On chess and the notion of luck

In The Price of Genius: Inside the World of India’s Chess Prodigies, published by Juggarnaut, Binit Priyaranjan looks at Indian chessplayers at the forefront of the chess boom today, including D Gukesh and Raunak Sadhwani. In this excerpt from the book, he pulls back the curtain on these players, and assesses ideas of “genius” and “luck” associated with chess. “Several other aspects associated with luck—as opposed to elements the players are in total control of—routinely permeate performance at the highest level,” he writes. “Even super GMs sometimes make moves they consider to be mistakes, only to realise upon deeper analysis that the supposed mistake was actually a brilliancy.”

In contrast to poker or backgammon, chess has a reputation as a game where luck plays no role. But favours or curses from Caissa—the chess goddess sacred to GMs—can play a decisive role in the climb to the ranks of genius. The appellation “genius” itself has antithetical connotations to that of luck—the genius achieves greatness due to skill, imagination, temperament and other virtues, not because of favourable accidents. In fact, this is the reason success in chess has had such a long history of being conflated with the presence of “genius.” For example, László [Polgár] chose chess for the Polgár sisters’ experiment because results in chess cannot be attributed to anything other than the capabilities of the player. It is also for this reason that chess is such a psychologically brutal sport, for when one loses there is no one (or nothing) to blame but yourself.

It can be argued that this reputation is mathematically correct because, mathematically speaking, chess is a game of “complete information.” That is to say, unlike cards in poker or the location of the rolling ball of roulette, everything relevant about the game is a 100 per cent transparent to both players and viewers. When the game is played in the idealised vacuum of strong chess engines playing each other in what’s known as the annual Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) there is no room for luck, since every move is determined by the silicon entities doing the calculations. In TCEC, the hardware hosting the engines is also the same. However, even when super computers with 3,500 plus ELOs play each other, the results are uncertain. When humans play each other, there are many more variables involved than just the crunching of variations.

In practice, computer science considers the problem of determining the best move in a complex middlegame position an “NP problem” or a “nondeterministic polynomial’ problem. Without delving into definitions, NP problems are ones where verifying a solution is usually much easier than finding a solution. Consider Sudoku, for example, where finding a solution may be hard but the solution can be easily verified. This is different, for example, from something like a simple multiplication where it takes as many steps to verify the answer to 123 multiplied by 456 as it does to find the answer.