Born Lucky



""I survived the Battle of Yavin. I survived the Battle of Hoth. Hell- Just a couple of weeks ago I blew up the Death Star during the Battle of Endor. The reason I'm still breathing when a lot of other good Rebel pilots aren't? Maybe it's because I'm better. Or maybe I'm just lucky.""

- Wedge Antilles

A character so mind-bogglingly lucky that it defies all chance. They'll win every contest or lottery they enter (in especially extreme cases, they don't even need to, the winning ticket will somehow come to them). Usually a weak explanation is given for this luck, attributing it to some kind of supernatural force but not going into any kind of detail. Despite the trope title, this luck does not necessarily begin at birth.

Sometimes the character actually dislikes their luck, because it makes things boring or alienates friends, or if it's the kind of luck that involves their friends dying instead of themselves.

The extent of this luck can vary greatly; sometimes the lucky individual has to be careful with taking advantage of it, lest it run out at the worst possible time. Other times it applies all the time and can get a little ridiculous.

Often some kind of Amplifier Artifact can bestow this super-luck. If Clap Your Hands If You Believe is a large force in the series, expect it to be a Magic Feather in the end. If the artifact in question follows Equivalent Exchange and gives you bad luck if you lose it, then it can cross into Artifact of Death or Artifact of Doom. Of course, if your luck is dependent enough on said artifact in these ways then it may not count as this trope anymore (See Winds of Destiny Change).

In games, this may be represented with by a Luck Stat or Luck Manipulation Mechanic. Compare Winds of Destiny Change, which generally has no subconscious element (i.e., wielders have to want something to happen). See also The Fool, who frequently has luck but it's never quite to this level. See also The Magic Poker Equation. May be related to Born Winner. Contrast Idiot Houdini and Lucky Bastard, which is a villain or otherwise unsympathetic character who continues to succeed primarily because of luck. The opposite is Born Unlucky. A character using a Two-Headed Coin in coin flipping may also appear to be this until The Reveal.

