Luck in Chess

I think the human error always allows for some luck. Even the greatest players make silly errors. I think what's important is not allowing luck to be part of your gameplan.

This is why forums don't work.  I made a post thouroughly explaining my point and you respond with snide remarks.  I have no wish to continue this debate with you but I would like to point out how childish your behaviour has been in this thread which doesn't exactly lend credence to your original argument.

Yes, thank you, let me point out to you that you said "If you still don't understand my point I will resign myself to that fact and leave the thread :P"

So i just made it clear to you that i don't understand you, so you should leave the thread, like you said. I have no wish to continue this debate with you, either, so why take the time to reply to nonsense?

You said you would leave, but you're back, and that shows zero credibility on your part, so take care of yourself before correcting others.

And don't confuse my humor with my arguments, like you confuse lack of ability with lack of luck.... /headesk/

I didn't see it as snide so much as playful, with the lolcat spelling and the grin.

I also am not sure you two actually disagree on the facts so much as their presentation.

It sounds like you're both saying, luck (aka chance or fortune) apart from the kind that is involved with you not having a stroke mid chess tournament, need not be a factor that a player of sufficient skill hopes to rely upon, though luck could enable a win at all for a weaker player. Preparation is where its at, and one should never prepare with the assumption that luck will be a factor. If you blunder and the opponent does as well, that's luck at work. If you do not blunder and the opponent does, that's skill at work - his blunder is irrelevant if you're already a more powerful player, thus luck is not a factor (once again, beyond the not having a stroke mid game type).

[Edit: And of course, its unlikely for there to be such a perfect human player so as not to ever benefit from luck after a certain point, but that's what one strives for...]

Lol we both pounced simultaneously.

Of course i'm being playful... They say i'm childish... ummm yeah, like "threatening" to leave the thread if i don't understand the other poster's pov is a mature behaviour, rofl :D

Thomas says that that the fact that chess hasn't been solved and that people can't calculate every possible continuation in a game, equals to some element of luck. Well, i cannot agree to that! It doesn't make sense to me. No, let me rephrase, it doesn't make sense. Period.-

It's lack of a-b-i-l-i-t-y, not lack of luck. Horizon effect or not, it's your skills, your mind that decides which move to make, consciously, having all the information available. If you can't see 500 moves ahead, it's not because you're unlucky.

Have you considered the counterpoint that ones genetically related biological abilities and your early-development related abilities were heavily influenced, from their frame of reference, by luck, due to the actions of others outside of their control? You weren't able to choose your parents or pre-speech childhood environment somehow, were you? I suppose we could account for time travel or something insane like that, but assuming that were possible, and one was born prior to its discovery/invention, and one already lacked the ability to discover/invent it yourself or contribute to the discovery/invention of it during their life time, then one would still not be able to go back in time and correct any original biological and developmental detriments.

Having all the information available doesn't mean one can avoid mistakes. Nobody can calculate 500 moves ahead.  With depth of calculation available to humans everyone makes mistakes - from patzers to super GMs. The difference is in number and severity of those mistakes. When a chess game is played can anybody (including players themselves) predict  when mistakes will be made? No. Hence probability, chance and luck.

Luck is always a factor. If your opponent is not making a single mistake you are not going to win. If you don't agree please find an example of a game that was lost without any mistakes made by losing player.  Preparation improves your chances not to make a mistake and to exploit mistakes of your opponent.

Luck is the name of what you cannot control. In chess you cannot control your opponent skill. In Backgammon you cannot control your opponent skill and you cannot control dice either.

Saying there is luck in chess is sort of like saying there is luck in writing: When deciding what character to type, you could use a random number generator. Probably this will result in nonsense, but it might "just so happen" that what it comes up with actually makes sense and is really good... theoretically.

So much of what you do influences what happens in a game, directly, and perhaps just as often, indirectly (without you even noticing it). So, yeah, there are always some weird theoretical outside factors, but if you think that these things have any significant amount of control you're probably overlooking just how much you do in fact control things.

It's worth pointing out that not knowing what to do doesn't necessarily lead to luck. It just means you don't know what to do. If you play a good move that wasn't to your knowledge a good move, it's still a good move. It's just that you might be surprised it's good or something like that. Being surprised is a mental state; that's not really luck. The fact that we can be confused by lots of information does not suddenly turn chess into an "incomplete information game"; it merely turns it into a complete information game that contains more information than we can handle. Again that's just a mental reaction; that's not really a statement about luck.

So I'm not sure I'd say there is zero luck or something like that, but probably 90% of the time someone thinks something is luck, it's probably not in reality -- for example if your opponent makes a blunder before you, perhaps it was inevitable, if you had a large positional advantage built up. At the end of the day your moves are yours to play; you can be unsure about which one you want to play, but again your mental state doesn't determine how chess is in reality. Opening theory is probably the biggest possible "luck" factor, yet even here there are so many variables that are in your control, and good and bad "luck" will inevitably even out in the long run.

Finally, probably what causes lower rated players to win is that they are performing at a level higher than average. It seems strange to call that luck. Better chess is better chess; if I play like a 2200 I'm not lucky; the 2200 level chess is 2200 level chess any way you slice it. It just means that that 2200 level performance is not necessarily indicative of how I perform consistently. But that doesn't make the moves I play when I do play like a 2200 any less skillful.

Elubas seconded. So the conclusion is evident: There is no luck in chess.

It seems presumptuous to assume that those arguing for a certain position are insecure. It's possible people just like to defend ideas :) For example, if someone uses wishy-washy justifications for luck like "well sometimes I make mistakes so screw how chess is really like, I'm calling luck," some might think, that idea ought to be countered :)

I think some luck arguments sort of have merit... yet they can be very misleading and sketchy too. For one thing, as some have hinted, when we start calling everything luck, then we no longer have a way of distinguishing between say, poker, the lottery, and chess, even though they clearly are all distinct. There can be uncertainty in chess, yet it arises probably for different reasons compared to other games, so using the same descriptor "luck" for all these different reasons might cause confusion more than anything else.

The rules describe a perfect information game.

The players, unable to process the information, cause the practical play to contain chance.

Agree / disagree?

Disagree leiph.

Resolve this first please

He's not sure. He's not for or against. But his writing implies that there's no luck in chess. :)

I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean the players being uncertain whether they will win or lose, I would agree, but I'm not sure if that is what you are getting at? Basically uncertainty doesn't always tell you the nature of the information that you are uncertain about. You can be uncertain about something due to a lack of skill.

So if you mean that a human playing a perfect information game like chess will cause them to make predictions that they are unsure about, ok, but that sounds more like sociology :)

Agree leiph18.

I still don't see how those who disagree address the argument that mistakes are always made and they are always unpredictable.

Well, yeah, if I was betting on a chess game for the white player to win, for example, there would be chance involved in that bet. But that's not actually playing. What goes into some mistake is a deliberate thought process you have. It may be a right or wrong thought process, but it doesn't operate randomly. A person has full control over their thought process; not full control over whether or not it's good, but that's irrelevant.