Hey Steve, that was certainly an interesting article! Haiving played chess for many years before quitting competitive play, I certainly agreed with the parallels you drew in your article. I do have some comments about some of the points you raised in the article:
But to read a Chess player, and a particularly skilled one at that, ascribing “luck” to an opponent was striking.
It is certainly hard to imagine how luck can arise in chess, but there is more luck than one would at first imagine. particularly:
1) Many games in a tournament boil down to heart-pounding time scrambles. They are certainly fun to watch (even for someone who doesn't even understand the game), and tend to be quite swingy. There can be a significant luck involved in such a scenario, where many moves that are made are more based on intuition and pattern recognition (or even playing the probabilities) than anything else.
2) In a course of the game, especially at high levels, there is frequently an interchange between one type of an advantage versus another type of advantage. For instance, a player might invest material for positional gain or to put a lot of pressure on the opponent and shift the burden of defense onto them. These types of sacrifices of material are often speculative - it is nearly impossible to calculate their long term outcome. The player must rely heavily on experience and intuition in such cases, but of course their sacrifices don't always pan out.
3) The “matagaming” in chess can have a significant luck component. Many games are determined not over the chessboard, but in home preparation. Periodically, strong players would unearth Theoretical Novelties (TNs). TNs at times were so significant that they would completely turn the tables, changing a negative evaluation of a position by theory to an overwhelmingly positive one. Arguably, one who falls for a prepared line is “unlucky” in the sense that they cannot possibly anticipate all of the subtleties of every conceivable position, and minimizing the chances of falling for such TNs would usually mean adopting systems that were known by theory to be equal or lack aggressive punch. Thus, if a player was highly ambitious and wanted to play the most challenging lines, they would be more prone to TNs.
Interestingly enough, Fischer proposed the “Fischer Clock” to combat the luck involved in scenario 1. The Fischer Clock would add an arbitrary number of seconds after each move (usually 10 seconds), to avoid situations in which moves are made almost mindlessly leading to horrible blunders. The Fischer Clock has even been used in major chess tourneys in the past.
Fischer also proposed a new chess variant that would completely eliminate the “luck” involved in scenario 3: randomly scrambling the back row of each side of a chess board before each game. This way players were left to their own devices, instead of reliance on home preparation (and to be fair, that home preparation might have come as a result of that player's helpers, called “seconds” - and thus entire games could be won with minimal effort from that player himself).
Going back to Fisher's behavior after his losses, you parallel that to the behavior of certain magic players after they lose their matches. However, I wouldn't necessarily paint Fischer's behavior in a negative light - in fact, I think it can be interpreted as a very good thing. Fischer had incredible drive and an incredible killer instinct. He would be upset after losing because he felt that he should be able to beat anybody. I think that while he might have been emotional in the short term, those feelings fueled his drive to succeed. I have no doubt that he meticulously analyzed his losses, and learned a lot from his mistakes.
This is what sets him apart from many magic players that ascribe their losses to luck – such players never truly learn and grow.
