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CronoDAS comments on Can chess be a game of luck? - Less Wrong
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Incidentally, Richard Garfield, designer of Magic, once wrote on the topic of luck in games. He said that there is, in fact, luck in chess, because we cannot predict the outcome with certainty. He went on to explain that if he sat down to play chess against Kasparov or some other world-class chess champion, he'd expect to lose, but there's still a possibility (however small) that he could happen to stumble upon a superior line of play, perhaps without even realizing it, and end up winning.
Perhaps it would be useful to make a distinction between the game of chess, which is mostly skill, and the game of betting on chess, which is mostly luck with fairly well-known probabilities. It looks to me as though the original article is conflating the two very badly, and that this is the cause of much confusion.
Incidentally, when I saw the title of this top-level post, I thought the argument was going to be something like what you've described here: when you make a move, you're steering the game in a direction that has an element of randomness because you can't really review all possibilities. And so you end up surprised at how good or bad it was for you.
Alas, it turns out that Gkalai was simply using a non-standard meaning for his words. Bait-and-switch.
Correct, of course; but we can make some pretty strong quantitative distinctions. I'm more likely to win the lottery than to beat Kasparov (assuming he's healthy and playing at his usual level, etc). But I bet I could beat any human being or computer program at Candyland half the time.
Similarly, if you put me heads-up against a poker pro, I might stand as much as a 10% chance of knocking them out (by getting lucky on the river on an all-in); but that level of luck averages out to a great degree over a long tournament, so that again my chances of making the final table at the WSOP are order-of-lottery bad.
Indeed. (Assuming nobody's cheating, of course.) Garfield's statement does not necessarily reflect my own opinions on things.
In this case, you can probably improve your chances by making the game more about luck -- just go all-in every hand.
I've heard that, if you go all-in on every hand in a heads-up poker match, the optimal counter-strategy still leaves you with a 1/3 chance of winning. (I don't know if this is correct or not.)
It depends -- in the limit where blinds are zero, you only call with aces and win 80% of the time. For more realistic values you may well be right.
(I had a truly marvelous bit about luck in chess in an unposted draft. Now I'll probably throw that bit away.)
Sounds about right to me. Going all-in every hand (pre-flop, and blind, of course, so I can't be read) would definitely improve my odds if I were in a heads-up game against a pro. But at a table with more than (say) 3 others, unless they can read me as perfectly as Omega, I should probably start looking at my cards and following a simple memorized poker algorithm.
Reminds me of making the system dumber when faced with a superior adversary.
If you're winning, simplify. If you're losing, complicate. Works in philosopher's football too -- if you expect to be the one to bolt first, you want a kink in the path.