Anime and Manga
"Man: Congratulations! You win a trip for one to a health salon. Nodoka: Isn't that wonderful? Akane: Oh, I'm usually lucky at these things."
 * Millefeuille Sakuraba of Galaxy Angel has this as her defining trait. In the second episode, a meteor smashed the casino she was playing in to give her the win. That's just one of many instances of her extreme luck. This was later balanced by a recurring and plot-convenient Conservation of Luck.
 * In the games, Millefeuille's luck isn't quite so outrageous, but even though the anime exaggerates everything to incredible proportions, it's still pretty close; such as winning the grand prize in a supermarket sweepstakes SIX TIMES IN A ROW. At the end of her path in the first game, she retires from the Angels, believing that she's used up all her luck... but it and she are back for the next one.
 * JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
 * The character PocoLoco in Part 7 has this power which works by having a spirit tell him stuff to do that may sound stupid until the good luck factors in.
 * In Part 3, there's a character with a book that can predict the future - and it's explicitly mentioned that anything that appears in the book will come to pass, no exceptions. But it's completely ineffective against the heroes, who escape unscathed thanks to a series of lucky Prophecy Twists that become increasingly implausible - the biggest would have to be when the book shows a picture of the main character having bullets being shot through him...and then it turns out those bullets were shot through the picture itself.
 * Akagi
 * The mahjong genius, Akagi Shigeru. His game style involves a shocking level of insight into how his opponents think and a degree of luck that could only be called godly. He plays like a drunk with a deathwish, but he never loses.
 * Washizu possesses this too, as his luck is referenced as a supernatural ability on multiple occasions. It's what gets him
 * Likewise, the eponymous mahjong anime heroine Miyanaga Saki has "superhuman luck" as, quite literally, her SUPERPOWER. Ridiculous amounts of luck seem to be very common for most of the characters, since they routinely pull off hands that have about one chance in a lifetime to happen, but Saki is especially outrageous, since she can apparently pull off one-in-a-billion-chance hands almost literally at will.
 * Subverted in the final arc of (and really, throughout) Kaiji. In the final gamble of the first series,
 * Sakura from Tsubasa possesses this trait to a remarkable extent, and is aware of it. At one point later in the manga,
 * Yu-Gi-Oh
 * Yugi's puzzle shuffles cards as well as minds, making Yugi's miraculous draws not so much luck as Ancient Egyptian cheating. Also, Joey Wheeler pretty much wins most of his duels by being on the good side of luck-based cards. Time Wizard only failed once compared to the countless times it saved him from the brink of defeat.
 * Joey's actually a bit of a subversion, ironically enough, as he's been subject to many useless card draws. Not to mention his luck based cards are more supplemental than anything to his lesser deck, poor duelist that he is, though he does manage to use them in inventive ways, like against Yami Malik. As for Yugi, or rather Yami, the Millennium Puzzle's card divining powers only kick in during the Ceremonial Duel.
 * Played much straighter with Ryuichi Fuji, a Game Master whose luck extends to being able to randomly walk into a restaurant and win a prize letting him get free meals, press random buttons on a keypad and get the code, break for pool and have all of the balls hit someone, and win at Russian Roulette (with only one chamber empty).
 * Naruto
 * Naruto Uzumaki is shown to have unnaturally high luck while he and Jiraiya are looking for Tsunade. He wins big by putting a coin he picked up off the ground into a slot machine (anime had him try a lottery and win that instead). His chakra training also had the inadvertent side effect of blowing dice Jiraiya was using to bet for information into just the total number to allow him to win.
 * Naruto is so lucky during his time spent with Jiraiya, that just walking remotely close to nearby gaming vendors and casinos result in everyone winning.
 * Subverted when Jiraiya uses his SANNIN-LEVEL NINJA SKILLS to win every carnival game he wants.
 * This trope has arguably been deconstructed with many characters who appear to be gifted, and therefore perfect, such as Kakashi.
 * Tenchi Muyo: Inspector Oblivious Mihoshi Kuramitsu's sheer blind luck is the main reason why she's not only still in the GP, but is actually considered a distinguished officer -- she's simply too much of The Ditz to get it the other way. On the other hand, considering that she is, it's hardly surprising that It Runs in The Family.
 * Seina Yamada from Tenchi Muyo GXP is an inversion verging on being a double inversion: his bad luck extends to those who cross his path, such as the Space Pirates he tends to attract... and also the Unwanted Harem, to some degree.
 * Sakurako of Mahou Sensei Negima. Her luck is so well known that, when the Muggle part of Negi's class found themselves unable to find where Negi's travelling party went, they relied on Sakurako to randomly lead them in the right direction, which she successfully did... despite the fact that it's a location so magically hidden, that a normal human has a lottery's chance of accidentally stumbling across it. It's a Running Gag that whenever the 3A girls are betting on something, she wins, no matter how unlikely the eventual outcome was. Word of God says that should she ever get a pactio, it would boost the luck of whoever she chooses.
 * Irresponsible Captain Tylor: Justy Ueki Tyler is a lazy, incompetent, bumbling idiot, and as the name might suggest, he is the most irresponsible man to ever hold the rank of "Captain." He also happens to be the luckiest man alive. He gets out of near-impossible situations by nothing but luck (unless he's really just that good.). At his bad days he only escapes from overwhelming fleets; on his better days he sinks them. Without any weapon. Or fighter. Damn, they sink themselves.
 * To Aru Majutsu no Index
 * Touma has the opposite problem. His special power destroys his own luck so he's born unlucky, if you don't count his Unwanted Harem.
 * Played straight when he finds out that has this and rightfully angsts over it.
 * In Cowboy Bebop, Faye Valentine's debut episode set her up to look like this. A casino hires her, claiming she's this ancient lady-luck figure who can win every game she's ever played and never cheated. "She was just a born winner." It appears for a while Faye is indeed the woman they speak of, as when she works the blackjack table, she takes everyone's cash almost effortlessly, even robbing our hero Spike of every chip (save one). Then Spike nonchalantly points out that she was cheating. As the series goes on, we see Faye is anything but lucky.
 * In Franken Fran, a man on death row who defied multiple attempts to execute him is posited to be just that "fortunate".
 * The lead character from ION. She has known a jinx since she was little that when you say it, you land in a fortunate situation. She uses it often.
 * Shinji Nagumo from the Tokyo Babylon OAV is so lucky that he has survived many events in which he should've kicked the bucket. Unfortunately, he's very aware of it, and uses it to set up different scenarios and kill whoever stands in his way to the top of the enterprise he works in...
 * One Piece: Monkey D. Luffy has been described as having the Devil's Luck. While the lightning bolt that saved him on the execution platform may have been 's doing, or not, he's survived any number of encounters due to extreme good fortune.
 * Axis Powers Hetalia: It's not a good idea to place bets against Hong Kong. It Makes Sense in Context.
 * Elie in Rave Master, to the point that letting her loose in a casino is a genuine way for the gang to make a large amount of money fast.
 * [[Ranma Â½: Whenever Akane Tendo enters a raffle or some other competition based solely on luck, she always wins first prize.


