Winning or losing in chess - a question of combinatorics? I have observed that every chess game can be assumed as a sequence of moves that lead either to win or to lose (in a few cases to a drawn game). It is very interesting to Count all the moves that are possible in any chess game. May be $N$ the number of chess moves done in a game (contains moves done by white AND by black). Depending on the previous chess moves one can Count the number of chess moves $n_i$ for the move number $i$ that are possible. But how many possibilities are there for winning or losing related to all possible chess games? Is there any literature dealing with this question?

Counting the number of possible paths of play is related to the task of actually solving chess, upon which there has been a lot of research. The difficulty is that there are incredibly many ways that chess can actually play out, which you hint at. I have seen in quoted that there are more possible paths of play than there at atoms in the universe. WolframAlpha tells me there are about $10^{80}$ atoms in the universe, so presumably there are more chess moves than that. Anyway, this is such a fun topic there's a Wikipedia page on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess
