18 September 2009

If i didn't have bad luck then I'd have no luck at all

Every time I deal I see players both good and bad talk so much about luck.
You are not unlucky, you’re not lucky either and neither is any other player particularly lucky or unlucky.
In fact if you believe that you are of either persuasion, then you are putting yourself in a position where you might make bad decisions as a result.
You should convince yourself that you are neither. Luck is a label that can only be applied in the past tense, never in the future. The odds of any random event occurring are precisely those dictated by the laws of probability. If you miss your open ended straight and flush draw 10 times on the bounce then when you go for it the next time your chances of hitting it are the same as the first time you went for it or indeed the any of the other nine. If you consider how well you are running when making a decision then effectively you’re on tilt - the act of playing worse than you are capable.
People tend to think of luck as an unlikely event that has occurred in their favour against the odds. In reality, however, a likely event occurring in a person’s favour can also be lucky as there was still the possibility of that event going the other way
For example you’re in a game £1/£2 pot limit and you hold
AhKs

You raise pre flop and get called by an opponent who holds
JdQc
The flop comes
As 9d Jc
You bet and are called down all the way, scooping a modest size pot when blanks fall on the turn and river. Was this lucky on your part? Most people would say no, as you had the best hand on every street and you would certainly not think your opponent “unlucky” in this situation.
However, you were lucky in a sense. Pre-flop, you were only a 65% favourite to win the hand. On the flop, if both players go down to showdown, you are still only 76% favourite. The fact you won the hand when your chance of winning was only 65% or 76% was lucky. You got a better result than you would expect on average. To look at it from a different angle if the exact hands and flop happened three times your chances of winning all of them are less than 50%!

When we play poker, we don’t tend to notice when things go as planned. We don’t notice when our flopped hands hold up or our aces don’t get cracked or even the times our opponents flush does not come in. Yet we will take notice when we get unlucky. We soon forget about the times we were fortunate enough not to get outdrawn instead focusing on the one hand, lamenting out bad luck.