Quote:
Originally Posted by tamiller866
Luck is not the odds, luck is our imaginary belief that we can beat the odds (over the long run) - sometimes luck is just not getting unlucky -
Sorry to ignore the rest of your post, but I wanna just talk about the idea of luck being a belief.
Saying luck is imaginary is kind of like pissing on the dictionary. I agree that it's not simply a black & white case that luck = odds, because luck exists on so many different levels.
Luck exists every time there is a chance element. Not getting unlucky (e.g like you bring up, say, not running kk into aa) is a part of chance. And chance is something we can sometimes easily quantify into odds, but can also be layered.
e.g the chances of running kk into aa heads up is like 0.49%. So I guess it's kind of counter intuitive to point out that if both players must get it in preflop (eg <10bb husng), if the KK wins, he was still the unlucky one in the hand relative to those two events of 'kk into aa'; and 'kk beats aa' (18%).
Now obviously one could point that it was indeed lucky to get KK in the first place, and that this player is going to go broke with any two most the time if our opponent wakes up with AA.
So then it boils down to just being 50/50 on who wins the hand if it's correct to always shove giving us an illusion of being lucky or unlucky. Don't confuse this with an imaginary notion though. Because people use the word luck when they're explaining an event in hindsight. There's nothing inherently fallacious about this. If there is a random chance element that affects the outcome, then luck is present. So it follows that: 'Player A won due to chance alone, therefore he got lucky' is a tautology.