The two types of luck that define life, sport and betting

Whoever wins the Premier League will be lucky. Lucky to have such good players, and lucky that those good players beat other equally good players. Separated by one point with two games to go, Manchester City and Liverpool are for all practical purposes identically superb.

How much of life is down to luck? All of it. We are the product of how we were born and what has happened to us since. Over none of that do we have any control.

Some say nature is more formative than nurture. Others say our environment has more impact than our genes. None of it do we choose. Everything comes down to luck.

But there are two types of luck – enduring and ephemeral. The first type we can recognise. We can try to quantify its effect. We will never be able to calculate its effect perfectly but some of our calculations may not be too bad. The second type surprises us. It comes from nowhere then just as quickly goes somewhere.

Ephemeral luck can scupper bets. I will come back to it. Let us start, though, with some examples of enduring luck.

Imagine two grown-ups. One was born with a gift that enabled them to become a professional footballer, the other was not. The first grown-up has been enduringly lucky.

Imagine two more grown-ups. Both had the potential to become professional footballers. One had a character – innate or shaped by experience – that enabled them to fulfil that potential. The other did not. The first of these grown-ups has been enduringly lucky.

Enduring luck is fate that has a lasting impact. Ephemeral luck is fate that has only a short-lived impact. It is when the ball hits a post and comes out then bounces back off the goalkeeper’s head and goes in the net.

Lionel Messi has benefited from enduring luck to become the best footballer there is. His prodigious good fortune will probably help to take Barcelona past Liverpool in the Champions League. On Wednesday at Camp Nou in a semi-final first leg Messi scored twice and Barcelona won 3-0.

Back to the Premier League. City have 92 points, Liverpool 91. City have scored 80 per cent of the goals in their games, Liverpool 81 per cent. City have had more shots (644 compared with 552) and faced fewer (224 compared with 283). But Liverpool have eased themselves in to shoot from better positions and forced opponents to shoot from worse positions.

There are no grounds for concluding that either team is in any way less remarkable than the other. I would still think so if Liverpool lost their last two games and City won the title by seven points, or if City lost their last two games and Liverpool won the title by five points.

If either team do drop any points we will be told that pressure has finally got to them. It might have done, or it might not.

City or Liverpool could drop points because they do not play as well as they usually do, or because their opponents play better than they usually do, or both. But there is another possibility. It is that in one game their shots just do not go in.

City average one goal every seven shots. Last Wednesday in the Manchester derby at United they had eight shots. With eight shots City’s commonest total will be one goal. At Old Trafford they scored twice and won 2-0. But they might not have scored at all. The shots that went in from Bernardo Silva and Leroy Sane could easily not have gone in.

How often when City have eight shots will they not score? In one game out of three. City could have failed to score against United. They could have played the same way, worked the same number of shots from the same positions, and drawn 0-0.

When two teams have been blessed with identical skills any contest between them that must be won will be decided by something else, a difference in passing fortune that helps one team and hurts the other. City and Liverpool may be the best English teams ever. That is their enduring good luck. And ours – we can watch. One of them will win the Premier League, the other will not. That comes down to ephemeral luck.

How luck can work two ways in betting

One of the things that can go wrong when betting is that we mistake ephemeral luck for enduring luck.

Enduring luck is this player being more skillful than that player. It is this club having more money than that club, which has enabled them to bring together better players.

But when watching a team or sifting through their stats we can see things that look enduring but are not – things that we think will be repeated but are not. In every team’s results there will be a lot of their enduring luck but also some ephemeral luck.

This is the first way we can be confused by the two types of luck. There is a second way.

Suppose you can separate the wheat from the chaff as well as anybody can. You can weigh the ability of two teams as accurately as humanly possible.

When the teams play each other the result could be influenced, perhaps decided, by some one-off accident. This team’s top scorer could twist their ankle in the first attack. The referee, with or without the doubtful benefit of VAR, could give a penalty on a borderline call that another referee would not have given.

Ephemeral luck during a match is as likely to help the worst team as it is to help the best team. So it has a levelling-down effect. The best team are less likely to win than their ability alone would suggest, and the worst team are more likely to win than their ability alone would suggest.

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