Winners are lucky. Losers are unlucky.

Approaching 10 years on here and still clueless....

Realist or fantasist?

It's your call.

Most probably you're actually just too bored with winning JTG and thought that an afternoon of good fishing might liven things up a bit ?.

Without disagreeing about the black swan, there are many winners who wd be desperately unlucky to lose

Statistical probabilty dictates that almost all of any group of winning punters have just been lucky.

Human nature and stupidity also dictates that of those same winning punters the vast majority will now believe that they have a winning system and have 'cracked it'.

Elite = Ch**ts and time travellers

Thousands will have been punting for six years. Many of those 000's will be in profit, for no other reason than luck!

One of them is you!

Be thankful - you are truly blessed.

27000 bets a day and he thinks he's a gambler!

Actually I don't, which is my point. ;)

You have to be lucky to win ,but you also have to make your own luck - it doesn't fall in your lap.

There will also be a number of pro's who at some time or other have escaped that nightmare moment which could have been the last straw .
Gambling requires that mental strength to pick yourself up Jonny . It's hard ,but you have to battle.

Statistical probabilty dictates that almost all of any group of winning punters have just been lucky

No it doesn't.

The 'pros' are not pros anywhere else other than in their own minds

. . and their bank accounts, lifetime p&l, lavish lifestyle and a **** on each arm.

JTG, if you worked hard and discovered a method of consistently backing coin flips at 2.2, or backing some horses at bigger than BF-SP, or backing some football matches at bigger than BF-KO-SP, would you believe you had an edge or would your profit still be down to luck?

That doesn't answer the question.

How many chimps consistently get 2.2 for the flip? Would they still be just lucky?

He has a point as plenty of winners over a fairly long period have just been lucky, but he is wrong when saying that nobody can win gambling in the very long run due to skill.

Of course chance favours the prepared, but you are wrong to assume that the preparation was the sole cause of the success.

Plenty will prepare just as well and fail. Others will put in little effort and yet still be successful.

Why is this? Maybe luck plays a bigger part than many believe.

Trevh - my chimps could be getting better than even money on their flips - probability again dictates that plenty would still be big losers.

Why? - because they are unlucky!

250,000 chimps place one £1000 bet a day on the 'flip of a coin' at 2.00.

It is a statisical fact that by the end of a year some of these chimps will have morphed into "Super Chimps" ..big winners...turning pro...lavish lifestyle...maybe even advising the mug chimps on the qualities needed to succeed.

Yes, this is exactly it.  But at what point can you rule out this luck and look to something more concrete?

I'll put you a challenge JTG.
Give an equal amount of starting capital to the likes of Contrarian, Investor, Catflapqo et al ( apologies to those not mentioned here) and give the same to the likes of Paulme, Schalke ( apologies to those mentioned here), and I will guarantee you that over a reasonably large sample of events the former group of players will be streets ahead of the latter.
Not because of good or bad luck, but because of skill.

I would say that ALL the schalkes would lose long term and ALL the contrarians would win long term

In 1984 Warren Buffett dealt with this same question when told that 'investors' couldn't beat the market. It was perfectly efficient, and anyone making more than the market average was just lucky, like tossing heads 15 times in a row.


Before we begin this examination, I would like you to imagine a national coin-flipping contest. Let's assume we get 225 million Americans up tomorrow morning and we ask them all to wager a dollar. They go out in the morning at sunrise, and they all call the flip of a coin. If they call correctly, they win a dollar from those who called wrong. Each day the losers drop out, and on the subsequent day the stakes build as all previous winnings are put on the line. After ten flips on ten mornings, there will be approximately 220,000 people in the United States who have correctly called ten flips in a row. They each will have won a little over $1,000.

Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.

Assuming that the winners are getting the appropriate rewards from the losers, in another ten days we will have 215 people who have successfully called their coin flips 20 times in a row and who, by this exercise, each have turned one dollar into a little over $1 million. $225 million would have been lost, $225 million would have been won.

By then, this group will really lose their heads. They will probably write books on "How I turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning." Worse yet, they'll probably start jetting around the country attending seminars on efficient coin-flipping and tackling skeptical professors with, " If it can't be done, why are there 215 of us?"

By then some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that if 225 million orangutans had engaged in a similar exercise, the results would be much the same - 215 egotistical orangutans with 20 straight winning flips.

I would argue, however, that there are some important differences in the examples I am going to present. For one thing, if (a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is; if (b) 215 winners were left after 20 days; and if (c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something. So you would probably go out and ask the zookeeper about what he's feeding them, whether they had special exercises, what books they read, and who knows what else. That is, if you found any really extraordinary concentrations of success, you might want to see if you could identify concentrations of unusual characteristics that might be causal factors.

You can read the whole thing here.
http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html

I'm sure that as the dedicated seeker of knowledge and wisdom you have shown yourself to be, you will return fully cognizant of the way markets work and the way profits are concentrated among a mixed group of the lucky and the skilled.

Alternatively, you already know all of this and are on the wind up, which is the more likely explanation, as you brought up the same monkey coin tossing analogy.

There are a handful of 'winners' I have known for a number of years. They were winning when I met them years ago, and are still winning now. At some stage of your inquiry you will have to admit that the assumption that it's all due to luck, is completely ridiculous unless it is made for purposes of entertainment.