Kinds of chance in games and sports

While talking about sports (and games) we use such expressions as ‘random victory’, ‘winning by accident’, ‘skill against luck’, ‘chance (fortune) favours the better player’, etc. Unfortunately, chance-related notions that occur in these expressions are not well defined—their meaning is vague and it is not clear whether they refer to one or many different phenomena. Because such phenomena play an important role in sport, from the viewpoint of the philosophy of sport it is necessary to give a systematic account of this topic. Although the works of De Wachter, Simon, Dixon, Breivik and Loland contain many important insights, there is still a room for further research in this field. The author tries to establish a typology of phenomena that could generally be called ‘chance-phenomena’, which however, should be precisely distinguished. As such the primary task is to present an analysis of several different kinds of chance in sports. In constructing this typology the author uses both the distinction between different kinds of games (performative vs. kinetic) as well as analysis of structure of a game (four constitutive elements: players, constitutive rules, material substrate of the game and the world of the game). The most important method used is phenomenological analysis, especially Ingarden-style analysis. These kinds of ‘chance-phenomena’ are: aleatoriness, chaos, irregularity, imprecision and arbitrariness. The paradigm cases of each kind of chance are discussed. The genesis and functions of the respective phenomena in sports and games are also shown, as well as their position in the structure of the game. Such analytic work should precede any solutions of the chance vs. skill problem, or other problems concerning chance in sport. As a test of usefulness of the provided distinctions, the author considers the veracity of the judgements expressed in such sentences as ‘Fortune favours the better player’.