 * The whole category of "Abnormals" in Medaka Box. The basic criteria of which is to be lucky enough to open a door with a randomly changing password by entering random numbers. On the first try, with no hesitation.

Comic Books

 * Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck's cousin. His luck goes to absolutely ridiculous extremes, much to Donald's dislike. Much of the character's humor comes from watching the Rube Goldberg Device of Deus Ex Machina events that make everything go his way. Worst of all, he revelled in his luck, knew everything was coming to him without any effort, and thought working was beneath him, which made the character all the more obnoxious. At one point it's implied he's lucky because the Goddess of Luck fell in love with him. It would certainly explain why his luck doesn't work when it comes to gain Daisy Duck's love. In the Don Rosa canon It Runs in The Family - Gladstone's mother Daphne is/was ridiculously lucky, as well. This was in turn based on a lucky hex symbol a traveling painter had placed on the family barn as a gift for the new child.
 * Perhaps the most spectacular example is when Gladstone gets saddled with a contract to move a house from the top of one mountain to the top of another: A hurricane comes by and moves the house from the mountain to the other with no damage whatsoever to it.
 * Subverted in one comic where Donald and his nephews dig up every square inch of a beach, looking for a sultan's lost ruby (with a massive reward attached). Gladstone just lays there and waits for his luck to bring it to him. At the end of the day, a cop busts Donald for digging up the beach, Gladstone goes home... only leaving Huey, Dewey, and Louie to dig in the one exact spot they never searched - the one Gladstone was laying on. It's right there. The ruby was directly under Gladstone the whole time, and he never found it because he was waiting for it to fall into his hands. And guess who ended up as a chauffeur to Donald and his nephews...
 * Zigzagged twelve ways until Sunday in one comic, where he and Donald both enter a fishing contest. Gladstone quickly catches what appears to be the largest fish in the water with no effort at all, while Donald's rod breaks. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, meanwhile, run into a fellow who knows where far bigger fish swim (he himself only didn't win the contest because he'd already won plenty of times). The nephews catch a fish larger than Gladstone's and attach it to Donald's boat, making it look like Donald will win. As everyone is heading for shore though, Donald's boat is hit by a runaway speedboat, knocking his fish into Gladstone's boat and letting Gladstone win the contest. Donald gets the last laugh though, when it turns out that the daughter of a millionaire was trapped on the speedboat and had a large reward for whoever could save her. So while Gladstone's luck got him to win the contest, Donald ended up getting a much bigger reward than the prize.
 * His annoying lucky streak extends to beyond the pages as well. When the Italian branch of Disney (it actually happened) got the idea to playfully point out which crimes the Disney characters would have committed if they were real-life characters, guess who was the only one who got away with a clean criminal record?
 * In one comic he did have a "charm" of some sort, kept in a vault that he never let anyone see inside.
 * Lots of his "unlucky" moments are just benefits in disguise:
 * In one Don Rosa story, a contest involved catching entries tied to balloons and when a balloon flies above Gladstone, he refuses to exert himself reaching for it, reasoning that if it was the winning entry, the balloon would pop and drop the entry into his hand, which actually happened. He lost the raffle because Donald's nephew persuaded him to switch the tickets (Donald had gotten the rest of them), but his consolation prize (a year's supply of oolated squiggs) included a fish that swallowed a 10 carat diamond and the main prize was a cruise ship that went icebound
 * He was unlucky to be discounted as Scrooge McDuck's heir since Scrooge couldn't respect someone who never worked for a living. But he never needs any money, he gets everything by luck, for someone like him Scrooge's money would be more trouble than it's worth.
 * Inverted in a Don Rosa comic. Due to being struck by lightning on his birthday while in front of a magic symbol in his youth, Gladstone is always phenominally unlucky on his birthdays. He spends the entire comic trying to get away from attending, but circumstances bring him to his own party, where he admits the truth. When a lightning storm suddenly shows up he manages to undo the curse, and prevent Donald from gaining luck powers of his own.
 * And on top of that, his luck occasionally got him into more trouble than he would have been in without it. One story involved a treasure in the Amazon, and he decided he needed a helicopter to get to it before Donald could. He got there, but he didn't know that the tribe native to the area attached negative superstitions to helicopters. (Yes, they played with this character a lot. As a general rule, Gladstone's luck works at its best when he just let it flow. When Gladstone asks for something specific, most of the time it come back to bite him. Lazing around is his most profit activity.)


