I am not one who places too much emphasis on luck but last Saturday’s poker night has proven to be our (hkgirl & I) luckiest night ever. Based on my 20+ years of gambling experience, I have never won money. I lose the big hands and win only the small hands. The best I can do is break even for the night. But then last Saturday happened. It started with hkgirl getting a 4 of a kind hand and a straight flush within a span of 10-15 deals. An hour later, I had my first ever 4 of a kind hand and started winning money. Then the night passes by and we are at the final hand.

Final hand. No holds barred. I had a 9 and 5 suited in hearts. The order might be a bit off now but the flop completed my flush with A 3 and 4 in hearts. I forgot what the turn was but guess what the river came out to be. 2 of hearts. Straight flush. My first ever straight flush hand. Same night as my first ever 4 of a kind hand. And also the same night it happened to hkgirl.

You go look at poker probabilities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability)
Straight Flush 0.0311%
4 of a kind 0.168%
and you cant explain / describe the scenario of getting all 2 straight flush and 2 4 of a kind hands in the same night other than one word – luck. It feels as if the powers that be decided to pay back all 20+ years worth of luck debt in one night.

I was going to write a bit more on how you need skills to utilize luck but then when you are that lucky, why does skills even matter?

For the sake of completing the story, my straight flush won me the hand over someone who had an A K flush and thought he had the winning hand (99% of the time he would be correct to assume that). I still feel terribly sorry for make him lose that big hand.

...in the same time (given my history of bad luck in gambling), I also see myself losing in similar fashion within the near future

IT Crowd

Technology has helped made communication easier. I still remember 10-15 years ago when I could only use letter and phone calls to call my parents back in Hong Kong. Now living in the same city, we email more than we call each other, let alone sending a letter. A twitter or facebook status update can easily let all your friends know what and how you are doing. Before? Sorry, there wasn’t such a thing. I look back and things were working fine; yet within this 10-15 years time, we have evolved into a specie that depends our lives on technology. From mobile phone & blackberries, email & word document, to Youtube & twitter, people cant imagine their lives without any of these technology nowadays. What was meant to be a tool for users is now holds the users as mental hostages. Yes the web has improved our communication and speed of many errands in our daily lives but it has also increased our lazy time and ultimately decreased our productivity. Assuming that our lifespan is 100 years old, an hour daily of aimingless browse the web / on face book / updating twitter etc results in (roughly) 4 years and 2 months total time on that. Isn’t that a bit… too much?

Next time when you go on a holiday or even on the upcoming Sunday, just try to not bring any of that technology with you. You may find that you have a lot more free time than usual.