he could see exactly what type of attack is coming he'd be able to defend much more effectively. So, making moves that do not give out the plan but expand the possibilities is advantageous to the player who has more options. You could clear out the minor pieces on both sides of the king with the intent of having the option of castling on either side. Until you castle the opponent will either be forced to wait until finalizing the plan, or to make a guess and choose the side of attack hoping he guessed correctly on which side the castling will occur.

There you go. That is an example proving that statistical probability in chess exists and therefore what we call "chance" is present in the game.

lol, flexibility is chess strategy, not probability. For example if you don't know where the other guy's king will be, there is a correct way of going about things: play in a way that would likely be good against either.

There is no guessing correctly in your example: the opponent won't castle on a side that he doesn't want to. You would only attack on one side of the board if the opponent going on the other side wasn't a valid option, or if it wasn't worrisome to you. You wouldn't "just hope" that he castles on the side that you're trying to attack on. I mean sure, you'd hope, but you'd prepare for him not to.

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<<<<<<It looks like you think thay since Chess is chess is what's called a "Complee Information Deterninistic Game">>>>>>

If there were complete information, you'd know what the other person is thinking.

<<It's misleading to conflate these and say that chess has just as much luck as backgammon and poker.>>

Who is saying that? No-one is saying that. It's misleading to conflate what is being said with what isn't.

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.

Well, I would consider it "luck" if I happened to study an opening trap last night and today my opponent, whom I'd never met nor played before, played right into it.

Or if my opponent was beating me but got stung my a wasp and had to be taken to hospital!

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.

<<But, before we start talking about probability and luck, lets ALL agree on a definition for luck.>>

Getting these people to discuss, let alone agree on something tricky like that, is not going to be easy. I just had Feufollet tell me his attention span is three lines of text. This is three lines of text and it contains three concepts, which is three too many.

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.

Probability regarding results and impersonal factors in a sample of chess players is entirely different from luck in a chess game. If he was talking about probability distributions and referred to it as the sort of luck one experiences in a game of chess, he was talking gobbledigook. Whether or not luck exists in chess on an individually specific basis is surely the only question that concerns us, since probability distributions are just depictions of samples and if he really meant that, it's non-contentious and entirely6 uninteresting.

"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.