 * This is the sum of the Marvel Universe character Longshot's powers. After appearing in a miniseries of his own, he was grabbed by Chris Claremont for a stint in the X-Men, despite not being a mutant (he's a genetically engineered alien and his luck powers are magical, but the X-Men were never picky about members). Longshot's luck was extremely strong but limited: it could only be used for altruistic purposes.
 * Actually, later on he was revealed to be, in fact, a mutant. Despite his powers being genetically engineered, his free will is an unexpected engineering error. Despite that not being a regular genetic mutation, in a race of genetically engineered beings an unexpected error is nothing else then a mutation.
 * The Ultimate Universe version has even better luck with no such restriction. In his first appearance, a man is about to kill him with a machete and is suddenly struck by lightning. On a clear day. Without damaging anything in the area.
 * The only one who has ever defeated him was Scarlet Witch, a mutant who also has the power to manipulate luck.
 * Domino from Marvel Comics, (best known from her X-Force days); her probability-altering powers are not as strong as Longshot, things just tend to fall in her favor.
 * It could be pretty powerful sometimes, though. For example, there was a time when somebody put a revolver to her head and pulled the trigger. Six times. All six bullets failed to fire. The odds of this actually happening are, needless to say, astronomically low.
 * Unlike most of the examples here, she can actively trigger her powers as well. She once had to infiltrate a mansion to open a safe. She had no idea what the combination of the safe was, so she just entered the telephone number of one of her ex-boyfriends (who had nothing to do with the mission or the safe). She is not surprised when it opened the safe.
 * She doesn't actively trigger her powers in the sense that she can turn the luck on or off, it's more like she has to be aware of what she is affecting the probability of. From TOW, "if debris falling from the sky was about to hit her in the head, she would still be hurt if she stood still. However, if she tried to avoid it, she would move perfectly to avoid each and every piece about to hit her."
 * Same thing was used in a Judge Dredd story, when a psyker in a Circus of Fear manipulated the odds so that her boss, seeing the six misfires, angrily tried the same on himself. Bang.
 * Black Cat has (well, sometimes) an interesting inversion of this: She gave OTHER people bad luck. Good when it affects your enemies, bad when it affects your friends...
 * A largely defunct American manga, Pantheon High, had a character with this kind of luck because he was the son of the Japanese goddess of luck, Benten. (Un)fortunately he had no guarantee whatsoever of getting lucky in ways that are actually useful to his situation. When he and two girls are threatened by the World Snake, one of the girls remarks that he might end up beating the snake, or he might end up making out with both of them at once.
 * It could be argued that Groo the Wanderer fits this trope - all the bad things happen around him, afflicting everybody else, never Groo himself.
 * Spirou and Fantasio fit this trope whenever they appear in the same story as Don Vito Cortizone, alias "Vito La Déveine" (French for Hard Luck Vito). In the comic book featuring Vito's first appearance, he chooses them because of their luck.
 * Spawny Get (Geordie English for Lucky Bastard) from Viz embodies this trope, typically having a piece of moderate bad luck that causes a piece of very, very good luck. In one strip, he is carrying a ten-pound note into a bookmaker's to place a bet when he slips on a turd; he lets go of the money and yells "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt!" The ten-pound note flies into the hand of the bookmaker, who assumes Spawny Get is placing a bet on a horse called "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt". Which wins. At odds of 1,000-1.
 * This was explicitly the only power of Johnny Thunder, a Golden Age Gag Series character best known for his membership in the Justice Society of America. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, born on July 7th, 1917, and this gave him uncanny luck. It later turned out that the circumstances of his birth had given him control over a genie called the Thunderbolt, and it was the T-bolt who pulled him out of so many jams.
 * Wedge Antilles, the "designated survivor" and everyman of Star Wars, is sometimes seen in-universe as lucky, though it's not to the extent of most people on this page. There was actually a one-shot comic called "Lucky", the cover mentioning "The Curse of Wedge Antilles"; in it he thinks about it, flashes back to his first love and how she and most others around where he lived were killed while he was "luckily" away, and thinks "Lucky? Sometimes it doesn't feel like it." When he was a child, he was "lucky" enough to be some distance away from his parents' refueling station when they were killed. At many, many points, he was "lucky" enough to survive events that killed his companions and friends; he once reflects on the first Death Star and how he was "lucky" enough to be able to fly away while Biggs Darklighter stayed and was killed. In the novels he is vaguely aware of his Plot Armor, at least in that it seems like friends are always dying while he lives, has some survivor's guilt, and wonders what will happen when his luck runs out.
 * To some extent, Baron Soontir Fel as well, Wedge's Imperial (metaphorical) twin. He is undoubtedly the best damn pilot in the Empire next to Vader, but surviving two tours of duty in the ridiculously fragile TIE fighter or TIE Interceptor takes more than mere skill. Even when he was finally shot down by Wedge, he survived with no injury.
 * The Marvel heroine Shamrock appears to have this power, though it's actually a form of I See Dead People--ghosts often agree to help her in return for her completing their Unfinished Business. (Notably, she got killed off in one burned-out alternate continuity after a foe convinced her that with so many people already dead, there was nothing left to achieve in the world, and it was time for her and her ghosts to finally rest.)
 * Talisman from the Justice Machine comics. His mutant power is Karma -- as long as he's working for a righteous cause, good things happen to/for him (and by extension his teammates). One of the team's standard combat maneuvers is "let Talisman be taken hostage and dare the villains to shoot him".
 * Roulette from the Hellions, enemies of the New Mutants, could create disks of energy that affected probabilities (white for good luck, black for bad).

