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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Chance and Luck

  • Jared Poley, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    Luck, Leisure, and the Casino in Nineteenth-Century Europe
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 111-138

  • Summary

    The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.