I stumbled upon an online article recently, which explained that researchers "proved" nothing is truly random, there's only cause-and-effect and probability, and the appearance or expectation of randomness is really just ignorance about the underlying probabilities of various outcomes (effects) arising from various causes.

To prove it, the researchers built a coin-flipping machine, and found that whatever side of the coin was up before the flip, that side landed facing up 90% of the time, apparently due to one side being slightly heavier than the other.

Yet among my circle of poker playing friends, there seems to be a unanimous consensus that certain players are just "luck-boxes". One older gent I'm friendly with actually stopped me to talk as we were leaving, and advised me not to play with anyone "lucky". Apparently some folks get AA more than once every 221 hands.

Do you think some people are just plain lucky at cards? If not, what's the rational explanation for why some players seem to always catch whatever cards they need to make the best hand?

There is no such thing as luck in poker. There is perceived luck based on variance, bias, and emotion.

So you think there are run-good / upswing times, and run-bad / downswing times, but it evens out over time, such that this year's "luck box" is next year's sad sack?

I dunno. My local room has a high-hand promotion. If you win a high-hand this month, you're entered in a $5k drawing the next month, with all the other high hand winners from the previous month. I know a guy who had an insanely high number of high-hands / drawings last year, and also won that drawing multiple times, including two months in a row.

My friends and I joke that we'd fold AA against that guy, that's how lucky he is.

I'm not saying I truly believe in luck, but it's hard to easily explain the sustained appearance of someone being lucky.

no such thing as luck

Of course not, but as an atheist with a statistics background you wouldn't expect me to.

People in general are weak at statistics/probability and also have many behavioral biases - chief among them is paternicity and the belief that there is always some sort of causal inference that can be had when in reality it's just the nature of randomness.

I guess it kind of depends on what we mean exactly by luck.

I do believe that due to sample size in live poker that there is "luck".

Meaning that there will be some players very high up on the lucky distribution (Garrett Adelstein, Mariano) and others very low (JRB).

All outcomes are not going to be equal. Some people are just going to run really poorly their entire life simply because they won't see enough hands and the opposite will also be true for others who just sun run forever and of course w/ most people in between.

This whole notion of everything equals out for everyone is just not true for live play.

Of course in the short term, but over time the CLT/Law of Large Numbers makes the CIs shrink, so significant outliers in percentage terms are likely to be less and less.

Yeah but that number has to be really big. It's quite possible for someone who plays live 300hrs per year to just run like shat their entire life and just die.

People have this misguided notion that because they ran so bad for x number of years that they're hot run is just around the corner. Sorry that's just not how it works.
Luck doesn't have to even out for anyone.

I get why people believe it though because it makes you feel better thinking there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes you never make it to the other side to see the light.

Some people's tunnels are way longer than others.

This article you're referencing sounds sketchy as hell. For one thing, all statistics about coin flips call for a "fair coin," so the weighting argument is already problematic. Secondly, if it is landing in a predictable way 90% of the time, their coin-flipping machine sucks. If it is intended to say X amount of force in X location on a coin X distance from the floor is the cause of Y output, they should be able to get Y way more than 90% of the time. And if it is supposed to be a randomizer, they obviously aren't flipping the coin hard enough, high enough, or variably enough in power location.

All that said, this is a poker strategy forum, and this discussion isn't about strat, so I'm going to move this to either Science Math and Philosophy or to Probability. You make the call.

Humans are terrible at randomness.


I've seen graphs from online grinders who were doing 100k+ hands a month where the all-in EV line just kept getting further and further away from the green line.


That said, I've seen people attribute things to luck in poker that were very far from it.

Some people will get AA more than once in every 221 hands and some will get them less. But how good someone has run in the past had no baring on how well they will run in the future.

Take 200 poker players and sort them by who got AA the most the last 100,000 hands. Take the top 10 players that got dealt AA the most and the reality is you have absolutely no data that will tell you anything about how many times they will get dealt aces the next 100,000 hands. They are as likely to get dealt AA the least as they are to be dealt them the most.

So in short, luck exists, but there is nothing you can do about it. How lucky a person has been in the past had 0 correlation to how lucky they will be in the future.

Come the **** on.

H walks into a new card room in a new city. H and his loving wife are on a vacation out of town and H slipped away to play cards while his wife and two healthy happy kids go play lazer tag.

H sits down and meets V. Vs wife just left him. He's been drinking and is visibly upset and has already lost 3 BIs. Within a few orbits H stacks V on a trivial hand getting it in with KK pre.

Is H lucky? Is V unlucky?

