15 Highway

Unlucky in cards – lucky in love

By Charles L Harmon

Do you play cards? Whether you do or don’t you’ve probably heard one of the popular superstitions from the hundreds of card superstitions. “Unlucky at cards, lucky in love” is one superstition I’ve heard a lot, especially when I was in the military. There I either played cards with fellow soldiers or sometimes just watched others play. Many times I wondered about the superstition, but never gave it any serious thought.

In card playing you often hear statements of how lucky someone is, especially when someone’s winning streak seems just too long for any skill to be responsible or when good cards come up many times in a row for any one person.

Unlucky at cards, lucky in love seems to imply that one cannot have good luck in both situations. The logic, however, seems to ignore that cards and love are two entirely different things. Nevertheless, the adage has been around, who knows how long.

Now, it is something to think about, especially when one considers the reverse applies and is an instance of a not too common occurrence in superstitions. For some, the exact reverse of being unlucky in cards leads to the notion that if one is lucky in love they are therefore unlucky in cards. The superstition seems to only apply in card playing.

Where did this reversible superstition come from? It seems to be the common notion that success contains an element of luck. I think most people believe this to one extent or another. The superstitious association of cards and love is due to the fact that since most people do believe that success does contain some element of luck, that luck cannot work two ways at once.

Of course love, or the love urge, has never been satisfactorily explained, and likewise, theories of luck and winning in games of chance are not clearly associated with each other. This leaves room for all sorts of thought regarding luck. It can be quite confusing.

Therefore success or failure in games, or in love, is persistently attributed to that incomprehensible thing, or something, we call luck. Luck is somewhat easier to quantify in cards, although the association is tenuous at best, but there is the “law of probabilities” which could be said to have some minuscule, effect on games of chance.

That law however, actually applies to a large number of events and in reality it would be very unlikely one could ever reach such large number of events, hands in card games, in any reasonable period of time.

For all practical purposes it must be taken for granted that luck, or some element of luck, good or bad, works in all things, at all times. More than that, it must also be taken for granted that when many people believe in something, believing makes it so. Read the self-improvement literature, mystics, and psychics often say the same thing – that believing makes it so, or our thoughts are things.

Despite logic and facts, belief in good or bad luck has a tremendous influence all over the world because of the thoughts and actions of all those people.

So the superstition lives on and the debate or question of luck can be interpreted more than one way. But for our purpose here let’s stick to the old adage – Unlucky at cards, lucky in love.