Luck counts for little in a game of chess | Letters

Prof Peter Ayton (Letters, 23 September) rightly points out that chess can be affected by chance factors, which is why I was careful to say that chess involves virtually no luck. However, the degree of luck involved, compared with that inherent in backgammon (which is also subject to the same variables he mentions), is likely to be modest. Indeed, if an intermediate player were to play a chess grandmaster, it would surely be a vanishingly small factor, very unlikely to affect the inevitable outc