Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that depend on getting your opponent into a position where he has only one legal move and by making it you can then play the winning move. If your opponent could instead skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.
I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could win without zugzwang. Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to make the first move and by white skipping the first move, the colors swapped).
If white would not skip the very first move and play an arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.
But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which contradicts our assumption.
1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever
And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed
Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?
