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Can you make your own luck?
Why are some people luckier than others? And can you change the way fortune smiles upon you? Eight investigates
Just how lucky can a person get? When Roman philosopher Seneca pondered this in the first century AD, he came up with the defining notion that luck was "something that happened when preparation meets opportunity". Fast forward a couple of thousand years and the search is still on for ways to make your own luck - or, at least, for maximising the returns when good fortune makes a surprise guest appearance.
Greg Raymer, who won the 2004 World Series of Poker has netted about $6 million in winnings in a relatively short gambling career. He won't be found at a table without a three million-year-old fossil in front of him for good luck.
"In the long term, skill is everything," says Raymer. "But in any one event - even a two- week long tournament - it takes a lot of luck to win."
Anthony Curtis, editor of the Las Vegas Advisor and one of that city's leading experts on gambling, agrees. "Poker combines skill and luck, perhaps better than any other game, which helps explain its popularity," he says.
"In a field of 6,500 (in the World Series), where less than 10 per cent of the participants are at the highest skill level, it figures that many unknowns will advance far. But you are likely to see the pros over-represented when you get down to the last hundred or so. In poker, luck can dominate in the short term but, overall, skill generally is the dominant factor."
The trick, it seems, is to have the skills to take advantage of the luck that comes your way. But can an individual improve his or her chances of getting that luck? Prof Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, is convinced that there really are ways to make your own luck. In fact, after studying the subject for a decade, he was so convinced that he wrote a book called The Luck Factor.
Prof Wiseman's research involved studying hundreds of people, who replied to ads in national newspapers asking to hear from those who felt lucky or unlucky.
He interviewed them, monitored their lives and subjected them to experiments.
"The results revealed that although these people had almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour were responsible for much of their good and bad fortune," he says. "Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.
"I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside.
I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: 'Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.' This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high.
"It was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected." Prof Wiseman's work eventually revealed that lucky people self-generate good fortune via four principles:
They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.
They make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition.
They create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations.
They adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Having come up with the theory, Wiseman then got a group of volunteers to put the principles into practice over the course of a month.
"The results were dramatic," he says. "Eighty per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.
The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky."
Jeff Staniforth, an Australian metaphysical scientist, supports Prof Wiseman's contention that lucky people expect good fortune to come their way and are always open to new possibilities. He says that people should adopt "power affirmations" to "maximise your mind's potential for bringing good luck into your life."
He says: "We consider people lucky when, using no apparent effort, they just automatically run into favourable situations that we call luck. Luck isn't necessarily a result of karma or coincidence.
I believe that these lucky people actually unconsciously generate their so-called luck. "They think and behave in ways that create good fortune in their lives. A large part of this is through a positive attitude or mindset, and how better to instill a positive attitude or mindset than through affirmations?"
Those affirmations include telling yourself:
I am always in the right place at the right time.
I expect the best and I get it now.
I always get everything that is for my highest good.
Everything good is coming to me easily and effortlessly.
I am divinely guided in all I do.
I expect good fortune every moment of my life.
envisage only that which is for my highest good. My highest good is manifesting in my life right now.
According to Staniforth, an American man who began repeating such affirmations won the state lottery within days. "Some people would call that a coincidence. Some would call it providence.
But whatever you call it, it's certainly worthy of further investigation," he says."There are affirmation techniques that empower you to achieve your desires and dreams in ways that appear to be pure luck. You can actually attract good luck in every area of your life - and make it look easy while doing it."
Steve Kaufmann, a former Canadian diplomat turned successful businessman, believes that "the greatest factor in any success I have had has come mainly from being lucky." He has drawn up a list of seven habits that people should practise to bring themselves luck:
#1 Be adventurous but do not bet the farm.
#2 Trust other people.
#3 Always play to your strengths.
#4 Be prepared to give more than you take.
#5 Keep fit in mind and body.
#6 Be a good communicator.
#7 Be true to your craft.
Many gamblers are only too quick to blame the much-maligned Lady Luck on their misfortune when, in fact, they should be blaming themselves. The fact is that nobody can rely on blind luck all the time. As poker columnist Mark Pilarski says: "The smarter you play, the luckier you'll be." Of course, luck is the major component in games of pure chance and there is no shortage of suppliers of amulets, mojos, charms, 'personalised' lucky numbers and jewellery which might (or might not) prompt the gods to smile on you.
Some people even rely on lucky numbers they randomly find inside fortune cookies. One week in 2005, 110 people won between $100,000-$500,000 each in the Powerball Lottery, which is played in 29 US states, when they all chose five numbers they found in a batch of fortune cookies mass- produced by a factory in Long Island, New York.
For those actively seeking good fortune, there is even an American company that will draw up your own astrology "luck chart" based on a "database of nearly five million rows of winning transit information," as well as reading the alignment of the planets. (Although the disclaimer in small print at the bottom adds the caveat: "These charts were developed for entertainment purposes only.")
TV presenter Noel Edmonds credits another New Age philosophy with a dramatic change in his own luck. Basically, it involves asking the universe for what you want... and getting it. The technique used is called the Cosmic Ordering Service and is expounded in a best-selling book by Barbel Mohr, a former journalist in Germany, who claims that the practice has transformed her fortunes.
Edmonds said that when he ordered up a new TV series after six years as an outcast in the entertainment wilderness, the cosmos obliged and came up with Deal Or No Deal, which has enjoyed phenomenal success. Edmonds concedes that people will think he has "gone away with the fairies" but says that it has worked for him and others.
Short of cosmic ordering, though, the challenge for the regular gambler is to improve their fortune by being better able to seize the opportunities that luck dishes out.
Fred Renzey, a high-stakes and successful US poker player, notes: "Actually, there is quite a bit of luck in gambling over short and mid-range periods, in fact luck will play a bigger part in your outcome than perhaps anything else.
"After 10 or 20 gambling sessions, luck affects things less, but it can still swing the overall bottom line quite a bit. Only after 200 or 300 gambling sessions will the luck get thoroughly sifted out and you'll be left with results that are a direct reflection of your skill."
Which brings us back to our ancient Roman philosopher Seneca. "Luck," he also noted all those years ago, "never made a man wise."
