"Paul Rubin" wrote in message
...
"David Kane" writes:
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.

Exactly. They mean that in the GM's opinion (valued precisely
because GMs have lots of practical experience playing chess)
one side or the other has better *winning* chances. I was
arguing against the help bot position that you can have an
advantage without winning chances.


So I think the
criterion of "empirical evidence that White wins more often" is not
the right one.

Do you maintain that the belief that White has an advantage
is completely unrelated to the fact that White scores better?
That would be truly bizarre.

Basically you are reminding us that there are different
ways to reach a conclusion about the winning chances
in a position. I don't dispute that.