Do you believe in luck?

luck

Another cliche I have trouble taking literally, bad luck and bad decisions "even themselves out"
The odds of that happening in reality must be off the scale!

if you have an edge, understand it, stake accordingly then you'll win over time.

A "lucky" punter doesn`t believe in luck.

isnt it a fact that the better you are, the luckier you are?

i once had a rescue dog...one leg, deaf in one eye and blind..he eventually got run over by a tractor...his name was lucky

So how can say someone who seems to win fairly regularly on games like roulette (where the odds and house edge should prevent this from happening in the first place) believe they have some sort of control over which number comes up? That it is not simply down to good luck or fortune?

if someone plays roulette regularly and 'seems' to be winning that's probably the answer.

Since 1998 I have looked at luck differently.

Back then I was in between jobs and struggling a bit. But then the possibilty of a job back in IT came up. It looked a longshot but I followed it through and got the role.

In the weeks before I started I put my head down and really preapred as well as I could, spending 12 hours a day reading stuff up and re-learning the bits of computing which had once been my profession.

Did the same thing after the job started and then developments at the company suddenly left me as their only choice to take on a much bigger role. Stayed there 6 years and earned over 1/2 a million with O/T, bonuses etc. This set me up but I would not have been able to take advantage had I not put the work in to start with.

So, the fact the company changed direction was a lucky break for me. But I was ready to take advantage of it and that is how I view things now.

Prepare as very best you can because you never know when luck might come your way. Trick is to take advantage of it.

That makes sense. You have to be in a position to capitalise on good fortune or being in the right place at the right time. Though maybe there could have been other people out there who put in just as much work as you did but are still waiting for that same break? Are they simply unlucky? Or maybe the companies they worked for started to perform poorly (with no link to their own performance, but maybe market conditions) so what can you do about it? Very little.

In terms of gambling, wonder if some of it is self fulfilling. When you start chasing, you can kind of feel it's inevitable that more losses will follow because that's what your recent experience has been, ditto with winning streaks, so that part could be self fulfilling. But it doesn't really make a great deal of sense that the results should follow that trend because there's no relation between your last few bets and a match being played in Italy! IE if you lost your last few bets, the match you're currently betting on a ref makes a wrong decision which goes against you, but had you won your last few bets, then that would have gone in your favour instead. Can't possibly work like that but feels like it does sometimes!

Similarly you hear of people who say they never have good luck, and the cycle continues for them. But for totally random things like lottery wins, how can your midset possibly influence this? Yet I do know of people who seem to have regular doses of good fortune who've had several decent wins on the lotto (not jackpot, but four/five numbers a few times)

no .

if there's a bag with a 1000 balls in it and 550 are red and 450 are black and you're picking the red balls out you'll, obviously, have more balls when the picking has finished. There'll be times when you could be well behind and it's a distinct possibility 15 blacks could come out on the trot but if you stick at it until the bag is empty you'll have 550 balls out of the 1000.

I wonder how many "Man Utd 0 v 1 Leeds Utd" balls are in that bag.

I worked as a coupier for a number of years and can tell you some people won all the time while others lost

Some people ARE more lucky than others

THAT IS A FACT

The Knight 03 Jan 14:36


Since 1998 I have looked at luck differently.

Back then I was in between jobs and struggling a bit. But then the possibilty of a job back in IT came up. It looked a longshot but I followed it through and got the role.

In the weeks before I started I put my head down and really preapred as well as I could, spending 12 hours a day reading stuff up and re-learning the bits of computing which had once been my profession.

Did the same thing after the job started and then developments at the company suddenly left me as their only choice to take on a much bigger role. Stayed there 6 years and earned over 1/2 a million with O/T, bonuses etc. This set me up but I would not have been able to take advantage had I not put the work in to start with.

So, the fact the company changed direction was a lucky break for me. But I was ready to take advantage of it and that is how I view things now.

Prepare as very best you can because you never know when luck might come your way. Trick is to take advantage of it




i.e the harder you work - the luckier one gets. FACT

buzzer, what point are you making ?

The harder i work , the luckier i seem to get . Arnold Palmer .

Facts, I agree. Gary Player used to used to say, ''The more I practice, the luckier I get ''

i think the last two post are very important to your question here is why,the last one that some people are more lucky than others is undoubtlly true, and the second one about the man utd game is they were short odds on so cant loss to a team aleague or two as was behind them, but the point of taking luck out of this was man utd even althoughplaying good team in the game still have more important things on there mind so there was always apossible out come of them vbeing upset , now if that was a league game im sure man utd would never have lost this game so there where the luck differance is. does that make sense

Some of the posts in this thread are just pointless cliches to me. It's easy for those who are successful in life to attribute it to hard work and "making their own luck" when looking at it retrospectively. Think it's far more complicated than that.
I don't believe the Knight did say he made his own luck either, simply that he put the graft in and when he got the chance he was prepared for it and took it. I'm sure you could find other examples of people in similar positions in other companies who worked just as hard, but their company was not thriving and circumstances did not throw up a similar opportunity for them like it did for the Knight.
I totally agree with the point he made that you have to be prepared for when/if the chance crops up though.What I don't agree with is the thought that somehow we can manufacture these breaks for ourselves and the feeling that more is within our control than it really is, when it's more to do with chance and events beyond our control.
And another problem with this logic is that opportunities are finite. There's only so many good jobs to go round and it's competitive, we can't all take these roles in life and there is always going to be a need for people to clean the streets too.

