Odds are against you, you know that. They're stacked against everyone, posters warn you, at the casino, buying a lottery ticket, even at the bar to just have a drink, warnings plastered on cigarette boxes. Everything is out to get you. The only thing you can do is never play the game.
And - even then, odds are certain you're still going to lose.
But then, look at how much you've already won?
The odds, unimaginably minute, infinitesimal, that you even exist. From amoeba's and protozoans in primordial swamps your ancestors munched, evolved, slaughtered and fornicated until you were born. An entire planet, through multiple extinctions, how many times over, why, the DNA alone of every thing that had to survive to evolve you would wind twice around the known universe.
It puts things in perspective. It's enough, really, when you consider the odds, to make everyone a gambler.
And then there's those "glitches" - like Ms. Hazel Ruffles improbable whist hand. That time in Bulgaria, the lottery, same numbers, different order, twice in a row. Bulgaria, you laugh, but what are the chances? What are the odds?
Monte Carlo, August, 1913: 26 consecutive black spins on a roulette wheel. Chances of that happening: 1 in 136,823,184. You had to be there. Or Laura Buxton's balloon message. Mike McDermott's twice lucky lottery numbers. This is not unusual we're told. This is simply the law of improbably large numbers in action, like the infinite numbers of monkeys on an infinitude of typewriters would eventually, most certainly type out, without error, the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Which is unquestionably true, it happened, only not in the way described, for after a few million years some of the monkeys became men and one of them did indeed type out the complete works of Shakespeare...