[Pov]

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I explain it as luck. Luck is cyclical, sometimes you run goot, sometimes bad. Anyone who doesn't believe in luck will instantly shoot me down as a bad player. I have yet to see an explanation of up/down swings without either skirting around the concept of luck or outright "blaming" it.

If someone reading this doesn't believe in luck, consider the case of wild west lawman Wyatt Earp. He was in dozens of gunfights and never even got wounded. He went up against some of the most deadly outlaws of the era and not one of them managed to hit him. It wasn't due to opponent skill that he prevailed in such a manner, so I call it luck. He just "ran good" his whole career.

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Just like downswings, luck only applies to the past. Random events can't individually be predicted, but after the fact if they happened to clump one way or the other we can say someone was lucky or unlucky or they had a downswing. When you're "in" a downswing you never know if you're at the start of it or the middle of it or if it ended two hands ago. You can only tell when you look back at it. All we know about future hands is that over a big enough sample all the luck will even out so as to approach zero eventually.

So sure, luck is real, but it's also worthless since it only applies to the past. Earp was in a profession where he had a much higher chance than normal of being shot. He wasn't as it turns out but I still wouldn't have offered him life insurance 2/3 of the way through his career because he was "running good" - that can end at any time and there is no way of predicting it. Fortunately for Earp, his sample size really wasn't as big as you might think.

Show me someone who "is" lucky and I'll show you someone who actually "was" lucky. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if he still is.

edit: I meant to add luck is definitely NOT cyclical. A downswing is just as likely to be followed by another downswing as it is an upswing. In poker, we can still win because we shave off the bottom of the downswings and pile onto the top of the upswings so our average comes out positive.