Gary Player -not Arnold Palmer !
Although i expect he felt the same way .

I read once about some research someone did with people who said they were 'lucky' and 'unlucky'.

They made both sets of people carry out a task where they would have to walk to a coffee shop and order a coffee. En route, a ten pound note had been left on the pavement, and in the coffee shop, there was just one seat left, next to someone posing as a person of great influence in the person's chosen professional field.

Most of the people who said they were 'lucky' spotted the ten pound note on the floor as they walked, and on entering the coffee shop, started a conversation with the person sitting next to them who could help them in their career. Hardly any of the 'unlucky' ones did.

This led the testers to come to the conclusion that

Did that £20 note have a "2" and an "0" on it? If so, it could be mine.

You get what you expect .

Nice story Millhouse. I heard about that too.

In some cases how lucky someone is can be subjective.
In gambling you can try to create an objective measure of luck, by looking at volatility of returns. You can even do simulations to show how your returns can vary. The more volatility there is, the more luck (or randomness) will become a factor. You can then use these stats to estimate how much luck was involved.

Millhouse are you referring to the book "The Luck Factor"?
Sure I read something similar to the coffee shop scenario you described in that.

I've read The Luck Factor and it's spot on - almost sums up my life. A great read.

No such thing as luck (long term) imo. People who win / ae successful consistently at anything are those who put the work in. Same goes for gambling.

The top teams in any sport get more perceived 'luck' because they create more opportunities and chances to score through positive play - you can apply that to life in general.

Yes, what Millhouse describes is part of The Luck Factor

Vaprus Parnu 03 Jan 20:16
[...]
No such thing as luck (long term) imo. People who win / ae successful consistently at anything are those who put the work in. Same goes for gambling.
[...]


If you take two successful gamblers one has made £100,000 in the last year and the other has made £200,000, it wouldn't be accurate to say the second is better. You need to take volatility into account. This is something that doesn't go away even in the long term.

The occurrence or nonoccurence of key events can mean the difference between making £2M or £10M over a lifetime. Skill doesn't come into it.

The more consistent you are, the more control you have over your returns. But you'll never be totally in control. There will always be at least a tiny element of luck, randomness or whatever you want to call it.

of course their is luck but it is not pre- destined and bad and good luck is only decided at the time and by physics mainly (ie the bounce of a lottery ball , the angle of impact in a car crash etc)

The Investor - I think any successful gambler does take into account volatility. Sure, a bad ref decision might cost you in the odd game here and there but you would have that factored in, just as a trader factors in the odd all-red screen.

If you consistently are thwarted by bad luck though, my point is that you are not unlucky - you have a bad strategy and need to change something.

Vaprus Parnu,

If you were offered the chance to play a game of heads or tails with a biased coin where the chance of heads is 50.5% and tails 49.5% with an even payout would you play?

If your answer is yes, you should consider that you could easily be down after as many as 10,000 tosses. The only way you can lose a positive expectancy game is through 'bad luck'. You can call it something else, but that would just be getting bogged down in semantics.

In my opinion avoiding this game altogether because the edge isn't large enough would not be rational.

If the conditions were the same as above but with a 55% chance of heads and a 45% chance of tails, you could expect to be in profit after 10,000 tosses (calling heads of course) with close to absolute certainty. But the amount you will win is still partly due to good or bad luck.

The essential point is how you deal with bad luck. Of course there is always going to be variance but you need to be able to control your emotions to make good decisions when you experience bad luck. People who are consistently unlucky are probably being influenced into making poor decisions by previous bad luck.

Case in point, a contestant on deal or no deal last week some time. She started the game by saying how unlucky she always was. She was offered 20k with roughly 6 boxes left, with the 250k as her only red on the board. Her rationale was that "my luck must change" so she ploughed on without ever considering the actual odds of winning or the implication of losing such a vast amount of money.

"Luck" obviously exist....no doubt about that!


However, it is basically irrelevant generally..................as the cliche is "correct"........YOU MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK!

Luck exists but not "lucky". I.e, of course some people will experience more bad luck than others during their life, but this is not predictable.

Gary Player was spot on. He didn't mean it literally of course...what he means is, when you are sh1t at something (eg Golf, Gambling) it might seem like the breaks often go against you, but in fact it is just the consequences of bad plays catching up with you sooner or later. If you make good plays you will still have good & bad luck, but as you are successful overall it will seem like you have more good breaks.

Luck doesn't exist. Stuff just happens.

People may say someone is lucky but it's probably because they created a situation where this 'luck' was more likely to happen.

How come when you try a new plan the minute you start it enters into a long period losses never seen before!! Thinking of laying favs for example?The week you start their winning % will rocket up to 70%!. Try backing and they'll start winning 15%.
It's like when you've got two keys in your pocket.You pull out the wrong one 80% of the time!