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Down on her luck and fearful for the future, the writer decided to chance her arm. She soon found it was the perfect gameplan
People process change in different ways. It is discomfiting to realise just how little control we have over the direction our lives can take. A day passes, a disease we never even knew existed strikes, and the world is suddenly changed. In its face, some turn spiritual. Some turn philosophical. Some turn to the hardest science they can in search of some semblance of ordered explanation. I turned in a direction I would never have previously imagined, to a pursuit that had not only never caught my interest but that I was only vaguely aware even existed: poker.
The more I think about the nature of luck, the more I realise just how big a hand it has had in every single aspect of my existence. As a child, I had perhaps the greatest luck of my life: my parents left the Soviet Union, opening to me a world of opportunity I would never otherwise have had. The sheer, beautiful chance of it all! Just imagine, for a second, if they had stayed. How different my entire subsequent existence would be. As a teen, I used every ounce of skill I had to excel academically and become part of the first generation in my family to make it to college in the United States – but, oh, the luck involved in getting into that college in the first place. How many people who’d worked just as hard as I did would never make it that far because of a happenstance of birth or a quirk of the admissions committee? Just how much of my life could I take credit for, and how much was just simple dumb luck? Continue reading...