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ood or bad, and about two score of cases where both good and bad are counted together. We have shown that, without imagining any antecedent luckiness, good or bad, there must be what, to the players themselves, and to all who heard of or saw what had happened to them, would seem examples of the most marvelous luck. Supposing, as we have, that the game is one of pure chance, so that skill cannot influence it and cheating is wholly prevented, all betting men would be disposed to say, ' These twenty are persons whose good luck can be depended on; we must certainly back them for the next game: and those other twenty are hopelessly unlucky; we may lay almost any odds against their winning.'
But it should hardly be necessary to say that that
which must happen cannot be regarded as due to luck. There must be some set of twenty or so out of our twenty millions who will win every game of twenty; and the
circumstance that this has' befallen such and such persons no more means that they are lucky, and is no more .a matter to be marveled at, than the circumstance that one person has drawn the prize ticket out of twenty at a lottery is marvelous, or signifies that he would be always lucky in lottery drawing.
The question whether those twenty persons who had so far been persistently lucky would be better worth backing than the rest of the twenty millions, and especially than the other twenty who had persistently lost, would in reality be disposed of at the twenty-first trial in a very decisive way: for of the former score about half would loses while of the latter score about half would win. Among a thousand persons who had backed the former set at odds there would be a heavy average of loss; and the like among a thousand persons who had laid against the latter set at odds
It may be said this is assertion only, that experience shows that some men are lucky and others unlucky at games or other matters depending purely on chance, and it must be safer to back the former and to wager against the latter. The answer is that the matter has been tested over and over again by experience, with the result that, as a priori reasoning had shown, some men are bound to be fortunate again and again in any great number of trials, but that these are no more likely to be fortunate on fresh trials than others, including those who have been most unfortunate. The success of the former shows only that they have been, not that they
are lucky; while the failure of the others shows that they have failed, nothing more.
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