Making Luck

Monday nights this summer consist of three things that are very dear to me: golf, beer, and pitch. Two of these things require a combination of luck and skill to be successful. (The odd man out is beer, which requires no luck whatsoever to be enjoyable.) I'm a pretty good card player and a pretty lousy golfer, but I try to take it all with a grain of salt, no matter what happens. Still, I find myself getting frustrated more and more frequently by bad things that I mostly chalk up to bad luck. There are stretches where the cards simply will not fall my way, and sometimes golf balls seem to take ridiculous bounces and ricochets to land in impossible lies when I hit them. I wonder why -- what have I done to warrant such terrible karma in the form of unlucky cards / golf lies? Why is my luck so rotten all the time?

This isn't exactly earth-shattering, but I've come up with a few conclusions. The first is that most things -- especially random playing cards in pitch -- will tend to regress toward the mean over time. If I played 10,000 games of pitch and kept data on the comparative quality of each hand, the data would almost certainly translate to a bell curve. (And, indeed, tonight I broke my streak and ended up with unbelievable cards.) The same concept applies to golf. For every time a ball of mine teeters on a bunker's edge and falls back in, or bounces off three tress and lands behind me, there have been plenty of other shots to which I paid no particular mind that went very well, including the occasional lucky bounce or lie.

I also have begun to think more and more lately that true "luck" is almost completely absent from games of human activity like golf and pitch. While sometimes I might get on cold streaks with cards or suffer from lousy bounces and lies playing golf, this isn't an accident. "Luck" in these games isn't really lucky -- luck is a product of skill. If I were a better golfer and I put in more time practicing at the driving range, I would be a better player. I'd hit the ball straighter and with more power. I wouldn't find the need to complain about a ball that just happened to nestle into really thick grass, because if I were a good golfer, I wouldn't need that kind of lucky -- I'd just never be in that situation at all. Good golfers hitting the ball in the fairway need much less luck.

Something that is strictly lucky, to me, is something that nobody has any control over. Sitting here thinking about it, it's hard to even come up with an example of something that's totally lucky. I suppose the weather is almost completely random, and if a rainy forecast is beaten out by a sunny day, that is lucky because there is nothing at all anybody could have done to make that happen. Pitch, for those who don't know, is a bidding, trick-taking card game. You bid who can take the most "points," and the one who bids the highest gets to set the trump suit. Therefore, I could just say that I'm unlucky that I haven't gotten many face cards when I'm not scoring a lot, but it could also be a product of my not choosing to bid very often, leaving the upper hand with my partner or the other team. One of my opponents happens to bid a lot, allowing him to choose whatever trump suit he desires. I always get on his case for picking up "lucky" bids, but the fact that he influenced the game in his favor actually takes away the "luck" factor in this. The cards might be random, but the human aspect of the game most certainly isn't. His bidding swings luck into his favor.

I need to remember this in the future. It's not to say that I should bid on every pitch hand I receive, or that I should spend hours hacking away on the driving range. I just have to remember that what I think is bad luck might actually be facilitated by what I am (not) doing.