Film

 * Lindsay Lohan's character in the film Just My Luck has extremely good luck, until she inadvertently swaps her good luck with a man's equally extreme bad luck by a kiss, and the rest of the film has her searching for the man to reverse the exchange.
 * In the James Bond movies with Sean Connery, Bond always has the better hand at Baccarat.
 * The protagonist, Kyle Johnson, in The Luck of the Irish. He's a popular junior high basketball player, gets good grades by guessing answers, finds money on the ground often because of the lucky gold coin he wore his whole life.
 * Somewhat seen in the film Maverick, with Mel Gibson as the title character. In fact, that's pretty much what it's about. Although sometimes it could be seen as a subversion,.
 * Forrest Gump. He becomes, in chronological order: able to walk after being born disabled, a football star, war hero, Olympic champion, successful business owner, multimillionaire stockholder, and national phenomenon, all just out of sheer chance while bumbling his way through life. Not to mention setting various historical events in motion without even realizing it...
 * While Gump really is incredibly lucky throughout the film, it should be noted that this often happens because of him doing what he believes to be the right thing to do. A major theme of the film is Forrest doing things that everyone considers stupid just because he doesn't considers the pros and cons like everyone else, just does the simplest thing with childlike sincerity. One of the best examples is him becoming a war hero without firing a single bullet: he goes to the jungle to find his friend, and he ends up personally carrying to safety what is implied to be ALL his injured squadmates instead of, say, calling for someone to help them. His only reaction to being told to stop because napalm is about to be dropped in the jungle is to yell "I've gotta find Bubba!". So while he is incredibly lucky and, in a way, he doesn't know any better, he DOES become a war hero because he does something heroic. There are other situations in the film where he is very lucky as sort of a karmic payoff for doing something silly, but noble in its simplicity.
 * Brutally subverted in Lord of War: Yuri manages to come out unscathed from a drug-induced stroll around Monrovia despite having unprotected sex with a prostitute, encountering a pack of hyenas and two militia members who would have killed him if their Kalashnikovs had not jammed, not to mention being a rich Westerner in one of the deadliest African cities. The subversion? He had just committed his only actual murder and wanted nothing more than to die himself. Easily one of the darkest moments in an already very dark film.
 * Brutally subverted in Lord of War: Yuri manages to come out unscathed from a drug-induced stroll around Monrovia despite having unprotected sex with a prostitute, encountering a pack of hyenas and two militia members who would have killed him if their Kalashnikovs had not jammed, not to mention being a rich Westerner in one of the deadliest African cities. The subversion? He had just committed his only actual murder and wanted nothing more than to die himself. Easily one of the darkest moments in an already very dark film.

