Chess is like playing Poker. How much is "Luck" and "Bluffing a factor to chess?

^ This.

How would bluffing work, even sometimes? My understanding of bluff is to hide something from the opponent and lead them to believe you have or do something you really don't have. Or won't do. 

In poker the bluff is based on the fact the opponent cannot see your cards. But in chess nothing is hidden, so how would a bluff even work? In other words, if in poker all cards were visible, by all players, at all times, could you bluff?

So lets say all the cards held in someones hands and all the cards in the deck are all face up. All of them. They have 3 kings and 2 queens, and you have a pair of 2s, a 4, a 8, and a jack. All the cards are face up, so everyone can see what everyone has. But you want to bluff. How do you do it?

Good point........I guess what I meant was trickery. Which is actually used in very high levels of chess so................Good point lol

Now the queen is dead after Qxb2  Na4

I think pretty much all average players are terrible at calculating and do simply rely on gut feelings about bluff or not.  I have heard it described as Spidey sense.

You have studied chess much more than I have.  I suppose I will need to study masters games more if I want to improve.

Interesting thread.

It might help to look at the way some recent chess engines work.  The standard AI method is to consider various lines and rate the resulting positions.  In contrast, some engines, such as Nibbler, simply look at a huge database of games and determine the likelihood that a certain line will result in a win.  It gives each line a certain percentage.

In fast games of 5 or even 10 minutes a stray move can break an opponent's concentration but I wouldn't call it bluffing.  It's more akin to a distraction.

It's not a bluff because the opponent can see what you did. Nothing is hidden. If the opponent can't figure what a poisoned pawn is, that's his fault. A sacrifice is the same way. It's not a bluff, because it's not hidden. It's a strategy or tactic that your opponent gets to see, but still has to figure out how to respond. From my understanding of bluff, it only works when the opponent does not know what cards (or moves) you have. That doesn't work in chess because the opponent always knows what move you made. If you could somehow hide or not disclose what move you made, then a bluff could work. But the rules of chess do not allow you to hide what move you made. 

Exactly. Bluffing is lying. But there is no lying in chess because the opponent can clearly see every single thing you do. It's not hidden. So the only thing that could be a bluff is when you say you are going to make a certain move, but then you don't. I have no idea if that's even allowed. 

Luck is not a huge factor neither is bluffing.

That's not so much bluffing as it is exploiting what you believe is an opponents weakness. By playing a move in a certain opening you have revealed your hand. You have shown your cards. So a bluff is not possible. The only thing possible is for the opponent to not know what playing those moves could lead to. 

A bluff is a form of deception. But when your opponent can see the moves you make, deception is not possible. If you could put up a physical barrier, where the opponent could not see the moves you make, (like the game Battleship) then you could bluff.

It's a practical question actually. You can't physically hide what's on the board, but you physically cannot realize everything that's going on either. So practially your brain isn't able to process whats on the board, therefore you don't have the information available to you. For this reason your opponent can make moves to make you believe something exists that doesn't, like in poker.

So both in poker and chess you're missing info but for different reasons, in chess it's the limits of your brain and in poker limit of physical access.

bluffing wont be recommend. never play hope chess

As in poker, the build up of pressure can be a big factor. This is especially relevant in shorter time games or short on time.Fortune favors the bold. Be aggressive, be unpredictable, be fearless, be suicidal, see the ball be the ball!?!

That's a good way of putting it.  Bluffing in chess is hope chess. It's putting your cards down where the opponent can see them and hoping they don't know what to do about it. 

I can totally see this working on a bad player. Someone intentionally, or even accidentally, makes a terrible move. A move so bad that the other player figures it MUST be a sacrifice. So they don't take the free rook that's now in a great position. But another equally bad player might just assume you are a terrible chess player and didn't know the rook is unprotected, so they just take the rook.

The bluff didn't work, but sometimes it could. Isn't that exactly what hope chess is?

Yep, making a move aware its not optimal but hoping the opponent misses something is definition of hope chess. Thing is, it definitely works at my level and probably at all levels in blitz atleast lol

How do you play poker?

Yes, but the similarities soon end; chess and poker are different games. I enjoy playing both chess and poker.

Probably the largest difference between the games is that with chess there is technically 0% luck (everything on the chess board is objective and has no probability within the game itself even though someone may "get lucky" to find a tactic or something, but this isn't "luck" in the same sense of the word) and everyone in chess knows how good the opponent and you are based on accurate chess ratings.

Conversely, poker has no such ratings so good players can habitually seek out weaker players without them always knowing (poker pros or poker hustlers come to mind) and the fact that poker has some element of chance (luck?) built into it - although this does tend to "even out" over the long-term.

As for "bluffing" this is an integral part of poker, but in chess, bluffing has much less effect and it looks a bit differently. A chess "bluff" can work (especially in speed chess or under tournament pressure), but this is more psychology and relying on human emotions, rather than in poker when players have various facets of knowledge in the hand, yet the information is incomplete.