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First move advantage in Western Chess - why does it exist?[Subject Thread] [Add Response]

Jeremy Lennert wrote on Fri, Aug 31, 2012 05:38 AM UTC:

Well, as long as white sometimes wins and black sometimes wins, the
"noise" is large enough to overcome all other factors SOME of the time. 
But if you collect a giant database of master-level games and find that
white is winning 53%, then I think it still makes sense to say that white
had an advantage, regardless of the theoretical perfect-game result. 
SOMETHING has to be responsible for the fact that white wins more often
than black.

So if white wins only 1% more than black, or only 0.1% more, or only 0.01%
more, at what point do you declare that the noise has "overwhelmed" the
signal and that there is now "no" advantage?  I don't see any
non-arbitrary way to draw a line anywhere other than zero exactly (i.e. the
point where the advantage passes from white to black).

So I'm assuming that the "advantage" is the hypothetical difference in
win rate between white and black that we would converge upon if we sampled
an ever-larger number of games played by "skilled" players.  The
definition of "skilled" is a bit hand-wavey and probably depends on
context, but I think the rest of that is rigorous.