Dublin Poker

There has been a lot of discussion about luck recently, mainly after this article , and I just wanted to throw a few thoughts down.

In poker, the fact of the matter is without luck you CANNOT win a tournament. In most cases the most skillful player in a tournament will be the winner, but 90% of the time, it will be a good player that has a lucky day.

Take me for instance. I was on such a horrible, shitty, disgusting, sickeningly bad run that I had to give up online, and was thinking about giving up alltogether. Then I sit down in the Fitz the other night and get an absolutely ridiculous run of good cards and breeze my way through the tournament. The only difference between that tournament and all the ones before it was luck. I never got any luck online so I quit. No point pissing money away waiting for your luck to arrive. I have played 4 games online since I quit and it has been EXACTLY the same. The good thing is I don't get annoyed anymore. I have absolutely no interest in online poker anymore.

I think luck it is the deciding factor every time I sit down. I play the same every time, (although always trying to improve!). If I get good luck, I will do well. If I get bad luck I do badly. I usually know within the first five minutes of a tournament how I'm going to do.

I think it is naive to presume that everyone gets an equal amount of luck. Some people breeze through life and find a good job, meet a nice wife, get a nice house etc, while others seem to consistently have it a lot tougher. You cant just presume that it will all 'even out' eventually. What if you lost EVERYBODY you knew in an accident? How does that even out? Can you expect to win the lotto in the foreseeable future? NO. Because the bottom line is 'Life aint fair'. Sad but true. You can bring logic into and say that everything should equal out, but it doesn't. Some people are just born lucky.

I've found that throughout my life I have been pretty 'unlucky' to put it mildly. I try to have a positive attitude and not let things bother me, but in some ways I feel I have been dealt a dodgy hand, losing many friends through car crashes and accidents, and having to endure both of my parents battle with cancer, losing my father earlier this year. However I found that there is no point in focusing on the bad things in your life. And I have tried to bring this approach to poker. Where I used to complain about bad beats and bad players, I now just accept them as part of the game. Fair enough, I get more than my fair share, but crying about it isin't going to help is it? I found that I have reduced most of the stress in my life simply by stopping playing online poker. Something which started out as entertainment had become my main cause of stress! How ridiculous does that sound? Thankfully I didn't lose any money through it, and I feel a LOT better after quitting.

Overall, I think that yes, I have terrible luck when it comes to poker, but at the end of the day, its only a game. I got sick of trying to figure out why I was consistently losing through bad luck. Bottom line is I don't care. If God or whoever controls 'luck' has decided that I will be unlucky then so be it. There aint much I can do about it is there!
So all I can do is hope I get lucky, and if I don't, just take it in my stride. Oh, and I've started buying lotto tickets... just in case...