Luck is the occurrence of improbable events. It exists in the past as a finite thing, but only exists in the present and in the future as a concept. This is a corollary to the law of probability. There can be bad luck and good luck, though the type of luck it is depends on the point of view. For instance, when I’m holding a 2 and a 5 of spades, and the flop is As3s4d, and the turn is J, it is great luck for me, and bad luck for my opponent, whose originally semi-premium hand AJ is about to cost him a large amount of money. The existence of luck is undeniable.

My opponents in a recent game of poker, a game touched on in the previous post, accused me of being completely lucky, and incapable of winning had I not been so lucky. At first I denied that I was lucky. I was simply playing my cards in the best way that I could, and when I hit a few lucky hands I tried to make sure I was paid off, and when my hands did not receive good fortune, I tried to get out as cheaply as possible. There were a lot of angles in play, and I tried to maximize profit in every way that I could. Sometimes I made terrible mistakes, and sometimes these mistakes cost me. Sometimes, however, I got lucky.

I didn’t realize how lucky I had been until late, or early in the morning if we’re getting technical, when I got 82 in the small blind. It had already been a long night and I was really getting fairly sloppy. I had been playing rags from the small blind all night because the player to my left had been raising from the big blind only very rarely. The flop was 873 rainbow. I bet six dollars, the big blind folded, the next player folded, and then the dealer (we were playing four handed most of the night) doubled my bet. Somewhere in my mind I recognized that to play from the position he was in and the style he played with, the dealer would have had to have face cards to be in the hand at that point. Excluding unlikely trips, the best hand he could have therefore was either an over-pair, which he normally would have protected pre-flop with a bet, or top pair with a better kicker. I put him on A8. Here’s where I got sloppy. I should have folded. He was not likely to have raised without a hand that would beat the hand I had, but I still thought that he only marginally had me beaten. All of this, admittedly rushed, consideration occurred within about a second, before I announced all-in. My move was to get him off his top pair better kicker and force him to give up the hand. From his position it was just too likely that I had flopped two pair. 87 had been a favorite hand all night, and I had won money by limping into the flop with it three or four times already. I intended to make him think that I was confidently coming back over the top of him because I KNEW that he couldn’t possible have my two pair beaten (even though I didn’t really have them). I had him significantly out-chipped, maybe 140 or 150 to 60. There was $26 in the pot, so I figured him for a fold. As soon as I did it however, I thought, “Oh no, I think he might call.” Three and a half minutes later he finally did call, and I think that at some point he must have sensed my fear, or I don’t think he would have done it. He was holding J8, which eliminated almost all hope. I was going to lose a third of my stack. The turn was a 7, which gave us both two pair, but of course he still had 8877J, while I had 88773. The river, however, was yet another 7. It tied up the hand. Our kickers became meaningless and I got half my money back. After trying all night to convince me I was just lucky, the runner-runner sevens finally convinced me I was having an unusually good night. They saved me $76.

The next hand, when I was dealt AhTh, and the flop was all hearts it almost made me giggle, and then it almost made me feel ashamed when Aaron hit a straight on the turn. I remember it didn’t cost him too much, but if I’d known he had the straight it probably would have. At that point I had to just laugh and agree that I had hit a great run of luck.

Still, it wasn’t all luck, though great luck did help me get through that late period when I was too sleepy to concentrate on the game. A lot of what my opponents thought was astounding luck was actually just position and stack play. The week before I made the mistake of walking into the room and sitting down to Anthony’s right. If I hadn’t made an early profit, the later game would have been very risky. Anthony raised behind my weak calls consistently. I had to mentally prepare myself for the fact that every $2 call was an invitation for a $6 or $8 raise, and therefore only play premium hands. In contrast, the next week I sat on his left. I sat on Aaron’s right who is not nearly so aggressive. This allowed me to dictate the pace of the game. I got to see a lot of flops I’d never have dared to see had the positions been different. Naturally when you see more flops, you win with more hands that appear to be lucky. For instance, I called with that 25s in the small blind and when that miracle flop made my straight it looked like outstanding luck. It was luck of course, but not so incredible when you consider that I paid two dollars to see that straight. One other factor that made it valuable to hit that straight was the factor of deception. When you see QJT fall on the board, you know you don’t want to count too much on your top two pair. When A-3-4 falls, nobody notices, because who plays 2-5? The deception would mean nothing in limit, and there’s no way that 2-5 could be a good call from any position. In no-limit however, the amount won on a hand can be tens of times larger than the cost of seeing the flop.

