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Luck Concepts

Jawsus-son Starship

22:04 / 19.05.06

I'm having a wierd run of luck, for perhaps the last month. Some random examples;

Positive;

-Keep finding money. Small(ish) amounts, found £10 on train, 20 in a cash point, randomly brought a scratch card, won £10.
-Relationships - keep randomly bumping into old mates in odd ways. Bumped into an old girlfriend at the airport when I was travelling down to Brighton, as my train was delayed. Old friend wandered into my shop, I literally bumped straight into her.

Negative;

Am on the worst streak of luck at the poker table. Stupid things like flopping trips, only to find that I've lost the hand anyway (lost $1175 on that hand). I don't play for the money, but I find myself really losing alot in odd ways. I guess it's difficult to explain. But this game is my life, I have a lot of goals tied into my game. I dunno.

Also, I've been in a really dark place for the last two months.

This seems to have started up after (the day after) I had a tarot reading, which was actually about my poker game. The reading told me that I was at a cross road of my game - I have a lot of the attributes needed to become a great player, but I'm in danger of dreaming my life away.

The reason I've posted this here - looking for ways to level out my luck. At the moment it's a rollercoaster and its to hard to ride. Any ways, any ideas, if you can see problems that are effecting me. Old Uncle Ramsey's last book seems a solid place for me to start, but perhaps you have some more ideas. And thank you in advance.

Korso Jerusalem

23:40 / 19.05.06

While we're at it, I could use some luck myself. I play the scratch tickets every pay day, and I have never won once.
Yes, I know I'm an idiot, but is a two dollar prize too much to ask?

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

06:22 / 21.05.06

You guys are thinking too specific. Gambling's not luck...most games favor the house, and the odds of probability are against you, and are set pretty much the moment the cards are finished shuffling or the dice hit the table. Even choosing a scratch lottery ticket; the outcome is predetermined the minute the person at the counter hands you your ticket.

I think of luck as a state of mind. "Playing the Fool", I call it. Another phrase for it is "running heedlessly down the throat of life with the utter faith that things are going to turn out OK". It really is this sort of zen-like state where you KNOW that things are going to be provided through confluences of events. Maybe not what you WANT, but almost definitly what you NEED.

Then again, part of it is also spotting coincidences and making meaning out of them. Which isn't really magic...but at the same time, it develops a firm belief in luck as a tangible concept that eddies and flows...and thus can be manipulated somewhat.

Think of it this way: at any given point in time we exist in tension between good luck, neutral luck, and bad luck. Its a crossroads, metaphorically speaking. If you have the right state of mind and run at it from the right direction, things tilt a little to the "good side"...or to the bad. Its really all in how you accept things.

I'm being rather unhelpful here, but I thought I'd chime in with my take on things. Maybe be helpful. Its the vast majority of the magic I do nowadays.

Hope I've made at least some degree of sense here, though. I'm notoriously bad at being really comprehensible at 3:30am, but I'm up and I felt the need to add my two cents.

Jawsus-son Starship

13:47 / 21.05.06

I'm not looking for any help in terms of getting people to do stuff for me to get me better luck, more ideas for luck manipulation etc. Of course, if you don't believe in luck then I can't ask much of you.

Maybe if we didn't have so many preconcieved notions about luck, stripped back what we know, what we think we know, about it. Exchange the word luck for the word probability.

For example; I've got a 1 in 6 chance of rolling a six on a die, and six is 'lucky' then I've got a one in six chance of being lucky. but if I have a loaded dice that always lands on a six then I'll always be able to roll 6. That's excepted. Now, if I have too much to drink tonight and decide to drive home, then I'm increasing the probability that i'll have a fatal car accident. So by not drinking, I'm bending probability to allow myself or others to live longer. Now I'm trying to find ways that make sense to allow myself to have a level of control on randomness. If everything I do has an effect of the probability of something else happening, why wouldn't, say, a little ritual something or other change my probability - what with the whole not needing to know why something works just that it does.

In terms of gambling; With Poker, the house takes no cut based on percentage, which is the opposite of how most casino games work, i.e. the house makes money by having a small edge over the gambler.

Poker is more like tossing a coin. Due to a specific number of cards that can help a player out in a hand (i.e. There are 9 'outs' that can get you a flush if you already have four cars to a five card flush), you have a specific percentage chance of hitting a hand (in the case stated above, you're about 2-1 to hit a flush with two cards to come, 4.5-1 with one card remaining).

I'm askig for ideas really, I guess. I'm sort of stuck, just asking for a little back and forth really. Hmmmm. This is kind of drivel I'm spouting, but I'm quite the inexperienced with this whole side of my life.