Risk is very different than luck.

Strive to make plays that work towards winning, or accomplishing whatever goal/strategy/tatic you have in mind, and work regardless of your opponent's response.

ya, this.
Good first thread for me to open here.

I was once a pawn up against a grandmaster, and then got mated 2 move later. So yes, there is luck in chess, or I would have won that game.

To quote or paraphrase (not sure which) Chigorin,

"Just because you are too stupid to see the mate, does not mean your opponent is lucky!"

You lost because you made a serious oversight. This is a normal way to lose a chess game. Your opponent won by exploiting your oversight. This is an normal way to win a chess game. The fact that his position was inferior prior to this is not relevant.

There is some perfect solution to the chess game tree so in that sense there is no luck.

However no player is capable of processing the entire game tree and that leads effectively to uncertainty in most positions from the point of view of the mortal player.

Two moves might appear to be equal, even to the best player in the world, even though there is some deep flaw not possible to detect at his level.

In practice there is much luck and attempts to control such luck in the sense of seeking or avoiding complications.

Two players with the same (infinite precision )rating are essentially a coin flip.

D.

When your opponent makes a move for a specific reason, and it turns out to be great for reasons he never intended, I think that's lucky. That happens all the time against lower level people.

There is no luck in chess. No one loses a game because of bad luck. One always loses because of bad decisions. Unless it's a mouse slip in an online game...

Amen

No, if God is all-knowing, then he would know all the cards to come, or that would be something he didn't know, and he wouldn't be God.

Most annoying post I've ever made? Probably.

I disagree with your post being annoying, its 100% correct and the guy who made the post before only helped prove the other side of the argument. Theres IS luck in chess. It's extremely minimal compared to poker, but is there. Roundtower's post will always be my explanation, I've never been able to put it so well myself.

Alot of nittery regarding the defintion of luck ITT.

Let's face it, the game has complete information and nothing happens by chance, only by decision.

Obviously if you are allowed to define luck in such a way that encompasses that, then so be it.

Because we know and can conceive of the complete information in chess does not give us ACCESS to it anymore then i have access to what 4th street is going to be. It actually makes me mad that people disagree with me here, lol.

...

Pretty much mandatory for a discussion on this topic, imo. "Luck" is a pretty poorly defined term, and most of the definitions used are valid within a certain context. Arguing about whether or not there is luck in chess and arguing about what "luck" means, are basically the same thing, since whether or not there is luck in chess depends on what luck does mean.

even if you define luck to mean "results by random chance" there is luck in chess!

No I do not consider winning due to an opponents blunder luck because after all i outplayed him i DIDNT blunder! But when neither opponent is capable of seeing ahead for the entire game, decisions will be made due to nothing but mental coin flips. Rarely will these cost a game but OCCASIONALLY it happens.

If you want to tell me it's not TRULY random fine, but neither are cards. I'm sure there is a way to KNOW what card is coming but no human is capable of it, just as no human is capable of storing the solution of chess in their minds.

Anyone who thinks there is no luck in chess must also agree there is no luck in any athletic sport. Batters are not lucky when they get bloop singles or unlucky when they line out. Since it is possible to calculate what will occur on any type of swing at any part of the ball off of any type of pitch, there is obviously no luck involved.

Although I agree with you overall, I also love playing Devil's Advocate, nitpicking, and arguing semantics, so here goes

This isn't an apt metaphor, because it really isn't possible to calculate every possible permutation of the pitcher/batter relationship. You will run into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle before you've fully mapped the possibilities, and so the probability space of potential occurrences is theoretically impossible to fully calculate. Baseball is not a "solvable" game. Chess DOES have a finite possibility tree, and is therefore theoretically solvable, which puts it into a separate discussion (even if it is true that actually solving chess would be impossible in this universe, because the entire universe isn't large enough to store the full possibility tree).

Every time I try to post the solution to chess I get an error message from 2+2, it's very frustrating anyone know away around that?

The sports examples given thus far have been very poor. Anything the players themselves have control over cannot by definition be luck.

Better examples of luck in sports:

The weather. A gust of wind could turn a home run into an out easily. Neither team has any control over the weather.

The field. Not every single field is the same. Grass is at different heights, goalposts might be a few centimeters different, etc.

The officials. There are alot of subjective calls to be made in alot of sports and different refs interpret the rules and call things differently.

"Luck" is one of the many concepts in the English language that cannot be precisely defined and is open to some interpretation. However the "spirit" or "feeling" of the word can be, and it does not fit chess at all.

If you want to make some long winded semantical argument that it does, fine, but you end up majorly misconstruing the true meaning.

everyone calls a bloop single lucky c'mon

Are you high? You're seriously attempting to compare chess and other abstract perfect information games which can be completely defined, even played within one's head....to a physical game with basically all of nature's laws affecting it?

Really? Really?! That's a hell of a stretch. I want some of the drugs that you're on.

Ugh just because chess' possibilities are finite and sports' aren't changes NOTHING. Chess' possibilities are so vast that for the purposes of humans they ARE Infinite.

So what? Chess's possibilities have nothing to do with physics, the weather, biomechanics, or anything else that may be construed as "luck". That's my point.

There is a limited amount of luck in chess - if you're talking about tournaments, some players may receive unfavourable pairings, in tournaments with an odd number of rounds, everyone receives an uneven number of Whites vs. Blacks.

If you're talking about single games, there is obviously a bit of luck - everyone overlooks something from time to time - sometimes your mistake costs you the game, sometimes it turns out to be a brilliant positional sacrifice :-) Sometimes an opponent walks into your trap, sometimes you walk into his.

But of all professional sports, I'd say that chess has the least amount of luck.

saying there is luck in chess is like saying there is skill in poker