In closing, there are lots of reasons that certain series of hands appear to be luck, and a lot of times they are lucky, but there’s still an element of control involved. If a player thinks of himself as very tight aggressive, chances are he’s playing too tight for a four handed game. It appears to tight players who are used to playing with large tables that looser players “suck out’ and beat them with pure luck, and of course looser players do win on the river more often, and bad players win on the river the most of anybody. But the concept of playing progressively looser as the number of players decreases seems to escape some players. While they inherently understand they can get away with fantastically loose calls and insane bluffs when heads up, the middle ground between heads up and a full table seems to cause some confusion. I’m not criticizing my opponents for their play. They actually play very well. I just think they missed this angle, at least a little.

DISCLAIMER: I was fantastically lucky, and might have lost money had it not been for it. I don’t deny that. If I had been playing the game in hours five through eight that I played in one through five and nine, I’d have been fine without all those lucky deals, though.

It’s been a long time since I updated Poker Notes, but I may have to officially bring it out of retirement. As I said elsewhere I suffered a crushing loss that made me think I had no business giving anyone any advice about how to play poker. I had been on a winning streak, despite what Mr. Gabbard would have you believe, but was still playing with limited cash. As such, and since my friends agreed we should play on credit, all of us, I didn’t feel too bad about the first re-buy. Unfortunately I got drunk. I wasn’t drunk enough to be unable to think about the game, just drunk enough not to realize exactly what effect it was having on me. I began to feel hopeless. Many re-buys later I found myself with a huge gambling debt (maybe not huge by some people’s standards, but huge by my own).

Of course it was understood that I could take as long as needed to cover this debt. It certainly wasn’t the first time we had come to such an arrangement, one of us owing the other a couple hundred this way or that, while occasionally uncomfortable, was fairly common. This amount was large enough that I didn’t feel capable of gradually winning it back over time, as I had done in the past. Therefore on a couple occasions, I took the opportunity to pass a couple twenties or to help out in a pinch with an odd job here or there, and probably paid back about a hundred dollars or so of it in that fashion.

After a while, I began to get impatient, and wanted to play again. I insisted on playing for cash, and it was understood that when we played for cash, part of my winnings would go toward paying off the debt and part would go in my pocket. It was understood by me, anyway. It was necessary to keep my head in the game; otherwise I would lose money when I lost, and psychologically break even when I won, and it’s hard to enjoy poker that way. Over the next three or four months (this last three or four months) I proceeded to win significantly every time I sat in a game. Each time I won, I thought to myself, “Well, I can pay back this amount, and that will be that much I won’t have to pay in cash later.” At first I won about three hundred and paid back two, then won a hundred and fifty and paid back another hundred, then I’d win forty or fifty a few times and pay back twenty.

This continued until about a month ago, but then the next time we played we switched venues. At that first game at the new place I made quite a nice win, going on two separate runs of moderate to good cards, from which I profited mightily. I walked away up two hundred thirty dollars. I meant to pay down the debt, even pay it off, but I got stingy and took it all home, where my wife, my children, and I promptly spent it. I may have given myself permission to do this because my creditor recently told me how well he had been doing poker-wise lately, which was even better than I had been doing by a factor of about three. In any case, I went to the next game with the intention of paying some back if I won.

The creditor got in some early trouble and asked me if I could cover his next buy-in, which I did. I didn’t worry much. He was taking my second and only remaining buy-in out of my wallet but I was up enough by that point that I would have preferred to pay on the debt than re-buy anyway, had I lost my whole stack. I had almost two hundred in front of me. He went broke again and pulled fifty out of his own wallet. This was a message that he either sensed that I was out of cash, or else that he had taken the fifty dollars from me to make sure part of the debt did get paid off by the run I was on. The next time he went broke, before he mentioned it I requested the other players let me give him fifty in chips, to which they agreed. For some reason this made it very hard for me to calculate my ups and downs, but at the end of the night I was handed 180 dollars from the cashbox, and was thus able to calculate very easily that I had already paid off one hundred dollars of debt, with forty left to go. I handed him two twenties, stuck a forty dollar profit in my pocket, and smiled all the way home.

More about the particulars of that game and the one before very soon.