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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

Jan. 6, 2007

Luck, Superstition, and the Run of the Cards

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose -- Kris Kristofferson

Scenario One -- True Story: Every December during my not-yet-grown-up years, my grandmother would hand me the cleaning supplies - scrub brush, old towel, bucket, broom and the like. "The way your house is on New Year's Day is the way it will look the rest of the year, so get busy," she would say in that Italian accent of hers. I believed her - the first time. Every year she would give me the same story, every year she would give me the same kind of supplies, and every year, having noticed only too well that the house didn't stay clean for the entire next 364 days, I did what good little girls are taught to do and I cleaned!

I'm still doing it today! The first day of 2007 my dwelling was spotless (almost because I was not and still am not that great a cleaner).

Scenario Two - True Story: Paul is playing in a sit and go tournament online. He is one of three remaining players. He finds a nice hand, a pair of jacks, and goes for the brass ring. The little blind calls his all-in raise with a 10-six suited and the screen reveals each player's cards. The flop comes ace-king-ten. The turn shows a useless trey but Paul sinks in the river and drowns when a 10 pops out of the deck. Boom, he is the bubble boy. He plays two more tournaments and the results are almost the same except he is out in the first hand in one event and then he is out about half way through the next tournament.

"I'm snake bit," he says. "This isn't supposed to be happening. How can I be so unlucky to have three bad beats in a row." This is a statement, not a question.

Scenario Three - True Story: A friend drives up to the casino and miraculously gets the parking space closest to the entrance. She walks inside, sits down at a video poker machine and within two hands, hits a royal flush. Now on every trip she drives around the parking lot looking for spots close to the entrance.

"When I get a spot near the front, I'm very lucky," she says. "I know I'm going to win something."

In the first scenario, we know my grandmother was using some silly adult rationale to coerce me into doing housework. I knew it back then and I know it now. That I still act like a Merry Maid has nothing to do with superstition, although the old lady might come down and smack me across the back of the head for having an unclean house on the first of the year.

As for the second true story, Paul is having a bad run of cards. If he goes back and checks his records, he might see that he has snapped off a few great hands to mete out his share of bad beats. Good cards in great position don't always spell success; sometimes they seem to forget how to spell altogether. But they get their memory back.

As for the third tale, my friend is just using a selected memory of success to influence her conviction to play. If she gets the perfect parking spot then loses her money, she forgets that she was "supposed" to win and if she doesn't forget, she just chalks it up to having one or two unlucky breaks. But her belief isn't hurting anyone or anything. She's going to play anyhow and if she wins, it's because she found a great parking spot and if she loses then maybe the spot wasn't that great.

Now, it doesn't matter what game you play, sometimes you will win and sometimes you will lose. The more skilled you are, the more times you will win but you will still lose once in a while. Sometimes you will lose consecutively for short or long periods of time.

Interestingly, when the wins come, we often accept them without explanation, or accredit them to good fortune, but when the losses arrive we almost always attribute them to bad luck.

I have no trouble with this at all. It doesn't matter. We could call the whole thing Spot or Weasel or George, We have to give our experiences definition so it doesn't matter whether we call it a bad beat or bad luck. We want to describe it, dissect it, define it, or disapprove of it and to do that, we have to put a name to it (one we can print if we want to).

We get hit with the deck; we have bad beats; we suffer a loss; we score a victory. I'm calling it luck, on both sides of the win-loss scale. After all, this is just a word, a marker, a way of keeping score in the up-and-down lives we lead.

Luck: It's just another word for something that happened in my life yesterday.