@NatWill said in #30:
> Just curious... who is that in the picture? It looks like Magnus (especially because of the hair), but I can’t be totally sure. :)
it's that previous world champion guy cagnus marson or something
@NatWill said in #30:
> Just curious... who is that in the picture? It looks like Magnus (especially because of the hair), but I can’t be totally sure. :)
It is some guy who pretends to be victor kortsnoi but for poker. I think he also likes puffins or something like that.
if uncertainty is immediate we call it luck. if beyond horizon, we stop calling it luck.
this is all the same thing quatifying ignorance or uncertainty given a limited forecasting resource budget. sometimes to speed things up we might even call luck willful ignorance... like a government saving money of scientific research.... then luck can be surfed onto, and badluck blamed.. but i digress... not to be confused with willfully ignoring facts to push one's belief. but making sure less fact finding funding might help, so uncertainty can be replaced by echo chamber influence.. navigating own digression.
meaning we don't know what we are talking about, the second someone bring luck to the discussion. it means we did not know the exact causal relationships between decision and subsequent observable consequent event, or not 100%. anything else than exact contains luck.. one just has to ask for confidence level to stop arguing forever (but first one needs to use well defined things to measure with some confidence).
One "Markovian" perspective that hasn't been mentioned in this thread:
In chess, state transitions are deterministic. For instance, the action "white plays Rd8#" will always result in the rook moving to d8. In contrast, in Monopoly, some state transitions (dice rolls) are non-deterministic, whereas others (player decisions) have deterministic effects. This is what some people refer to as "luck".
Furthermore, chess is also a perfect information game -- both players are aware of the board state at all times. This is the biggest difference between chess and imperfect information games such as poker, where players are only aware of part of the state; there are many valid possibilities for the complete state, and may it be modeled by a probability distribution. This is what some people refer to as "luck".
So where does "luck" in a deterministic, perfect information game (i.e. chess) come from? There are a few elements:
- Non-deterministic player decisions. As mentioned within this thread, humans (and even multi-threaded engines) may make different decisions within the same position on different days.
- Imperfect position evaluation. Due to the horizon effect (i.e. limited search depth), a position that looked good from a distance may actually be a bad position, and vice versa.
These both effectively contribute to the element of "luck" (non-determinism) that makes each chess game different. While the game of chess is deterministic and perfect, its players are neither.
In fact, using these observations, an omniscient being could construct a non-deterministic game that is exactly mathematically equivalent to the game "chess played by Carlsen and Giri on 2018-11-16" with its own abstract state space and deterministically time-varying state transition matrix. Does such a game not involve "luck" in exactly the same concrete mathematical sense as Monopoly?
I think that last statement is the final nail in the coffin for claims that there is no "luck" in chess when played by non-deterministic entities.
I'm sorry that I didn't bother reading all the posts just wanted to say is it not better to describe chess, as a game of chance, rather than luck, if there is a difference, I feel chance is more correct view point than luck xxx
I seriously doubt the guys CheckRaiseMate is losing to in Poker are worse players than him. It's more likely he's overestimating his ability and his chances. Yes it is a game where with enough bad luck you may not win a single hand, but there's a fair amount of strategy and psychology involved and after enough hands the luck will even out. Recognizing the flow of the game and acting accordingly is in itself a skill, both in poker, chess and most other games as well. Understanding who the opponents you're facing and their playstyles is also another important skill. And i know there's quite a bit of theory for poker playstyles and how to deal with them.
For example, Daniel Naroditsky (Rebeccaharris on lichess) on his streams shows incredible knowledge not just of lines, but of which lines his opponents are good at playing and which ones they have trouble in, that greatly tips the scales on his favor during longer matches. The same applies in poker, having intel on how your opponents play makes it easier to deal with them.
I'll argue that luck in chess will mostly come down to biology. It might be the case that you're having a bad day, or your opponent is having the day of their life, imagine if during a classical game your body suddenly decides you really need to go to the bathroom and you're incapable of focusing because of that. That's luck.
Magnus ?
@slackdrago said in #3:
> mahhhh you give too importance Elo online where most of games are bullet...blitz... and refllexes and play fast count.
> So many players lose for distractions and pieces in jeopardy... my answer?
> YES "LUCK" is very important on chess.....but online! :)
I don't think this guy understands that these skill factors are what determines the rating in the first place, reflexes and playing fast are exactly what makes a high elo blitz player.
@Toscani said in #17:
> Luck drops, as moves are more accurate
>
lichess.org/insights/Toscani/luck/accuracyThis is a flawed interpretation of the chess insights visualisation because you haven't controlled for the time control, ofc the accuracy will increase and luck will decrease as the time control becomes slower. The trend of the luck decreasing as accuracy is simply because the higher accuracy games are slower games. If you select for a specific time control, say blitz only, so the spread of accuracy reflects variation in performance for a specific time control there is no clear trend (the high accuracy end of the scale doesn't have a sufficient sample size to draw reliable conclusions. Also note that the y axis does not start at 0 so it blows up the variation to make it look like more of a significant trend).
Aw, please, not this discussion... again.
Luck, there is no such a thing intrinsic in the game, no way. Period. What the author calls "luck" is not in the game, it's right in the head of the players. You're not "lucky" because your opponent made a mistake, and it's not "misfortune" if your own mind derailed. It's good play or bad play, that's all, whatever the cause may be. And that's a beauty of chess.
If something really happens outside the game during the game, like in "someone in the audience got stabbed so I forgot my best move", that's life, not chess.
