Good Luck, Mr. Behrendt!

In the seventh grade, I had the most uptight teacher of my entire academic career. Mr. Behrendt was an English teacher, who had some sort of nervous breakdown or other psychological collapse just two years after I had his class. He came back to the high school (I had gone to the affiliate middle school, where he once taught) a few years later when I was a senior. He seemed kind of defeated and dead inside, when he returned. (He's still there, actually, apparently after another hiatus and returned in 2000.)

Anyway, this guy was, when I knew him, obsessed with structure. You'd get detention for looking at your watch during class, or if you threw away crumpled paper in the trash (this was before my friends and I had started the campus recycling program). That's right; he got angry if you made the effort to crumple paper into a ball. He gave us a lecture once of how "trash doesn't deserve that much attention" and that you should fold it in half and throw it away, but never waste the effort of crumpling the paper. Strange fellow.

About the only thing he ever said that made sense to me was his obsession with never saying "good luck" before a test or a quiz. He said that luck had nothing to do with academic success, and that to wish someone luck was an insult, because a good student shouldn't need luck if he knew the material. I took this deeply to heart.

I despised many of my classmates, because they seemed to do exactly what Mr. Behrendt said was impossible: they were successful through luck. They came from rich families. (It was an expensive college preparatory high school that my parents could barely afford, so I was one of the poorest students, even coming from the lower middle class.) My classmates had life handed to them. They cheated on tests, just "lucky" enough to be next to someone they could intimidate into showing them the answers. When they got in trouble, their parents bailed them out of bad spots; they were lucky to have influential parents.

This idea that luck had nothing to do with success was central to my thinking and attitude for many years. In fact, I didn't even begin to examine this concept until I started playing poker for higher stakes. What I actually see now in the world is that luck is a central factor in a lot of success. There is chance involved in being in the right place at the right time. You can get lucky to meet the right person to help your career along. There is even luck in academics, even if you study hard. I got a 4 (out of 5) in my high school Advanced Placement Literature exam because I was lucky enough to have done my poetry research project on Emily Dickinson, and one of the three essay questions was about one of her poems. I was a huge underdog to get above a 3 on that exam, because Literature was my worst subject. But, I got lucky and "drew out" on the AP Examiners.

I have an evolving relationship with luck. As Tom McEvoy says regarding tournament play, "you have to play skilled enough to give yourself a chance to get lucky". Ring games are different, but the general principle is the same. It's sobering to think that Mr. Behrendt, whose own life collapse showed the perils of obsessive control and ignoring the luck factor, was just dead wrong. We can, as he suggested to my seventh grade class, tell each other to "Do Well" rather than wish each other "Good Luck" in poker. But, like life, poker is game that requires both a substantial amount of skill and luck; we need both. Sometimes, luck trumps the skill, and sometimes, hopefully over the long term, the skill can trump the luck.

I'm on the downside of that right now. But on the other hand, most of my bankroll is gone because I was "lucky" enough to find the best apartment I've lived in my whole life, and I used that money as part of what made it possible to live here. I am going to stay focused and keep in mind, as I look out the window at my landlord's beautifully kept city garden, that it is thanks, in part, to some well-played poker and a little luck that I can live in such a nice place.