Well my down swing obviously has very little to do with decision making, I’m suppose to be up 30buyins but instead down 30.

Obviously I understand luck, it’s a simple concept.

There is a huge amount of luck in poker suggesting otherwise would be ridiculous.

In regards to there being an inherent power that would have to suggest we’re living in a simulation, all playing characters, possible not probable.

Naturally some individuals will live on the right side of variance and unfortunately for others the wrong side.

I've never thought of myself as being inherently lucky or unlucky as a stable condition. I see myself as sometimes temporarily getting lucky (running good), or unlucky (running bad).

Playing vs someone widely perceived as a luck-box, I think it can be correct to make tighter folds, for logical reasons which don't require believing in luck.

If a player has enjoyed better than average card distribution, as opposed to being card dead, he will probably end up bluffing less on average, because his personal experience is that he gets good enough cards often enough that he doesn't need to find as many bluffs.

If everyone tells him he's lucky, he might start believing it, and expect to get good cards often enough that he doesn't think he needs to find as many bluffs.

So, against a guy everyone sees as being "lucky", I'm more likely to make tighter folds and bluff-catch less, because he's probably experienced good card distribution to earn that reputation, and he might actually think of himself as lucky, and thus less likely to be bluffing.

None of the above requires believing in luck, nor actually quantifying my opponent's card distribution as being better than average. It's just psychology and probability.

What this discussion has made me realize is that very few people will play enough to get their individualized long-term distribution to revert to the expected mean. Instead, half of all players experience better than average distribution, even if it's only slightly better, while the other half experience worse than average, with a small number of extreme outliers who experience dramatically better or dramatically worse.

I'm not superstitious, but I've labored under a mistaken expectation that the cards break even for everyone eventually. I no longer expect they will, and thus, some folks will be "lucky" enough to get better than average distribution.

Yeah, that's not how normal distribution works. There will always be some outliers, unless you play to infinity.

Luck is when a whale walks in at 2pm and I happen to be in the room.

You are dealt pocket aces on two consecutive hands. This happened because

A. You ARE a lucky person
B. You WERE lucky

I choose B.

Luck is the occurrence of an event that is at the tail of a distribution. On the far right tail of a profit distribution you are running really good; on the far left you are running really bad. If there were no tails (called a censored distribution), there would not be good or bad luck. Conversely, if no one was “lucky” there would be no tails

Simply stated (as many others have indicated), we use the term luck to describe variance.

We use the term variance to describe luck.

What you are positing is a fully deterministic view of the universe which was the normal approach at studying reality in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.

Einstein used to believe that as well claiming at some point, they say, "god doesn't play dice" (=randomness has no role in the universe).

That was when our understanding of the nature of reality was approaching quants (the elements making up an electron or a proton, sub-sub atomic "particles") but we didn't know enough yet about them.

We now know they exist and behave stochastically (based on probability distribution).

We know the smallest components of the universe we are for now capable of observing are all based on probability, so bye bye determinism

Of course there is luck. 50% of all players run above average and 50% of all players run below average. You will never reach a long enough time horizon to see this bell curve revert to the mean or whatever, so in any human sample the outliers persist. The good thing is you will never know where you are in that distribution, or anyone else for that matter, so you can just ignore it like it doesn't exist at all and play the game instead. Poker isn't an ATM. If you knew you were on a 2 year bad stretch, would you still play? If the answer is no, you're not playing poker but some wishful thinking game that doesn't really exist anywhere but in your head.

Ya but probability is deterministic too, isn't it?

Huh? Luck determines everything in poker other than the decisions made, and even there it's influenced by luck. The only way to deny there is luck in poker is to redefine the definition of luck. It's a serious cognitive bias to say there is no luck in poker just because there is probability involved (if that's your reasoning). Making a good hand in poker is still lucky even if there's some chance that it happens, to say it's not luck is entering a world where words don't matter anymore.

Yes. Shorts term/one session it is very important which seat you get😁

So if I call heads in a coin flip and it comes heads twice in a row, is that “lucky”? Am I a lucky person?

The OP is literally asking if certain people are inherently luckier than others. Like if a lucky person takes a seat he/she is more likely than the average person to get certain cards. This is nonsense.

You can call making good poker hands lucky. You can call hitting your outs lucky. You can call sucking out lucky. It’s all just variance.

Would you disagree with a grandma playing poker for the first time and winning a $100 pot by hitting a straight if she told you she got lucky?

Yesterday my local casino had a $750 high hand promo. A guy at my table hits the promo with a Q high straight flush. I joke with him how I haven't had a straight flush in 3 years. He tells me he has had 10 Royal Flushes in probably 5/6 years of playing. Also said he hit a 40k BBJ 2 years ago. Claims he plays 2-3 days a week.

These anecdotes are not helping anyone’s cause in proving they understand probability.

Luck is defined as:

1) success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions

2) chance considered as a force that causes good or bad things to happen



1 = variance
2 does not exist

Ok... man who has never played poker before plays a freeroll satellite on a site and freerolls into a 10K tournament and then wins it crushing everyone because of how good he ran. This is an extreme example but things like this might have happened to a lesser degree... it seems to suggest that luck exists in poker.

Are you trolling?

"I won 14 freerolls in a row to get here, I'm not losing this thing now" says man at the main event final table. "You're one lucky dog" "No, it's just probability working it's way out."

Chris Moneymaker

Ok you guys have convinced me.

Lucky is a description of the past, not a state of being.

Fortuna, goddess of luck, is a thing if you ask me. Our recent friend cited, the erudite but demented Ignatius Riley, was a firm believer. Me too. So I'm into teleology inherent in nature, which would include adventures at the poker tables since it's part of nature, and the ascribed results are delivered in accordance with the ... I better not go there right now. You get the picture. There is such a thing as what we would call luck as a shorthand description of skewed, non-generic, non-rote, non-random results.

Depends what you mean. If you mean to ask if having been lucky in the past is an indicator for future luck, then absolutely not. Moneymaker was lucky to win the WSOP main by running wildly above expectation, but he didn't keep running above EV. I'd still gamble with him if I get $1.05 on heads and he gets $1.00 on tails, because I don't think he has a higher Luck stat as if we were in a role playing fantasy game.

Good players are lucky because they put themselves in positions to get lucky, ie more equity and backdoors due to better starting hands.