Luck

I’ve been sitting here contemplating that last blog post as well as the various comments and have finally realized a rather important point – luck is for suckers! In fact, at least in my opinion, luck doesn’t even exist. I’ve been wasting time hoping for a string of good luck – I mean how can I expect to have something I don’t even believe exists…? Perhaps I was just hoping that I was incorrect in my feelings on luck and that maybe it did exist? Whatever the case, I’m no longer going to just sit around and hope things magically get better. The only way to see that things improve is to actually consciously participate in the improvement.

For anyone that’s interested, here are my thoughts on luck…

As many of you are already aware, I usually play an awful lot of poker. Unfortunately it’s been quite a while since I’ve played poker (haven’t played even a single hand since moving to Germany some four months ago…) but I used to play pretty much every single day – both online and live. The live games were usually DPT (Denver Poker Tour) tournaments and I played a lot of those – made it to every qualifying tournament for the last couple of years, in fact…

Okay, so I’m actually down a bit over ten grand in all since I started playing poker (well, started playing money tournaments so frequently – I’ve actually been playing ‘dealer choice’ poker since I was something like 12 years old…) but I see that as merely the cost of training. I think I’ve become a better player over that time period (and I have very extensive statistics on my play that show this improvement) but the one thing that I have most definitely learned is that luck has very little to do with it…

In order to win at poker, you need to realize that luck is not something that happens – it’s something that needs to be made. In poker, sometimes you get the cards; however usually you don’t. The good players are those that can take the pots with or without the hands. It becomes more of a game where you need to play the other players rather than merely play your hands. The thing is that, if you play the game correctly, people will start to think of you as a very lucky guy. This impression, of course, is bullshit. You aren’t lucky – you’re just good at playing the game…

Luck, after all, is a man-made concept that is merely nothing more than a measure of one’s successfulness. If someone’s successful, they’re “lucky” … somebody who has problems (unsuccessful) is considered “unlucky”. This, of course, is crap… The reason that a person becomes unsuccessful is always because he ‘played the hand incorrectly’. One must always be very cognizant of any situation that one is placed in and make decisions to better one’s standing overall. When you’re holding the 4th nut and a strong player is trying to bait you into risking your entire stack, you really need to consider whether he might be holding one of the three hands that can beat you. Never risk it all on what could very well be a loser … always leave yourself outs… With the 4th nut, the odds are very good that you’re hand is the best; however there is still a small probability that it isn’t. The “lucky” people understand this and limit their risks … the “unlucky” people mistakenly ignore this probability and go bust. You often need to limit your return in order to stay alive…

Life, like poker, is (as I have stated before) really nothing more than an endless (well, until you die, of course…) string of decisions that need to be made. The “lucky” people have learned to limit their risks so that no one decision is capable of busting them. They’ve become masters at calculating risk versus reward and use these often subconscious calculations to make the correct choice more often than not. They’ve discovered that building a stack (sorry about all the poker references, but poker mirrors life so perfectly…) slowly is far better than risking everything on a possibility. If you’re going to risk everything on a possibility, you need to be able to understand that only the stone cold nuts are unbeatable. Holding anything less is always a risk – always!

Of course human nature, in general, complicates things a bit here – we want it all and we want it now! (Or maybe that’s just me…) I guess what I need to start doing is trying to build my stack slowly. I need to realize that anything worth having is going to take some time to build and that anything that appears to be a shortcut to a goal must be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, unlike poker, the stone cold nuts are usually unknowns in life…

bis später,

Coriolis