Quote:
Originally Posted by Allen C
I agree that luck in chess only applies to players at least vaguely similar in skill. Few people on this board could be lucky enough to beat the world champ as long as you discount stuff like the chandelier falling on his head.
It's funny though, I do feel that someone rated 1000 might beat an 1800 but 2000 can never beat 2800? Maybe I'm wrong about something or maybe ratings work differently at the top? Well, I'll at least say that a 1000 will never, ever beat Anand.
It applies even when 2 players are far off in skill, you just see it way way less.
1)There are a finite amount of moves in chess
2)You can 'randomly' pick a move every turn and by chance pick the best one
Thus...
3)LUCK EXISTS IN CHESS!
On the more practical level an 1800 player should be able to pick out his best 5 moves or so on any given position. He may very well pick 'the best' move every time or a lot of the time for reasons no at all other than he had to pick one. How can this be defined as ANYTHING but luck?
The people that insist it does not exist seem to use the argument that the chess player technically controls everything that occurs, therefore it cannot have luck. I don't see what 'control' has to do with this. When baseball players hit line drives right at people we say they got unlucky, we don't say "he should have controlled better where he hit it", you might as well say a poker player should have shuffled the deck differently, or he should be able to remember the micro-differences on the backs of playing cards. No one can do this, no one can see 30 moves ahead in a chess game either.