Literature
""The gods always smiled on Watt, though. When the wildlings knocked him off the Bridge of Skulls, somehow he landed in a nice deep pool of water. How lucky was that, missing all those rocks?" "Was it a long fall?" Grenn wanted to know. "Did landing in the pool of water save his life?" "No," said Dolorous Edd. "He was dead already, from that axe in his head. Still, it was pretty lucky, missing the rocks.""
 * Teela Brown, in Larry Niven's novel Ringworld, was the result of a project to try to breed a person with supernatural luck: she, and her ancestors for seven generations, were all born because of lucky draws in Earth's Birthright Lottery. The Puppeteers figure that humanity exists primarily due to luck anyhow (since humans are just Puny Earthlings), so breeding for luck will make humans extremely lucky. There is much debate about whether she is extremely lucky, and, for that matter, what it means to be extremely lucky.
 * The debate is mainly between the other main protagonists. Louis thinks she's lucky because she has survived many brushes with death, each time by pure chance. Nessus argues that her luck does not exist because the rest of the crew was not protected. Louis counters that the luck works only to preserve her and her fortunate genes; he says that her luck brought them to the Ringworld in the first place, because it will be the safest place for her descendants to ride out an inevitable galactic disaster.
 * The counter-counter-argument is that the Puppeteers were already planning this expedition before they started the breeding program that produced Teela. In universe there are yet more viewpoints and further levels of argument.
 * Canon indicates that the luck is real. Niven has a later story in this universe, Safe At Any Speed, showing a future world populated by people even luckier than Teela. The protagonist  and comes out perfectly unhurt.
 * Interestingly, when recruiting for the mission, they have a lot of trouble filling the Born Lucky slot. Teela Brown is the only one they can reach, since attempts to call the others end in very improbable failures. Either Teela's luck is causing her to win a position on the mission by process of elimination, or the luck of all those other candidates is causing her to lose.
 * Ways, from the Terry Pratchett science fiction novel The Dark Side of the Sun is a robot built with an intrinsic ability with p-math, meaning he can manipulate probability to make himself lucky. In one scene he's forced to roll 5 sixes twice in a row at gunpoint to prove his identity.
 * Rincewind, another of Pratchett's creations from the Discworld, has the most amazing luck (Thanks to being the pawn of the Lady herself), and has leapfrogged in, out, around, and through so many sticky situations relatively unscathed that even Death doesn't know when he'll die. Bear in mind, however, that in this case amazing luck doesn't necessarily mean amazingly good luck.
 * As stated above, Rincewind is amazingly lucky because he survives everything he's put through. Rincewind himself feels it would be luckier not to go through these things at all, but the Lady doesn't seem to see it that way...
 * The problem is that while the Lady blesses him on a regular basis, Fate is out to get him. Literally. The two of them are playing a board game, and Rincewind is one of the Lady's favorite pieces that Fate is always trying to take off the board.
 * Erast Fandorin in Boris Akunin's detective novels always wins in gambling games, which causes him to find them boring. In The Turkish Gambit (and its movie adaptation), he exploits this to win a donkey in an inn in a game of dice to transport away Varvara Suvorova... who later discovers, to her shock, that she was his stake.
 * Later in his career he uses this ability to expose a fake lottery wherein he loses his bet (meaning that there was not a single chance to win, otherwise, he would have). Even later, he plays Russian roulette in front of a suicide club president to convince the latter to accept him to the club.
 * In fact, he comes from a family where luck always skips a generation: his father and only son were extremely unlucky, while his grandson (Nicholas Fandorin) was extremely lucky again.
 * Subverted in the Alfred Bester story Oddy and Id. Oddy has the ability (unknown to himself) to have everything go in his favor. The subversion is that.
 * This is one of Mat Cauthon's defining characteristics in The Wheel of Time series. He goes from the son of a horse trader in a small town into a rich gambler throwing around money like it grows on trees simply because he can regain it easily. While all three of the ta'veren characters tend to twist probability and cause unlikely and bizarre events to happen just by being there, those events can be either good or bad. Mat, however, adds an elven gift of luck to this. Not only does he have amazing luck in general (including battle), but his gambling luck is openly supernatural: If he's paying attention, coins are liable to land on edge, and dice on their corners. (Happily, this sort of thing never happens when it would have gotten him killed....)
 * It should be noted that his luck can often be a string of bad luck that turns out to be useful to him in the end, such as losing a dice roll when winning would result in a fight, or losing many rolls as a sign that something is about to happen.
 * As a matter of fact, his luck is so predictable that he WEAPONIZES it - if he's getting too poor of a streak, he and his friends know the fecal matter is going to hit the impeller, because his good luck is "being stored up" for what's to come, which has saved their hides several times.
 * In A. E. van Vogt's novel, The Weapon Shops of Isher, the character of Cayle Clark is a "callidetic giant", which makes him crazy lucky to the point that being forced into sex slavery comes out to his advantage.
 * Robert A. Heinlein's recurring Author Avatar / Marty Stu Lazarus Long had "a feeling for what makes the frog jump", which his descendants put down to latent Psychic Powers, but which he saw as a learnable skill. That he just happened to be born with.
 * In Harry Potter, there's a potion, Felix Felicis, that gives the user luck and will make everything go their way, usually in improbable ways. For example, when Harry drank it, he accidentally bumped into Ginny while invisible, causing her to think it was her current boyfriend, and got unusually annoyed and dump him, so that leaves her open for Harry. It also gave Harry the perfect chance to bribe Slughorn. Later it is used by nearly all the main characters to survive the climactic battle. The effects are temporary, and Slughorn advised against abusing the potion, as it'd make one reckless after a while. It's also banned from sporting events, essays, and elections.
 * And in The Film of the Book it's a Crowning Moment of Funny, since Harry acts so mellow that you'd think it was a luck joint.
 * Thursday Next had a villain who could manipulate entropy.
 * The Duck from Spider Robinson's Callahans Crosstime Saloon stories is an interesting variation of this: his luck (and the luck of those around him) is not unbelievably good or unbelievably bad, but simply extreme, tending to cancel itself out over time. As he puts it, if you're standing next to him and win a million dollars, rest assured that you'll have lost it again by nightfall.
 * Bink's power in Xanth looks like this, but it's actually that magic can't harm him. This was determined to be a top-tier magic talent.
 * Given that everything in Xanth is at least partially magical, it is.
 * The reason his talent manifests as luck is because his talent can't hurt him either. In other words, it makes it look as though he's just lucky at avoiding magic, because if fireballs just bounced off him, people would just start punching him. And that would be his talent causing people to punch him, thus harming him indirectly via magic.
 * Played with in A Song of Ice and Fire:


