My girlfriend was busy most of yesterday, and I had an LSAT class to teach at USC, so I decided to spend the afternoon playing poker at The Bicycle Club (aka The Bicycle Casino), which is most of the way to the campus and would cut the rush hour drive (class started at 6:00). I played a little no limit hold'em and a lot of my favorite game, 7-card stud high-low split. I was up a couple of hundred dollars when they held a raffle - everyone seated at a table got tickets every hour, and they drew a ticket from this huge drum (which had hundreds of tickets in it). I was involved in a hand at the time of the drawing, so I wasn't paying attention, but the guy next to me said, "%#*+, I missed it by one. It's probably someone at this table!" I looked, and sure enough, I'd won the drawing for $500. So I won more money in less time with less effort just by sitting in the right seat, thereby proving the old adage.

I love when luck like that happens. Unfortunately for me, it doesn't happen to me a lot.

I'm not a typically lucky guy. I once won a bottle of champagne on a NY to LA flight when one of the stewardesses came on the PA system and announced a trivia quiz. She asked what famous event took place ten years ago this week. Can you believe that on a well populated 727, I was the only one who answered correctly, "Neil Armstrong setting foor on the Moom." So I won the champagne, but that wasn't even luck.

This is luck though.

Several years ago a girl I worked with had a scratch off lottery ticket with a five dollar win, but it was purchased from a Pennsylvania store. I lived in PA at the time and worked in New Jersey, twenty miles away. She asked me if I't cash it for her and I naturally obliged.

While there cashing it in, I bought a ten dollar scratch off myself. I won a thousand dollars on it. The most I've ever won in my life. I wouldn't have won it if I hadn't been there to cash the co worker's ticket. I almost decided to split it with her, but my wife had a few things to say about that.

Cool! When you are on a roll, you are on a roll. I love that film, let it ride.

Lol. Let It Ride is great.

Reminds me of the joke about the guy who goes to Vegas with his wife. He wakes up early and goes down to the casino...puts five bucks in a dollar slot machine and wins $500. Starts playing craps for $25 chips and turns the $500 into $5,000. Sits at a blackjack table and plays $500 a hand...soon the $5,000 is up to $20,000. Goes to a roulette wheel and puts the whole $20,000 on number 17. The wheel comes up 22, so he loses it all. Goes back up the room, and his wife asks how he did. "Lost five bucks."

Three chess tournament stories, two unlucky and one very lucky:

1. When I was a kid, probably around 4th grade, I was playing in one of my first chess tournaments. Probably the National Open. (For those not in the chess world, the "National Open" isn't as impressive as it sounds. Anyone can play.)

I wasn't doing very well in the tournament, but before the 5th round I won the grand prize in a lottery: two free round-trip tickets to anywhere in the country. We lived in Vegas, but had family in New York and Florida, so I was stoked. My mom suggested she hang on to the tickets, but I insisted that she didn't. These were MY tickets. I don't know exactly when I lost them, but some time before the 6th round. Easy come, easy go...

2. Many years (and many chess books) later, I was in high school, playing in the North American Open. (Again, not as impressive as it sounds). This time, I was set to win my section -- I think U1800 or so. The last round involved a very complicated middle game. This is the only time in my life that this happened, but I was getting a little overwhelmed with all the rapidly branching variations. At some point, I looked around and realized I was up a rook. (For those who don't play chess, (a) that's a decisive advantage; and (b) it's almost unheard of for any competent player to not realize an advantage like that). I re-read the score sheet and realized I had been up a rook for a few moves. It was kind of an out-of-body experience I guess. I won the game and my section, only to learn that the prize fund had been cut in half, my prize being cut from $1200 to $600. (Still, $600 was a lot, especially for a teenager. But I had big plans for that $1200...)

3. Again in high school, this time at the first out-of-town tournament I had ever played, in San Jose. My parents didn't come with me -- I went with an older friend. (As an aside, would this happen these days? I teenager leaving town without his parents? God I hope so.)

Anyways, our return flight was scheduled a little tight relative to the timing of the last round, but we didn't anticipate any problems. Even after the last round started about an hour late, I still had plenty of time. I chatted with my opponent before the round started, and joked that if I didn't have a winning position after the first 20 moves then I'd resign, because I had to catch a plane.

