In Chinese numerology, 8 is the luckiest number. So today, if you apply Chinese numerology to western dates, is the luckiest day in a long, long time. This is why the Olympics are kicking off today.

Given the heavy Chinese population at local cardrooms, should I expect the gamb00lers to be out in force today?

Let's find out. I'll be at Lucky Chances from early afternoon on, if anyone wants to come say hi or join in the fun.

What makes a person lucky? What makes an event lucky?

Recently I heard on NPR a story about an improbable rescue in Iraq. The version I heard on the air started with the line, "Aysahr Ahmed is a very lucky man." After listening to the story, I thought that characterization was really odd.

The reason he's lucky is that he was in a trunk of a car that was taking him off to be executed when a nearby US patrol came under fire from a sniper. The people in the car bailed out for fear of the Americans, who heard him making noise in the trunk and rescued him. Certainly his rescue was extremely lucky -- a series of unrelated events happened just at the right time and place to save him, all of which was very unlikely.

But is he a lucky man? He was in the trunk because he'd been kidnapped by a militia, and his family couldn't pay the ransom. He was kidnapped because he was trying to buy a black market passport to get out of the country, and went to a contact that a friend recommended, but his friend betrayed him to the militia. He was trying to flee the country because his cell phone store was burned down because he was Sunni in a mostly Shiite neighborhood. And when he called his family to tell them he was alive, they assumed it was a trap and refused to come pick him up.

If I told you someone had his store burned down and a friend sell him to kidnappers, who then nearly kill him, would you think he was lucky? I do notice that NPR changed the intro in the article to, "If someone who was a hostage for three terrifying days can be considered lucky, then Aysahr Ahmed is lucky." That, I can't really argue with.

Perception of luck is a weird thing. People see the last event, and not the earlier ones. When the board is AK32 and you have JJ and the other guy has AK, and you win with the J on the river, people say, "Wow, you got so lucky!" And they say that even when the money went in preflop, where the JJ was a favorite. If you win 57% of the time, and in fact you win... did you get lucky? Was it lucky that you were behind at some point in the hand and sucked out, more so than if you were ahead the whole way? I tend to think of all 5 cards as coming out at the same time if you're all in preflop, but almost nobody agrees with that perception.

I am guilty of the same kind of thinking in other contexts. A friend once told me about a car accident he was in, where he lost control on an icy road, spun across to the other side of the street, and was rear-ended by a large truck. "Wow," I said, "you're lucky you didn't get broadsided!"

I think that lucky has at least two distinct meanings. One is that you had unusually good fortune -- hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, or getting lost and asking for directions from someone who becomes the love of your life. The other is the sense that things could have been a lot worse, or perhaps that you weren't nearly as unlucky as you could have been.

The Dilbert Blog had a recent post that nicely exemplifies the second case. He tells the story of a man who went swimming, and got shot by some guy hunting rodents in the river. Luckily, the bullet broke on the swimmer's head instead of penetrating.

I can’t decide if the snorkeler was unlucky because he got shot, or lucky because the bullet hit the densest part of his skull. I’m an optimist, so I see his skull as half dense. You might be a pessimist and see the river as a shooting range that’s full of rats plus one guy who seriously needs a new hobby. You are entitled to your opinion.

The swimmer was clearly lucky in the second sense: generally if you get shot in the head, things aren't going to go well. Having the bullet shatter is very lucky. Getting shot at while you're innocently swimming along is clearly wildly unlucky.

It is interesting how the usage of lucky and unlucky differ. If Oprah got hit by a meteor tomorrow, I suspect people would say that her death was unlucky, but not as often that she herself was unlucky. However, we happily refer to a lottery winner as lucky, not just the fact of her having won the lottery.

Combine that with order effects, and things can be really confusing. If you hit the lottery and then die the next day, are you lucky, or unlucky? (And is that ironic?)

I've written before about luck; I firmly believe that luck largely defines our place in life and our success, on a global level. There are one or two events, like where and to whom you are born, over which you have no control but have a huge influence on your life.

However, I also think that when you meet someone who seems unusually unlucky, or unusually lucky, in the course of their daily lives, a much more likely explanation is that they are influencing their own luck. You have no ability to choose where you are born, but you have huge ability to influence the huge string of subsequent events that occur.

I started thinking about this when a friend showed me this interview about a researcher who was looking into how people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky viewed the world.

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

It's not just noticing things, either. It's a different view into the world:

They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there." What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people I know, in that things often just work out for me. I'd really like to think that it's due to my cheerful outlook (which I do have), or my excellent opportunity-spotting skills, which I don't necessarily have that I know of.

However, I do take exception to one of his claims, which is the sort of thing that you say when you're trying to sell a self-help book, which he is:

But can we acknowledge that sometimes bad stuff -- car accidents, natural disasters -- just happens? Sometimes it's purely bad, and there's nothing good about it.

I've never heard that from a lucky person.

I would take this research with a grain of salt, since he has products to sell based on the idea that people can learn to be lucky. But I think there's a truth at the heart of it, which is that luckiness is not just due to luck.

Of course, given the huge number of people in the world, there must be some people who really do have most things work poorly due to chance -- they are unlucky over the course of their whole life. However, the number of those people is vanishingly small, and given that we all know people who have any number of things go wrong (car accidents, losing jobs, breakups, purse snatching, etc.) and who disclaim responsibility. I have to think that the odds that they are making decisions that make those things more likely outweighs the chance that they are that 1-in-a-billion super unlucky person.

As I said, I consider myself to be unusually lucky compared to those around me. This year is the first time I've experienced events which I consider bad luck, really genuinely bad luck, that made me feel unlucky. This is the first year since junior high where I look back and negative events dominate my perception of the year. Those (I think) are transient, and I'll soon get back to my happy and lucky existence. But for now, I'm living proof that bad luck can happen to lucky people. This should lend hope to unlucky people too, for whom unusually good events that are so excellent that they can't cast them as bad should happen from time to time.

In a fit of mild writerly ambition, I wrote a piece a few months ago for NPR's This I Believe. They solicit essays about "the core beliefs that guide your daily life". So I wrote and submitted a piece about the nature of luck, and how it all evens out in the end... or doesn't.

Well, it's been a few months, and they haven't written, so I guess they weren't impressed. Anyway, the click contract specified that it was non-exclusive, so here it is, presented in all its glory.

( This I Believe )