Game theory

The one move in a game that nobody chooses has a German name an English reader is likely to get wrong. Game theory treats the shuffle of a deck as a move made by nature, der Zufallszug, and the key part is der Zufall: chance in the sense of randomness, what happens without anybody deciding it. The tempting word is die Chance, and it does not mean that. Die Chance is an opening or a prospect — eine Chance nutzen is to seize an opportunity, die Chancen stehen gut says the odds look good — so it matches « chance » only where English means opportunity or likelihood. It never means randomness. A game of chance is ein Glücksspiel, something that happened by chance happened zufällig, and nobody would call nature’s move a Chancenzug. Where English says « chance », ask first whether it means an opening or an accident: the first is Chance, the second Zufall.