When I worked, my boss and I had a discussion about employee performance. Part of his job was to periodically rank (or assign ‘goodness’ numbers) to each employee, and he was struggling to explain differences.
The trouble is that there is never just one axis (or knob…). There might be 25 or 30 different components for an employee’s contribution. 15 technical ones; 8 interpersonal ones; maybe 5 character qualities; in addition to external factors like you talked about.
Chess is hard, and I think the same applies. There is a scale for experience/expertise with how each piece maneuvers, then you can add in the expertise for two-piece interactions; as well as creativity; a brain fog scale that acts as a multiplier for everything perhaps ….
No game touches all those axes or knobs; so some jaggedness is expected.
A story about luck: I was playing in a tournament and the opening went poorly. I had a totally hopeless position.
My opponent seemed a little weirdly disengaged and also like he wasn’t sure how to make progress (which should have been easy) and so I offered a draw.
He accepted. In the hallway afterwards I asked why and he said “my wife left me this morning and I’m having trouble focusing.”
It's unwise to call variance luck. In Poker a lot of people could fix their game by finding leaks. I know I had a few leaks even when I was wildly successful at online poker.Buying in into a table immediately instead of waiting til the blinds came to the seat as an example. But most people don't even know they have leaks. When you excuse your downswings on luck, you might be having bigger downswings than professional players because of leaks.
In chess there's really no such thing as luck or variance except how many times lichess or chess.com gives you black in a row.
When you fall into viewing things as luck, you're not being objective. You're somewhat closing your mind to the absolute truth. For instance, it's why cheating paranoia exists in the chess world. And I'm somewhat guilty of that. When I face new accounts, and get crushed I almost invariably suspect a smurf, and possibly a cheater depending on how exactly the game unfolded. I feel the former is warranted considering how big of a problem smurfing is and how little chess.com and lichess does about it. The latter isn't as warranted.
Even dice thrown. is just lazyness to go measure the initial conditions to the precision needed to predicted the dynamics of the free rotating dice and its bouncing on a surface with say little friction. We just prefer to not do that, and look at the odds of its 6 stable attractors that friction even if small ends up giving.
For chess, the uncertainty comes from single mind limitations, even the best of us. Each individual fog of chess. Even if we wanted to put the energy, even the best of us, chess will have some residual fog left. (for engine we are doubly in the fog, that while it can beat any of us, we do not know that the cumulated engines in a huge pool would explore the real absolute chess, not just an engine club self deluded notion of absolute chess, they could be competing over a tiny patch, as long as no human can go through that, well we hail its oracle glory).
What is nice though is that this lazyness, can be quantified and modeling in math language, exactly. We measure and control our ignorance by assigning a world of events, and some blob probablility over it to represent it.
Hopefully you get a better response than I did when I wrote about it a few years ago. I was looking at it from a math/game theory point of view, so I think your take, which I love, is going to be more relatable to people. Here it is in case you or your other readers are interested in a complementary/supporting point of view. https://lichess.org/@/MatthewKCanada/blog/there-is-definitely-luck-in-chess/AexcZ90q
The topic is dear to my heart, though more from a chessboard philosophy viewpoint than from the training/coaching advice standpoint emphasized in this post. Here's how I examined the question of luck in chess (which broadly aligns with your paragraph that noted the inherent complexity of chess can sometimes make outcomes unpredictable even when both sides play well): https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17yemeosi4/
I’m working on gathering data from my own games about rating progress despite the downturns, and one of the big things I’m contrasting is rating variability and overall rating increase. I’ve found some interesting things thus far so I’m excited to talk about what I think the results indicate. :)
I’m working on gathering data from my own games about rating progress despite the downturns, and one of the big things I’m contrasting is rating variability and overall rating increase. I’ve found some interesting things thus far so I’m excited to talk about what I think the results indicate. :)
When I worked, my boss and I had a discussion about employee performance. Part of his job was to periodically rank (or assign ‘goodness’ numbers) to each employee, and he was struggling to explain differences.
The trouble is that there is never just one axis (or knob…). There might be 25 or 30 different components for an employee’s contribution. 15 technical ones; 8 interpersonal ones; maybe 5 character qualities; in addition to external factors like you talked about.
Chess is hard, and I think the same applies. There is a scale for experience/expertise with how each piece maneuvers, then you can add in the expertise for two-piece interactions; as well as creativity; a brain fog scale that acts as a multiplier for everything perhaps ….
No game touches all those axes or knobs; so some jaggedness is expected.
A story about luck: I was playing in a tournament and the opening went poorly. I had a totally hopeless position.
My opponent seemed a little weirdly disengaged and also like he wasn’t sure how to make progress (which should have been easy) and so I offered a draw.
He accepted. In the hallway afterwards I asked why and he said “my wife left me this morning and I’m having trouble focusing.”
Wow. Poor guy
It's unwise to call variance luck. In Poker a lot of people could fix their game by finding leaks. I know I had a few leaks even when I was wildly successful at online poker.Buying in into a table immediately instead of waiting til the blinds came to the seat as an example. But most people don't even know they have leaks. When you excuse your downswings on luck, you might be having bigger downswings than professional players because of leaks.
In chess there's really no such thing as luck or variance except how many times lichess or chess.com gives you black in a row.
When you fall into viewing things as luck, you're not being objective. You're somewhat closing your mind to the absolute truth. For instance, it's why cheating paranoia exists in the chess world. And I'm somewhat guilty of that. When I face new accounts, and get crushed I almost invariably suspect a smurf, and possibly a cheater depending on how exactly the game unfolded. I feel the former is warranted considering how big of a problem smurfing is and how little chess.com and lichess does about it. The latter isn't as warranted.
Randomness is always in the eyes of the beholder.
Even dice thrown. is just lazyness to go measure the initial conditions to the precision needed to predicted the dynamics of the free rotating dice and its bouncing on a surface with say little friction. We just prefer to not do that, and look at the odds of its 6 stable attractors that friction even if small ends up giving.
For chess, the uncertainty comes from single mind limitations, even the best of us. Each individual fog of chess. Even if we wanted to put the energy, even the best of us, chess will have some residual fog left. (for engine we are doubly in the fog, that while it can beat any of us, we do not know that the cumulated engines in a huge pool would explore the real absolute chess, not just an engine club self deluded notion of absolute chess, they could be competing over a tiny patch, as long as no human can go through that, well we hail its oracle glory).
What is nice though is that this lazyness, can be quantified and modeling in math language, exactly. We measure and control our ignorance by assigning a world of events, and some blob probablility over it to represent it.
Hopefully you get a better response than I did when I wrote about it a few years ago. I was looking at it from a math/game theory point of view, so I think your take, which I love, is going to be more relatable to people. Here it is in case you or your other readers are interested in a complementary/supporting point of view. https://lichess.org/@/MatthewKCanada/blog/there-is-definitely-luck-in-chess/AexcZ90q
The topic is dear to my heart, though more from a chessboard philosophy viewpoint than from the training/coaching advice standpoint emphasized in this post. Here's how I examined the question of luck in chess (which broadly aligns with your paragraph that noted the inherent complexity of chess can sometimes make outcomes unpredictable even when both sides play well): https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17yemeosi4/
Nice.
I’m working on gathering data from my own games about rating progress despite the downturns, and one of the big things I’m contrasting is rating variability and overall rating increase. I’ve found some interesting things thus far so I’m excited to talk about what I think the results indicate. :)
Nice.
I’m working on gathering data from my own games about rating progress despite the downturns, and one of the big things I’m contrasting is rating variability and overall rating increase. I’ve found some interesting things thus far so I’m excited to talk about what I think the results indicate. :)