Sure enough, after some reasonable number of moves I ended up with a decisive advantage. After my opponent's last vestiges of possible counterplay were extinguished, he smiled, looked at me, and asked "when's your flight again?" It was in, say, 2 hours, and he still had something like an hour and 15 minutes on his clock. So he smiled again and got up from the table. Mind you, we weren't in any significant standing in the tournament... neither of us were in contention for a prize or anything like that. He was just being a *********.

Word got around, and eventually he relented to peer pressure (and apparently some threats of physical violence), but not before wasting a huge chunk of time. Now it was a mad dash to get to the airport. The train we were supposed to take wasn't working, and in a panic, my friend flagged down a car. It looked like it was occupied by a couple of gang bangers... you know, custom rims, super dark window tint, custom paint job, with two... uhhhh... unsavory looking guys in the front and a girl in the back. My friend was talking to them in Spanish, and I figured he was just getting advice or directions to a taxi or something like that. Eventually he motioned me to get in the car, and the gave us a lift to the airport.

Lucky.

One reason casinos exist is the odds being in their favour. Since we lose more often than win we remember the wins as outstanding points. So although we may get lucky occasionally a level of skill will give more consistant odds. Thereby making our wins come more often.

So although it feels great to be lucky it would also stand to reason that having skills and being occasionally lucky would be better.

The only thing I ever won was by calling a radio station in the mid-1970's, and getting tickets for an Al Jarreau concert. Other than that, I am not a lucky guy. Always had to work extra hard, persevere through hard times, and pay a lot of dues for everything I got.

But once in a while, Fortune smiles even on a luckless individual like me. This happened in 1983 after my job as musical director/pianist with the "new" Mamas and the Papas came to an end. After 2 years of touring, and no record companies taking a real interest in John Phillips' new songs, we were reduced to playing the casino circuit, performing only the hits. That gets pretty depressing after a while. ... especially when you're surrounded by folks who need a creative outlet. Eventually, the singers all started hating each other and the group disbanded around the fall of 1983.

This left me unemployed in NYC, so I started looking for studio work as a keyboardist, playing on record dates, music for commercials and film scores. Since I had been out of town for so long, this was easier said than done. It was very much a case of "out of sight, out of mind." So I had to start all over, trying to "break in" to a very closed circle of studio musicians. Another possibility was joining a local band, to generate at least some income until I could get another major tour, or get enough studio work to survive.

So I was at a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, auditioning with a newly formed band from New Jersey. The singer and main composer had some pretty good songs. He was writing partners with Dan Hartman, who wrote "Free Ride" when he played bass with The Edgar Winter Group. (Under his own name he also wrote and sang the hit song, "I Can Dream About You" ).

After my audition finished (by the way, I got the job) ... my roadie Bernie came running in and told me that Pil was next door in another rehearsal room, and they were looking for a keyboard player. I said, "Who's Pil?" Bernie, being British, was flabbergasted! Public Image Limited was Johnny Rotten's band after the Sex Pistols. The reason I was clueless is because from 1974 -78 I was a student of jazz composition and film scoring at Berklee College of Music in Boston. So during that time I missed the whole KISS phenomenon and many other groups that were popular then.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I went next door, introduced myself, and was asked to jam with the band. (There were keyboards already set up on stage). As we played, I immediately felt they were great! This was not a punk band at all, but guys who could really play. Martin Atkins on drums, Louis Bernardi on bass, and Joe Guida on guitar. Next, they played me a tape of some of their music, which consisted of edgy rock/dance grooves, above which someone's out-of-tune voice sang and chanted provocative but intelligent lyrics.

"Who's singing?" I asked, and the musicians pointed to a strange, red-headed figure in a trench coat who had been lying on a sofa throughout our jam session. This turned out to be John Lydon ... none other than Johnny Rotten himself! "I've go' a bloody toof-ache" was all he said.

Pil was preparing for a European tour. And since their single, "This Is Not A Love Song", was #3 single in Europe at the time, it didn't take long to convince me that a tour, with a steady paycheck, overruled what I thought about this somewhat avant-garde combination of music, attitude, and noise.

