^ luck in poker. good variance and bad variance. so does everyone have equal share of good variance and bad variance?

in theory, yes.

Actually, in theory everyone does NOT have an equal share of "good and bad" variance, over any finite number of hands.

But they have an equal probability of running good or bad over any finite set of future hands. :-)

You're right, though, that this discussion hinges on what you mean by luck. If you mean some mystical property that attaches to you, causing you to run better or worse, then there's no such animal. If you just mean that sometimes you run good or bad, then yes, obviously, and that running good or bad is not evenly distributed.

Of course. However if you and I agree to flip coins 1000 times or whatever (that is, each of us flipping our own coin), it is expected that we will end up with a different number of heads, one of us will have more.

In fact I was curious so I just wrote a little program that simulates this. I did 1000 series of 1000 flips each. The 2 players had a different number of heads 982/1000 of these times. The average difference was +.39 flip for player 1 (which is just noise) but the average absolute deviation was 17.5 flips.

A surprising result to some people, I think, is that if you increase the number of flips, the disparity gets greater. For example, 1000 runs of 10k flips has 992/1000 results where one player got more heads than the other and the average absolute deviation was 60.

However we can see that deviation/N decreases, since we went from
17.5/1000 = 0.0175
to
60/10000 = 0.006

But yes, by no means, do we expect 2 people to have "equal luck"

Of course not. Some people get better cards and get into better situations than others over a lifetime. Just like some people win the lottery while others don't.

But the key idea is that past luck is not a predictor of future luck. So it makes sense to say that someone was unlucky in the past. But it doesn't make sense to say that he's just naturally unlucky and should expect bad luck.

Then again, most people who think they are unlucky are actually bad.

Supposedly it is possible for one to hop onto any given 'thread' of varience and randomness for a short time, and always loose..

just not true. the relative deviation from the mean will get smaller, but the absolute deviation from the mean will grow arbitrarily large.

people need to understand this.. but they wont.

IT DOES NOT even out in the long run.

^^^ Right -- as N grows, the AVERAGE amount of luck for everyone will approach the same level, but the ABSOLUTE amount will not.

For example, as people play more poker hands, the average number of times each person gets AA will approach the same number, but the total number of times each person gets AA will diverge. Some people will get many more AA than others. That difference will grow larger as N grows. And the distribution will be approximately normal.

But the average (that is, the total number of AA's each person gets divided by the total number of hands they play) will converge to a single number. That distribution will also be approximately normal, but the curve will get narrower as N gets larger.

No everyone does not have equal amounts of luck. How many times does one player make it deep in a big tournament that can change their life? And of that maybe 5% of the time you get that big rush of being deep with life changing money in effect what if variance decides it's not your day and ends it for you. That could happen 10 times in a row in this situation and by then you would be 129 years old and it wouldn't matter if variance decided it was your day because you would be dead in 12 days anyways. May the poker gods be with me!!!!

play your best and do all you can to beat the game with +EV at all times and hope for the best and plan for the worst!

In theory yes I suppose. For all intents and purposes no.