Greg Costikyan's blog about game design issues is consistently worth reading. Today he brings us some crystal-clear and rather counter-intuitive discussion of the role of luck in games:

At the Replay conference in 1999, Garfield said 'If I am very lucky, I can beat Kasparov at Chess.' A priori, the statement is nonsensical. Chess is a game of pure strategy, without any luck elements whatsoever. Kasparov is the world champion; I don't know how good a Chess player Garfield is, but he's clearly not anywhere near in the same league. How, then, could he win 'by luck?'