There are certainly luck in every thing including poker, even with enough sample size. It is not determined by one hand or just a couple of hands whether you can hit the dream cards.

One way to see whether you are one of the luckier ones could be to note down let's say the last 50 hands (the more the better if you play more regularly) when you've gone all-in prior to the river so that there is no further actions you can make, and it is only luck that determines what card / cards will be coming next and the result.

As an example you've gone all in on the turn with an Ax FD against a trip, you know you are on 16%, your expected return is A1, and your actual result is B1. Or it's a three way all-in preflop hero had QQ, against V1's AQss and V2's TT. We were 53% favourite, and our expected return is A2 and actual result is B2. Adding more samples up we will see that some people 's actual results can be way better than expected returns, and that's lucky.

If this is not based on the condition that it's already all-in. and if there can be further action some people would boast it's their great play instead of just luck, just like those successful businessman like to think how hardworking and talented they are, and ignore the factor of luck, which is certainly biased.

When I lose as a 97.5% and 96% equity favorite to the same guy in two separate sessions of PLO you start believing there are Poker Gods and they do not favor you.

Luck is the key factor in determining how any individual session goes.

Luck is a huge factor in poker, skill determines success long term.



Look at this graph for example I’m running 60 buyins under ev this is purely down to being unlucky.

This is at $1 $2 blinds!

It’s amazing that people that play the game of poker have such a poor grasp of statistics and probability. If you want to define luck as short deviation from the mean, sure you can observe people get “lucky” and “unlucky”. But that’s all this is. It is variance and completely conceivable within the sample size. The OP seems to be asking whether people believe in some inherent power, where an individual is simply blessed to be on the better side of variance than some other individual.


Not to mention, a downswing can also be the result of poor decision-making, and not just getting sucked out on or running into coolers

Probability would seem like the most apt venue, but I'm still new here, so I'd be happy to defer to your superior judgment.

As for the article and its sketchiness, I think the point was that if we watch a man flip a coin once, which side comes up SEEMS random. But if we watch him flip that same coin thousands of times, we'll start to see that one side or the other starts coming up more, due to the weight balance of the coin, as well as his flipping technique.

After enough trials, we should have a fairly accurate estimate of the probability that the coin will come up one side or the other, if we know which side was up to start.

I may not be remembering the coin-flipping machine's results perfectly. It may have been higher than 90%. I recall the article also said if you spin a Lincoln Memorial penny, it'll land face down 80%-90% of the time, owing to a weight imbalance, so maybe I was conflating the two.

The takeaway is that the coin landing one side up or the other may be impossible to predict before the first flip, but that doesn't make it random. There's a cause for every outcome, and every outcome has a probability, so nothing is random.

This question has been tested and the answer is yes. There are those who are luck boxes. I can't remember where I read about it but someone used bots. They set up a 9 handed game and programmed each bot with the exact same profile. So each bot played exactly the same. They ran the simulation for one million hands and in the end there was a clear winner and a clear loser. The winning bot got lucky while the big loser got unlucky. The rest ended up a little or down a little. So that leads to the question, how to beat luck or at least how to not be the unlucky one. In the simulation each bot had the exact same playing style. This is why table selection is so key.

Its funny that I ran across this thread today. Last night I found myself at a table where there was no clear losing player. I was a tough table that I told myself there's no way to make money here unless someone goes on fire and gets better hands at a higher frequency than everyone else. I was mostly card dead the whole night and knew I needed to change tables. Not because I was getting dealt cold cards but because I knew that I would have to get lucky to make any money. Unfortunately I didn't change tables and at the end of an 8 hour session I was a loser. Driving home I was kicking myself for not changing tables.

Learning that even bots can get lucky makes me despise them that much more.

In all seriousness, I would expect a statistician to say that what happened was just a normal distribution - half the bots getting better than average starting hands, and half getting worse than average, but in the aggregate their distribution reverts to the mean, which is just normal / average distribution.

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Luck only means variance is on your side so yes of course there's luck in poker. I used to tell people "good variance" before a tournament which is pretty much the same as saying good luck.

The thing about luck is:

Even if it does exist, how does it matter? Unless you plan to believe in it to the extent of making decisions based not on math but "who is luckier," it literally does not matter. Your decisions going forward should still only ever be based on sound math/poker theory.

That dude in the 1 seat? He's been running good (lucky) for the last 6 months against you. He raises. You look down at a 3-bet hand. What are you doing? If it's anything but what the math says, poker might not be the game for you.

It's never stopped me from three betting preflop. But it has led to me making some nittier folds and bluff catching less on the river.

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You make nittier folds vs someone who you perceive to be lucky or because you perceive yourself as unlucky?