 * The Malazan Book of the Fallen has Oponn, the bifurcated God of Luck. Their chosen tend to have absurd luck, with occurrences like "avoiding a assassin's crossbow bolt by picking up a coin" or "killing an enemy by tripping and falling into them with your sword". It's suggested that this eventually turns around on the poor mortal, but hasn't happened to any of those chosen so far.
 * Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit is explicitly stated to have been born with an unusual amount of luck. It saves his life on several occasions.
 * Clever Jack from Playing for Keeps has the superpower of being incredibly lucky.
 * From the Star Trek Novel Verse, Auger in Hollow Men. He's a wide-eyed innocent youth serving under Captain Steyn (a freighter captain and sometimes smuggler). She has him on the crew entirely because he's Born Lucky (well, that and she's quite fond of him). He has a natural affinity for gambling, and seems to somehow “tap into”...something...other beings can't, so as to always win. Note that this is consistent with the TV show, which occasionally suggested luck was governed by an unknown force that could be sensed or even controlled. Quite why this boy has the talent remains unexplained. Steyn apparently doesn't care, she's just happy it makes her money.
 * In the world of the aleators from Riddle of the Seven Realms by Lyndon Hardy, luck is a literal commodity which powerful individuals have managed to hoard for themselves. It's also a finite natural resource, so the hoarding of vast quantities of luck by such people means that everyone else in that world is Born Unlucky by default, and must exercise extreme caution just to make it though a day alive.
 * Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is both this AND Born Unlucky. He's one of only 2 humans to survive the destruction of Earth (amongst other events throughout the five book trilogy), but this isn't necessarily a good thing.
 * Falkor the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story belongs, as you may have gathered, to an entire species of dragons who are Born Lucky. He is very conscious of this and will often rely on blind luck to get him and Atreyu through tight spots.
 * In the Kurt Vonnegut short story "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," the titular effect is devised by Prof. Arthur Barnhouse, which allows him to manipulate luck. At first, it merely lets him ensure that dice will come up as whatever he wants to roll. He eventually develops it to the point where he starts to border on Reality Warper powers, and hides so as to go on a quest to destroy weapons to prevent future wars.
 * Roran doesn't fit this trope (at least no more than is usual for a protagonist), but nevertheless Nasuada invokes this trope in sending Roran to end the Siege at Aroughs, because he was (in her estimation) lucky, and they desperately needed it done fast.

