Oct 15, 2015 How to Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn This video covers the secret into how to manifest your own luck into your life and how you can begin to attract luck in to your life and in to your. Jan 08, 2015 Today casinos can change every aspect of a casino floor in a moments notice. Server Based Gaming was introduced a few years ago and has been spreading like wild fire across the world. This enables a casino to change par/hold percentages.
Spend any amount of time in any poker room on earth and you will inevitably hear players curse their luck:
“I never win a flip!” “Her aces hold up! Why don’t mine?” “I’m down two racks and I ain’t won a pot yet.”
You will also hear people who strive to change their “luck” by taking actions that can have no discernible impact on their results:
“Dealer, could we get a new set-up?” “Give ‘em a really good scramble, dealer, would you...? No, I mean really good.” “I want a seat change… table change… game change.”
Even typing out these kinds of whines, complaints, and irrelevant actions feels silly. No successful or experienced player could rationally believe that a seat — or a dealer or a particular a deck of cards — could possibly affect the outcome of a given hand or session in a foreseeable way. (Of course, I recognize that you may have a real and legitimate reason to request a seat change or a table change, but here I’m talking about the guy who’s running bad and simply wants to change his luck.)
It should be obvious — but it’s still worth saying — that vocalizing these sentiments is not just silly. Doing so also makes you look like an amateur. Furthermore, complaining about your bad luck can and will hurt your results.
One of two things will happen when you complain about the cards not going your way: (1) good players will exploit these signs of weakness, defeatism, and resignation; or (2) your own weakness, defeatism, and resignation will cause you to donk off your remaining chips.
Either way, you will lose.
But there’s a bigger lesson here as well — the value of understanding and embracing luck.
Poker is of course a game of skill. To be a winning player, you must learn the technical skills of poker, including understanding the value of hands, the value of draws, the value of position, the value of bluffing, and more.
But you must also recognize that poker is a game of luck. As the more sophisticated players refer to it, poker is a game of variance.
Jesse May, best known as a TV poker commentator in Europe, speaks to this idea directly in one of the game’s few good novels, Shut Up and Deal. Mickey Dane, his grinder protagonist who narrates the book, explains poker this way:
“Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren’t ever gonna fade it. That’s what sets poker apart. And that’s what keeps everyone coming back for more.”
That last line is the easiest part of this insightful observation to understand. If the game were purely skill — that is, if it were more like chess — no amateur would play, or at least play for long. This is one reason why it’s so important not to berate anyone for playing badly. For someone to play badly and get lucky is what you want, despite the occasional, inevitable short-term pain of it. The fact that poker has a large luck component is the source of your potential profits.
But there’s another component to this idea as well: You must master luck — or variance — so that you don’t fall into the trap of looking back on that losing hand, or that losing session, or that losing month and give in to weakness, defeatism, or resignation.
It’s valuable to look back in an effort to improve your game. Could you have played a hand more deftly? Can you learn something new about an opponent by reviewing how he played a hand against you? Most definitely.
But don’t look backward if it causes you pain and suffering in a way that causes you to play badly going forward.
Luck is a fact of poker, just as it is a fact of life. Luck is like gravity — it’s there and you have to deal with it, and you have to work within its realities. To play smart poker is to embrace luck. And when you can embrace luck, you will enjoy poker’s infinite capacity to surprise you.
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William Hill Poker
Think you have some quirky gambling superstitions? (Trust us, they’re quirky.) You have nothing on our Las Vegas visitors from China.
Here are eight Chinese gambling superstitions we find particularly fascinating.
1. Books Are to Be Avoided
The Chinese don’t like words that sound like unlucky things. For example, “book” in Chinese sounds like “lose,” and hearing the word is considered unlucky. Carrying or looking at books are also unlucky to Chinese gamblers.
2. Find the Right Spot
Many Chinese gamblers are into feng shui. The west side of a room (or casino), for example, or somewhere you can see a door, are considered good luck based upon this ancient philosophy.
A famous example of the importance of feng shui to gamblers is when the MGM Grand had to change its entrance, one that formerly forced customers to walk through the mouth of a lion, deemed to be very bad mojo by players from Asia.
Good Luck Gambling Spells
Bad feng shui cost the MGM Grand a pretty penny.
3. Be An “Innie”
In Chinese culture, a concave navel is seen as good luck, as it symbolizes a prosperous life. Sorry, 10% of the population with outies, you’re on your own.
4. Luck By the Numbers
In Chinese culture, eight is a very lucky number because that number in Mandarin Chinese sounds like the Chinese word for “prosperity.” (Why do you think our list has eight numbers on it?)
Four, on the other hand, is unlucky, because it sounds like the Chinese word for “death.” This is why many hotels in Las Vegas skip floor numbers that start with the number four. The Rio Las Vegas, for example, is advertised as having 51 floors, but if you deduct the missing 40-49, it actually has just 41. The Encore is also missing floors 40-49.
Floors in the 40s are for suckas.
Interestingly, Chinese gamblers seek out room numbers that sound lucky when pronounced in Chinese. In Chinese, 84 sounds like “prosperous till death,” 168 sounds like “prosper all the way” and 998 sounds like “prosper for a long time.”
5. The Cold Shoulder
When a Chinese person is gambling, it’s a major faux pas to touch their shoulders. Shoulder-touching is considered no only very bad luck, but rude to boot.
How To Change Your Luck Gambling
6. Paint the Town Red
To the Chinese, the color red represents joy and good fortune. That’s the reason you’ll never see red at a Chinese funeral. Red is everywhere during the Chinese New Year and other holidays.
Chinese gamblers also believe wearing red underwear to the casino will bring them good luck.
Seeing red in a casino can help keep you in the black.
7. It’s a Wash
For Chinese gamblers, washing their hands during a session in the casino can change their luck. If they’re losing, a good hand-washing can turn things around, according to the superstition. If a player is winning, hand-washing is to be avoided, as it could wash the good luck away.
8. No Sexing Before Gambling
Chinese males believe having sex before gambling is bad luck, so it’s to be avoided at all costs. Note: Unfortunately, this Las Vegas blog is really, really lucky. ‘Nuff said.
Bonus Chinese superstition: In the Chinese culture, it’s considered especially good luck if a woman gambles during her period.
So, there you have it. If you play in Las Vegas casinos at all, you no doubt have your own wacky superstitions.
Then again, they’re only “wacky” if they don’t work!