Chance and Luck

It might be supposed that those who are most familiar with the actual results which present themselves in long series of chance games would form the most correct views respecting the conditions on which such results depend -- would be, in fact, freest from all superstitious ideas respecting chance or luck. The gambler who sees every system -- his own infallible system included -- foiled by the run of events, who witnesses the discomfiture of one gamester after another that for a time had seemed irresistibly lucky, and who can number by hundreds those who have been ruined by the love of play, might be expected to recognize the futility of all attempts to anticipate the results of chance combinations. It is, however, but too well known that the reverse is the case. The more familiar a man becomes with the multitude of such combinations, the more confidently he believes in the possibility of foretelling -- not, indeed, any special event, but -- the general run of several approaching events. There has never been a successful gambler who has not believed that his success (temporary though such success ever is, where games of pure chance are concerned) has been the result of skilful conduct on his own part; and there has never been a ruined gambler (though ruined gamblers are to be counted by thousands) who has not believed that when ruin overtook him he was on the very point of mastering the secret of success. It is this fatal confidence which gives to gambling its power of fascinating the lucky as well as the unlucky. The winner continues to tempt fortune, believing all the while that he is exerting some special aptitude for games of chance, until the inevitable change of luck arrives; and thereafter he continues to play because he believes that his luck has only deserted him for a time, and must presently return. The unlucky gambler, on the contrary, regards his losses as sacrifices to ensure the ultimate success of his 'system,' and even when he has lost his all, continues firm in the belief that had he had more money to sacrifice he could have bound fortune to his side for ever.

I propose to consider some of the most common gambling superstitions -- noting, at the same time, that like superstitions prevail respecting chance events (or what is called fortune) even among those who never gamble.

Houdin, in his interesting book, Les Tricheries des Grecs dévoilées, has given some amusing instances of the fruits of long gaming experience. 'They are presented,' says Steinmetz, from whose work, The Gaming Table, I quote them, 'as the axioms of a professional gambler and cheat.' Thus we might expect that, however unsatisfactory to men of honest mind, they would at least savor of a certain sort of wisdom. Yet these axioms, the fruit of long study directed by self-interest, are all utterly untrustworthy.