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those who start gambling will be either lucky or unlucky (given that the casino has the advantage, a slightly greater number will be unlucky). The lucky ones, with the feeling of having been selected by destiny, will continue gambling; the others, discouraged, will stop and will not show up in the sample. They will probably take up, depending on their temperaments, bird-watching, Scrabble, piracy, or other pastimes. Those who continue gambling will remember having been lucky as beginners. The dropouts, by definition, will no longer be part of the surviving gamblers' community. This explains beginner's luck.

First, consider the gambler's fallacy, named after roulette players who believe that a streak of reds or blacks from a roulette wheel is more likely to end than to continue with the next spin. Suppose you see ten blacks in a row. Those who fall victim to this fallacy expect the next spin to have a higher chance of coming up red, when in fact the underlying probability of each spin hasn't changed. For this fallacy to be true, there would have to be some kind of corrective force in the roulette wheel that is bringing the results closer to parity. That's simply not the case. It's sometimes called the Monte Carlo fallacy because in a widely cited case in August 18, 1913, a casino in Monte Carlo had an improbable run of twenty-six blacks! There is only a 1 in 137 million chance of this happening in any twenty-six-ball sequence. However, all other twenty-six-spin sequences are equally rare; they just aren't all as memorable.