What IS Luck?

[MiloMinderbinder]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm going to have greater EV in all my endeavors compared to my compadres.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not compared to your compadres with same level of giftedness. You are still neutral EV with others of similar conditions.

[ QUOTE ]
Its similar to always being dealt aces.

[/ QUOTE ]

No it isn't. It's similar to finding a soft table or having a big bankroll due to variance. A player with a big bankroll at a soft table has a better win rate than a player with little money at a tough table. And it isn't because his "luck" (i.e., probability of being aces, as you say) has changed.

[ QUOTE ]
...Ultimately, I guess you are right, its just variance, but I will have a decided edge for the rest of my life due to nothing I did. It seems a little silly not to call this an EV-boost, but I'm no expert.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's all semantics, but hopefully my poker table analogy helps. It isn't that your fortune at being gifted all of a sudden changes the laws of probability to favor you. It's that your fortune at being gifted merely gives you different starting conditions (like sitting at a soft table) and thus the probability of your range of outcomes changes.

If I'm playing NLHE and Gus Hansen, Scotty Nguyen, and Doyle Brunson all happen to be at my table that night. My win rate plummets due to my conditions relative to my environment. Not because the probability of aces changes.

[ALawPoker]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm going to have greater EV in all my endeavors compared to my compadres. Its similar to always being dealt aces.

[/ QUOTE ]

Always being dealt aces? Or dealt aces once and happen to be concerned with nothing but this hand?

I get what you're saying. But it all revolves around the natural bias that our life is important. I don't think you can take this bias to imply broad conclusions about variance. It should be pretty clear that variance/luck, by its definition, is neutral. It's only +EV in this instance because we are being rewarded for decisions we did not make, since our existence is a function of things that other people did. But the decisions leading up to our involvement in the game of life were indeed made by someone (and our equity is the result).

[ALawPoker]

Vhawk's under attack!

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Vhawk's under attack!

[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, no problem there. I think this is an interesting concept. So, why would it be wrong to say, when my friend tells me that raising on the button is +EV, that he is in fact wrong and that his knowledge to make that play is just variance, based on the mistaken idea that his intelligence or this specific game or this specific hand or his bankroll are somehow special?

So the whole world is just variance? Is this thread just a weird argument for determinism?

[MiloMinderbinder]

[ QUOTE ]
So, why would it be wrong to say, when my friend tells me that raising on the button is +EV, that he is in fact wrong and that his knowledge to make that play is just variance, based on the mistaken idea that his intelligence or this specific game or this specific hand or his bankroll are somehow special?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because taken over all games, this play has a certain expected value which is nonzero. The outcome of any individual trial however may not be equal to this EV due to variance. Just like being born a human on planet earth has a certain expected value for giftedness (or any other property), and the outcome of any individual trial (your birth) may not be equal to this EV due to variance.

[onesandzeros]

[ QUOTE ]
Read "Fooled by Randomness", by Nassim Taleb for the best answer to this question that has yet been written.

[/ QUOTE ]

Before the book was released you could read the online version at Taleb's website years ago. Great book!

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So, why would it be wrong to say, when my friend tells me that raising on the button is +EV, that he is in fact wrong and that his knowledge to make that play is just variance, based on the mistaken idea that his intelligence or this specific game or this specific hand or his bankroll are somehow special?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because taken over all games, this play has a certain expected value which is nonzero. The outcome of any individual trial however may not be equal to this EV due to variance. Just like being born a human on planet earth has a certain expected value for giftedness (or any other property), and the outcome of any individual trial (your birth) may not be equal to this EV due to variance.

[/ QUOTE ]

But it was still just variance that led to you being capable of making that play.

[chezlaw]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Luck simply is a shorter word for variance.

[/ QUOTE ]

I suppose. Variance is EV neutral, though, and luck doesn't have to be. Luck could be some + or -EV thing that just happened to be out of my control.

[/ QUOTE ]

Luck is EV neutral except for fools! Sorry, vhawk01! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, thats sort of exactly the question being asked, and now your just asserting you are correct. If luck is just "everything that is out of your control" then it definitely doesn't have to be EV neutral. If luck = variance, then sure.

[/ QUOTE ]

Everything out of your control is the source of variance, vhawk. And over an infinite period, it is EV neutral. Unless you think everything out of your control hates you or something. Can you provide an example of a source of "luck" (out of your control) that has a + or - EV?

[/ QUOTE ]
being born in the 1st world in peace time rather than starving in a war zone.

Fairly pleased with myself for having had the sense to avoid the WW1 trenches as well.

chez

[/ QUOTE ]

Your being born in 1st world is not +EV luck. It's simply variance. There's a distribution of conditions for being born into this world that has some median. For each birth above this median there is a birth below this median.

Here's a poker example to demonstrate:

Just because the table is a lot tougher does not mean you all of sudden are just "unlucky" since your win rate went down. This is what you are saying with your birth analogy. Just because you found a soft table (being born in 1st world) doesn't mean you have some +EV luck factor. Anybody born here (all things equal) has the same EV.

[/ QUOTE ]
assuming you have some choice abut whether and where to play poker then your analogy is simply false.

If there's no choice about anything then its all luck. Some are happier than others, no choices were made and they just got lucky.

edit: no one is suggesting the laws of probaility ever change.

chez

[ALawPoker]

[ QUOTE ]
So, why would it be wrong to say, when my friend tells me that raising on the button is +EV, that he is in fact wrong and that his knowledge to make that play is just variance

[/ QUOTE ]

It of course isn't wrong that raising on the button is +EV, but you have to consider that you earned the button by having the less desirable end of the stick the previous 9 tries. There's no way to have the button more than your 1/X turn. If there was, then there'd be some skill to attaining it. "Having the button" is no different than "it being Saturday." Gee, I have all this money, and I don't even need to go to work, +EV. But it's only because you already took the -EV end and now you have this to show for it.

I mean, you can't look at it like "having the button" IS anything if you don't accept that it comes prepackaged with 9 other times where you don't have the button.

[ QUOTE ]
So the whole world is just variance? Is this thread just a weird argument for determinism?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure what determinism is exactly (other than what I got from your context here). But sure, the world is a ton of variance. Science allows us to predict it. But we are only human. We stereotype situations, and act in a way that is most likely to be to our best interest. Variance is just something that will always be there until we're omniscient (and by omniscient, I mean dull and lifeless). I think life approaches omniscience but can never reach it. So life will always observe variance, since it is not perfectly equipped to get what it wants all the time.

[MiloMinderbinder]

[ QUOTE ]
If there's no choice about anything then its all luck. Some are happier than others, no choices were made and they just got lucky.

[/ QUOTE ]

What's the point? The discussion concerned whether this can be described as variance or not. Sure sounds like what you described can be called variance, and spread over the population it is neutral (some are "lucky" and some aren't).

The point with the table analogy is to say that no matter what poker room (birth place) you stumbled upon, the laws of the game are the same. Just because your outcome at one or another may be different is due to different circumstances, not because you are somehow endowed with a higher "+EV luck factor".