More Luck in Poker than most people think...............

[pswnio]

I remember reading something written by a statistician a while ago, saying that in fact the numbers are not in fact large enough to even luck out in a lifetime, so some players will in fact benefit from good or suffer from bad luck even in the long run. I'll rack my brain to think where I got that.

Is true. It's like lottery numbers. Given an almost indefinite period of time, the amount of times they'll come up will be roughly even. But it'd be a loooooong period of time.

[pswnio]

I remember reading something written by a statistician a while ago, saying that in fact the numbers are not in fact large enough to even luck out in a lifetime, so some players will in fact benefit from good or suffer from bad luck even in the long run. I'll rack my brain to think where I got that.

Is true. It's like lottery numbers. Given an almost indefinite period of time, the amount of times they'll come up will be roughly even. But it'd be a loooooong period of time.

I'm with Tikay. Almost every time I get knocked out on a bad beat, it's my own fault for not having grown my chipstack earlier. If I'd made the right decisions earlier, it wouldn't have hurt so much. That said, running my AQ and AJ into AA in the space of a couple of hands on the bubble of my last STT was pretty sick

[lazaroonie]

there is no such thing as luck. luck is something invented by people who do not understand probability.

[RED-DOG]

Others are fortunate enough to understand probability only too well

[M3boy]

there is no such thing as luck. luck is something invented by people who do not understand probability.

Probability is the outcome of a predictable event - ie rolling a dice.

Having a table broken is not a predictable event - you can never know WHEN it is going to happen.

Or am I talking bollox now? lol

[RED-DOG]

Or am I talking bollox now? lol

Well, maybe just one ball.

[pswnio]

there is no such thing as luck. luck is something invented by people who do not understand probability.

So someone who takes down the lottery at 14 million to 1 isn't lucky?

Someone who travels with an airline with the best safety record in the world and, in a 6.3 million to 1 chance, dies, isn't unlucky?

Come now.

[LeKnave]

But I look beyond each "piece" of luck, good or bad. If I had been operating with a deeper stack, I'd have survived. And my stack was shallow because......any number of reasons, some luck, & some skill. But I (almost) ALWAYS operate with a small stack, so it's a skill failure on my part, & the "bad luck" that muffed me was just the final act of something which began the very hand the tourney started - the fact that I don't accumulate enough chips generally. That's nowt to do with luck.

This is something i try to tell people.  A lot will look purely at their exit hand and say how ul they were.  Which is often the wrong thing to do.

[M3boy]

Agreed.

[matt674]

yup, being saying it for years - in fact two seperate posts on the same thread from over 18 months ago on blonde.........

SMITHY - If this sounds as though i'm critisizing how you played the hand in anyway then i apologise, thats not how i mean it. All i mean is that a poker tourney isnt won in one hand so by going through the tourney history and analyzing the hand history you may be able to see an area where you could have improved your chip stack to stop this situation happening at the end. If you'd have started the hand with 30k in chips then a big reraise would have forced your opponent to pass J8 suited and who knows where you would have finished.

Good Luck

I dont seem to get much luck on final tables, but i hope when i get to another its the 100k, and im the lucky one.

What you have to try to do is minimize the luck factor as much as possible - you are at war with luck. Try and get yourself in a position at the final table where you wont have to rely on luck, then you can outplay your opponents. Let them be the ones who have to rely on luck!!

[lazaroonie]

there is no such thing as luck. luck is something invented by people who do not understand probability.

So someone who takes down the lottery at 14 million to 1 isn't lucky?

Someone who travels with an airline with the best safety record in the world and, in a 6.3 million to 1 chance, dies, isn't unlucky?

Come now.
[/quote]

define "lucky" ? someone who fulfills the criteria to satisfy a statistical event ? Someone has to win it (eventually)

Its interesting that both "events" , realistically the person involved has no control over the outcome but whether the outcome affects them or not is given a human attribute in being "lucky" or "unlucky".

bringing the odds back to a more manageable level for a moment, supposing player A offers player B to toss a coin, and the winner gets 100K. Will the winning player be classed as "lucky" ? There are realistically only 2 outcomes here, and we have succeeded in arriving at one of them. So luck doesnt really have anything to do with it Similarly the lottery has 14 million outcomes, and each week we will arrive at one of these outcomes

[AlexMartin]

Luck is a massive element in poker. But over 1/2 million hands, its negligible.

[kvnstv]

Luck is a massive element in poker. But over 1/2 million hands, its negligible.

True but there is always going to be that three or four hands where you lost a flip or had a big hand busted that where so much more important then 99.9% of the other hands. From an amateurs perpective I believe the truth of the matter is the difference between a good amateur and highly successful amateur is not how lucky you get, but when you get lucky. Or probably more importantly when you don’t get particularly unlucky.

But then I have been runner up when the winner has picked up, a ticket for the Irish Open main event, Aruba and The Poker news Cup trip to Aussie and thats just in the past six months so I might be a little bitter! 

[Jon MW]

there is no such thing as luck. luck is something invented by people who do not understand probability.

Not really, luck and probability are just different ways of explaining the same concept.

[MKKfish]

Interesting that people think that luck 'evens itself out' over a period of time...

You are born white in a first world country while other peep is born in Darfur. If the 'it evens itself out' theory was true then a whole heap of sh*t needs to happen to you for the theory to work.