My definition of luck is obtaining more positive results than the math allows on average. Bad luck is obtaining fewer poitive results than the math allows on average. Since I've had far more royals than the math says I should have gotten, I'm lucky. The math says that I can never get another royal. The math also says that I can get a royal every time I hit the max play or deal button. One of those two outcomes is lucky and the other is unlucky since they're both equally improbable.
That's pretty much a summary of the problem people have in perception. You HAVEN'T been "lucky," in that no quality of yours or mystical magical force has acted to cause your better-than-expectation results.
For thousands of years, people have gotten this wrong. Random outcomes, BY DEFINITION, can't have been influenced by luck or magic or the gods. And video poker results are random.
Hard to wrap your head around, but there is no such thing as luck.
When the max play or deal button is pushed, all hands are possible. There are winning hands and losing hands with nothing in between. When all outcomes are equal, but you get more winning hands than the mathematical average allows, that is lucky. You're right to say that luck doesn't influence the results. It's the random result itself that is lucky or unlucky. Someone that gets more winning results than the mathematical average allows is a lucky person. The unlucky person gets fewer winning hands than the mathematical average allows. One is either mathematically prosperous or mathematically challenged to be politically correct.
Luck, like streaks, are always in retrospect. If your results have been above the mean (EV), then you were lucky. The math says that, in the future, you're likely to stay close to the mean. It DOESN'T say that you're likely to start losing to make up for the wins. Kevin is right in that there's no characteristic (aside from cheating) that will keep some players ahead of the mean. He's also right that these are hard concepts to get on an intuitive level; that's a fundamental rule of casino management, subtly encourage the players to believe in luck, or to mistake short-term positive results (i.e., retrospective "luck") for skill (that's why roulette and baccarat tables have those totems with prior results, but blackjack tables never have totems with the true count).
Originally posted by: PackerBackerAZ
My definition of luck is obtaining more positive results than the math allows on average. Bad luck is obtaining fewer poitive results than the math allows on average. Since I've had far more royals than the math says I should have gotten, I'm lucky. The math says that I can never get another royal. The math also says that I can get a royal every time I hit the max play or deal button. One of those two outcomes is lucky and the other is unlucky since they're both equally improbable.
"The math says I can never get another royal". Not so.
The odds of hitting a royal do not change. The cards have no memory, they are inanimate objects. It is exactly the same if have just hit three royals or if you haven't hit a royal in three tears.
Don,
The odds of hitting a royal are just an average. Part of that average is no royals ever and royals every time the button is pushed. The cards have no memory but over infinity all results possible will be produced. That would include a peson never hitting a royal and another hitting a royal every time.
jstewa22,
I'm not talking about a short streak. I'm talking about being lucky for 35 + years of gaming. I've played slots a very few times and have never lost. I've broken even a couple of times, but the other six times I've come away with money. How can this be? The fact that I started hitting royals so very early in my gambling life, and continue to this day, goes way beyond the math. When a person ends their session with a win far more often than a loss over 35 years it's just plain good luck.
I do not believe in the long term. Any strategy developed uses trillions of hands. Nobody will ever play that many hands perfectly. How do the people that play video poker not using perfect strategy on every hand affect the averages? I know that I don't come close to perfect strategy and still I win. Luck is the biggest factor in winning at video poker, at least for me. I will always believe that I became a lucky person the day my wife married me. Both in life and video poker.
Agree to disagree and may the royals be with you all.
Originally posted by: jstewa22
Kevin, I did my own research online, turns out that some people have a prime number of neurons in their hypothalamus, which exerts a constant pressure to move their results to the good tail of the bell curve.
I believe this. My casino friend is so damned lucky I have to blame it on something. I've always said she has a horseshoe up her butt, but this biological theory is interesting. Ever since we've been doing Vegas, around 1987 or so, she always hits big time (to me).
Candy
Funny how anyone who thinks this is a thing can't explain just how it might work. Let's say someone had "luck neurons" embedded in their brains. Those neurons would have to not only intimately understand whatever casino game the person so blessed is playing, but also deploy instantaneous telekinetic powers to make the dice roll or the cards fall the right way--or in the case of an electronic gizmo like a slot or VP machine, alter the random electrical patterns of the machine to make it generate the desired combination(s) even though the signals that pass through the machine's computer and wiring are about fifty times as fast as human neurons fire.
I realize that jstewa22's response was tongue-in-cheek, but it's amazing how many people think there really is something like this going on when someone they know is "luckier" than "normal."
Once again, the true nature of probability is sharply counterintuitive to the way our brains are hard-wired to perceive and interpret the world. We look under every rock to find causation, and when we don't find it (because it ain't there), well...that's deeply unsatisfying. So...we make shit up. God. Gods. Rabbit's feet. Luck. It's my birthday. I said "rutabaga" three times fast before hitting DEAL.
The truth is, that guy who just hit three royals in ten hands was exactly as "lucky" as his friend who couldn't even get a four of a kind in nine hours of play.
The other point to bring up is selective memory. I'm not accusing PackerBacker of that, but it must be considered. The vast majority of players don't keep records, wins are far more memorable than losses and not everyone keeps accurate track of their coin-in.
My mother-in-law went to Vegas once or twice a year for maybe 50 years, only played slots (heavily) and insisted that she was a lifetime winner. I once ran the numbers, assuming an EV of about 93% (generous, as she only played at the Golden Nugget) and variance of about 80 (SD ~9). As I recall, being a lifetime winner would have put her about 7.5 SD above the mean; odds of that were about one in one trillion (she didn't keep records).
Originally posted by: [email protected]
It seems like everybody likes to talk about strategies for different VP games, but the number one factor is LUCK.
I decided to try VP for about 6 months. and see if you can make any money at. I started by hitting 3 jackpots in one month playing progressives that got high enough to overcome bad pay tables. I hit only one where I played more than 3 hours, the other two I played less than 30 minutes.
I also put in long sessions on trying to hit other jackpots, only to witness 5 people hitting the jackpot by sitting down and playing for couple of hours or less.
The moral of this story is that unless you are lucky enough to sit down at the right machine at the right time you can play forever and not hit the jackpot, without the jackpot you will be a loser no matter what strategy you use or how fast you can play.
You (IMHO) are 100% correct in your statement....but as you can tell by the responses to your comments many people do not believe in "luck",,,,so maybe "luck" should just call it "chance" to make everyone happy. However there will still be a few people on here that will say that chance isn't a thing either because no-one can "prove or explain" it....
If I hit a jackpot I feel lucky even if I forget the $'s I have put into the slot machine prior.....selective memory LOL.
Bottom line is, which can be proved and explained, is that if you hit the play button at the exact right time when the RNG is on a jackpot number then you win a jackpot...period....(drop the mic)...
