Luck in Chess

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.

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