"David Kane" writes:
Err, David, very few chess games, even in your tournaments, are won
from the opening position. Guess again. The more likely explanation is
that White has the first move, and having the first move constitutes an
advantage - I believe it's been compared to having the serve in tennis.


Still not getting it. If White and Black had equal results from the
opening position, would we still say that White has an advantage?
No. We conclude from empirical evidence (not help bot's drug-induced
hallucinations) that White wins more often than Black, so say that
White has an advantage.

No, still not getting it. If I look in any issue of Informant,
there's hundreds of positions labelled "+/=" or "=/+" scattered
through the various games. Most of these positions have never
appeared in any other game, have never been played more than once, so
it's completely bogus to say there's empirical evidence that White (or
Black) has "won them more often". Most of those positions are in fact
likely to be theoretical draws. And yet, since we should reasonably
presume that the grandmasters annotating those games know what they're
doing, the +/= evaluations must mean SOMETHING. So I think the
criterion of "empirical evidence that White wins more often" is not
the right one.