And so I joined up, and we toured all the major cities in Europe until the end of the year. Including dates shared with Tina Turner, and The Eurhythmics. And I might add, for the duration of our tour, Johnny and I constantly tried to "out-rotten" each other! The things we got up to were so unbelievable, it's probably better that they remain untold.

And that's my story ... It was pure luck that I had been in the right place, at the right time.

Congrats Lobo (and everyone else who has the good luck stories)! It's always fun catching that kind of break. Normally, I never win anything. But as luck would have it (cause that's all it was), a little over a year ago I bought a $2 scratch-off and it hit for $20,000. It has taken a lot of discipline to realize that the lottery is not really easy to win.

Wow Michael, that's a pretty good hit for a scratch-off!

I absolutely adore the times when you happen to be able to mix lucky AND good. That perfect storm is one of the great pleasures of life.

I have won many things in my life, many would call me lucky, but the truth is, I have never won anything of any real value. A magazine supscription for a year, concert tickets once, six months of a prime parking space where I used to work. These are nice, but not all that great. I often do OK at the casino in Vegas, but by OK I mean coming home with a few dollars more than I left with. It is not always true either, just often. I will say that getting a seat on the plane "Zero G" was lucky, but truth is even though I don't know how I got the seat, and often claim it was "dumb luck," truth is I got the seat by working hard on being well connected in my field.

I can't believe no one has hit Michael up for a loan!

As they say, sometimes you make your own luck. Here's another story...

I spent my first year of college at UNLV, then transferred to UC Santa Barbara. I was a math major.

While at UNLV I became friendly with a mathematician who worked for the EPA. At Santa Barbara, I became friendly with a retired statistician (who also played chess, which is how we became friends.) Anyways, the Santa Barbara guy was working on a problem, and as a sub-problem he needed a good way to count paths between two points in a network, such that the paths didn't contain any loops. It wasn't a super hard problem, but it wasn't super easy either. I worked on it off and on with him, and after a few weeks we had it.

When I went back to visit Vegas, I ran in to my EPA friend. We were casually chatting about what he was doing, and it turned out he had a problem with the exact same sub-problem of counting paths. Moreover, his solution was wrong! (It was mostly right, but it occasionally counted some loops that shouldn't be counted). He didn't know I worked on the same problem, so being a little mischievious I pretended I hadn't ever seen it. But I glanced at his formula and said, "This looks right... wait... are you sure it shouldn't be something more like [this]? Your formula lets in such-and-such loops."

He was floored.

It was lucky that I had seen the problem a second time, but I was good to have solved it the first time!

Did you ever 'fess up to your EPA friend?

Actually I did, about 15 years after the fact. He's retired now, and I often visit him when I go back to Vegas. Recently he introduced me to someone else, and told that story. I had to come clean. He was floored again, but this time in a different way.

You haven't read his PM's.

"The harder I work the luckier I get" - Gary Player

Luck evens out in the ends.
If one person appears to be luckier than most it's because they put themselves in more situations to get lucky.

It's one of the reasons that showing up is a large part of success.

I have never been lucky at gambling, and have never won so much as a little door prize. However, I consider myself as having climbed rather high in the larger picture of life. As much as my ego would appreciate the thought that my successes have been a matter of superior abilities and intelligence, I know in my core that all has been more the result of good luck. Work hard? Sure! Try for the brass ring? Absolutely! But many people do that. I think you are right as can be, Lobo- and I will take lucky, too!

[quote]On Mar 28, 2014, Mr. Mystoffelees wrote:
I have never been lucky at gambling, and have never won so much as a little door prize. However, I consider myself as having climbed rather high in the larger picture of life. As much as my ego would appreciate the thought that my successes have been a matter of superior abilities and intelligence, I know in my core that all has been more the result of good luck. Work hard? Sure! Try for the brass ring? Absolutely! But many people do that. I think you are right as can be, Lobo- and I will take lucky, too!


This is very interesting to me.

I was wondering if you can recall a specific example?

In theory, but not (necessarily) in practice.