One of the most popular complaint that I hear (even from good players) is how “unlucky” they are. Clearly, we can’t all be unlucky, because – by the definition of luck – for every one person who gets unlucky, somebody else needs to get lucky!

So where does the misconception lie?

For starters, people tend to ignore all the instances that went in their favor and remember only those that didn’t. This is also known as selective memory. Things get even worse, when they assume that they deserve to win the hand every time they are ahead.

A classic example is AA vs KK when the money goes all-in before the flop. If AA wins then the person who held them, usually has no idea how lucky they got! “But what are you talking about Duncan, aren’t you supposed to win with AA vs KK?”. No you are not! Not the entire pot anyway. You only deserve to win 82% of the pot, which literally means that you get 18% lucky every time you scoop it! This is more than what the best investors make in a year. If this is not luck, I don’t know what it.

Also, the thing with poker (and with any other game that involves even the slightest amount of luck), is that things can go against your way for longer than you think. To put things in perspective let’s compute some quick odds of some “unlikely” events:

1) First let’s examine two instances of trips versus a straight draw on the flop: For each instance you are about a 70% favorite to win the hand and thus you are a 30% underdog to lose it (this is higher than most people would think btw). What is even more interesting, is that the chance of us losing both hands is 0.30 * 0.30 = 0.09 = 9% which is again more than most people would think!

2) Similarly, if you had an overpair to the flop and your opponent has a lower overpair, your chances of losing is about 10% which again is not insignificant!

My point here is that you will lose more than you think and that you need to play a lot (and correct!) for the “long run”to prevail.

Another thing that I want to point out – which is a bit more subtle – is that the better the competition the worse your odds! By that I mean that when the money goes in, you should always be concerned!. What do I mean by that?

Let’s take the instance where we made trips for example. Let’s also say that we play it aggressively to the point that all the money eventually goes in. Against a weak opponent, this can mean that they are drawing pretty “thin” (meaning that our opponent has low chances to win the hand). But against a good opponent, this will rarely be the case, as they will not only have a better hand than us a huge percentage of the time (!) but even when they don’t – they will make sure that they at least have a ton of outs and thus a huge chance to beat us even if they are behind!

This in not much different than the “theorem of relativity” for poker. The stronger action we are facing the more the value of our hand drops.

And one last thing: One of the most frustrating factors of the game is of course the luck factor. Especially when we get the money in with the best of it, only to see our opponent catching on the turn and/or the river. But this is the ONLY WAY we can make money in this game. That’s because bad players will give us action regardless of how bad they are. Poker is the only game where you can learn the rules one day and then sit with the world champion and beat them the same day. That cannot happen in chess. But that’s also the reason why you don’t see amateurs challenging Magnus Carlsen for hundreds of thousands of dollars like they would Phil Ivey or any other poker pro.