I just submitted Part V, the final part of my series on Strategic Differences between Limit and No-Limit play. I am going to write a few non-series columns for a change.

One I will write soon will be about luck. Actually about good luck. Poker players never feel they are having good luck, only normal luck (in which their wins come from their superior play) and bad luck (in which their losses come from the inferior play of their opponents).

I was reminded about this recently in a conversation with my friend Igor, who was having excellent results (well deserved). I postulated that perhaps he was having excellent luck, and he replied that he did not remember any significant suck-outs or hitting three-outers. I am sure he was right.

But good luck in poker can be well hidden. As a mediocre example, suppose you play live and average 35 hands per hour. In a six-hour session you should get pocket aces one time (roughly, of course). Would you really notice if you get AA 1.2 times per six hours (note this is 20% more often than typical). If you play 5 days a week, that means you will hold AA 6 times instead of 5.

Over 3 months, this is 12 more AA than usual. If in general you average 10 bets per pocket A you hold (just for an example), this is 120 bets extra over that time. So over the 360 hours, you have picked up .33 big bets per hour more than you should from this subtle effect alone.

I know you PokerTracker guys will tell me you know how many AA you hold. But you don’t know if you make 10% more flushes than normal, or if they hold up 1.2 times as often as they theoretically should, or if the pots you win are 1.2 times larger than normal.

This is why poker is such a long term game, and why guys who play mediocre poker can run good for weeks and months while thinking they are playing well. And these guys are in the worst trouble, because when things start to go bad, as they always do, they do not change anything because they were convinced by the artificial winning streak that they were playing well.