TysonTime

String of Luck February 5, 2008

My wife and I were out on the town Saturday night with another couple (Rob and Carissa) with whom we recently became friends. With the racket of dueling pianos ricocheting about our heads and the uneven haze brought on by far too many diet cokes in our stomachs, Rob and I managed to connect on a spiritual level. Well, sort of.

There is a fantastic book written in 1970 called Ringworld, by Larry Niven. In this book, aliens (known as “puppeteers” because they meddle in human kind and have two heads) have introduced a breeding lottery for the population control of humans. This lottery implies that to have children is a lucky thing, and the aliens’ theory was that a family composed of a string of lottery winners, say 5 generations, would be unnaturally lucky.

There is a far away “planet” that the cowardly puppeteers want to travel to that is actually a man-made ring around a sun, with a circumference roughly equal to Earth’s own orbit. For the dangerous journey, they select an old wise human, a battle ready yet tame-enough-to-be-civil alien called “Speaker to Animals” and the luckiest of all humans, a girl named Tila. Tila was born of this string of luck and also had no experience with unlucky events in her life.

The bottom line is that this girl was so lucky that it was her luck that drove the aliens to pick her, then to crash the ship, and then to take her to a town on the Ringworld where she finds her only true love. The girl was so lucky that she found her love at the expense of everyone else. Her luck was hers and nobody else’s. This brings us to Rob and me.

Rob insists, and I believe him, that he is unnaturally lucky. In fact, he is apparently famous for getting parking spaces that are impossibly perfect during impossible times. He will say, “I will get the spot closest to the entrance to the ballpark, even though we are late.” Everyone in the car will hear this, and sure enough, he drives right into the spot he fully expected to get!

I am the same. Ask my friend Seth G. At poker one night (Texas Hold ‘Em), he was out and I was in. I am known (though less-so than the great Cliff Boro) for winning on luck and hitting big on the river. I told Seth that I play with heart and that is a good bet. He didn’t buy it. So, I was dealt two hearts and knew for sure I would hit a flush. I leaned over to Seth and said, “This will be a flush, and I will bet as such.” The flop? A heart, and spade and a club. I bet the table, drawing them out still on a flush of hearts. The turn, a heart. I bet more, drawing the table out further. Big pot now! And the river? You guessed it, a heart. I knew all along.

So, I am lucky, Rob is lucky. Is Cliff lucky? No. Crazy, reckless at poker, a workaholic and a saint to everyone. But I don’t think Cliff is lucky as in this innate string of luck. Sorry Cliff. This string of luck is about foreseeing the positive outcome… and about that foresight almost never being wrong. This doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen to me, but it does mean that if I feel something is good, it will be.

I know, I know.  Probability doesn’t permit this. You can get 20 heads in a row, and the probability of the next flip hitting heads is still 50/50. But I have a long and storied history proving the opposite, and so does Rob, proving to me that some other physical string of “luck” is tied to some of us that is a matter of fact, not a matter of unbridled statistics.

So, do you have it? You’d know if you do.