Live Action TV
"Elaine: (exasperated) You know, one of these days, something terrible is going to happen to you! IT HAS TO! Jerry: (nonchalant) No, I'll be fine."
 * An episode of The X-Files, "The Rube Goldberg Variation", was about a man whose luck was absolutely ridiculous. The catch: Whenever his luck gives him a benefit, the universe seems to "balance" itself by either making him unable to benefit from it, or inflicting something bad on someone else. During the episode, he is desperately trying to raise a large sum of money very fast (for a sick kid's medical bills). When he wins it by gambling at a Mob table, they assume he was cheating and throw him off a roof. (He lands in an industrial laundry basket, harmlessly breaking his fall.) When he buys a lottery ticket, he wins, but (a) the payoff would take too long to help the sick kid, and (b) the ticket is for waaaaaay more than he needs and he is terrified of the inevitable backlash so he throws it away. The guy who picks the ticket up gets hit by a bus seconds later.
 * Both Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis are this lucky: it is integral to the High School Hustler archetype.
 * In an episode of Red Dwarf, they find a luck virus that causes this.
 * Tom Chance, from the mid 80s series Chance in a Million, for whom life always seemed to fall in place (including once knowing the train schedule of an obscure route, from having been held hostage by terrorists in the past, who forced their captives to memorise the London Underground timetable...)
 * Supernatural had a rabbit foot that gave this but once you lost it, it did the exact opposite: that is, giving you bad luck. For example, while in possession of the foot, Sam Winchester could survive gunfights by virtue of having everyone else's gun jam when pointed at him and win as much as $2000 dollars from each Scratch And Win ticket he bought. Once the foot was stolen, however, Sam started tripping over everything up to and including thin air, lost his shoe in a sewer hole, had a hotel room heater catch on fire when he was doing literally nothing, and knocked himself out while trying to put out said fire.
 * Much of a Seinfeld episode is dedicated to reiterating the fact that everything consistently turns out all right for Jerry, and nobody else. . But before then, he's pretty darn lucky.


 * Chance Harper's "power" from Strange Luck. It's not always good luck, but it all works out sooner or later.
 * Lance White from The Rockford Files. Jim Rockford himself points out that Lance's good luck is always balanced by the people around him suffering from bad luck.
 * British-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili has a sketch titled "The Bloody Lucky Arab" in which he portrays a stereotypical rich Arab who manages to strike oil everywhere he goes. Mostly on golf courses.
 * Rob Mariano, especially in Redemption Island where he's put on a tribe full of the dumbest players since the cast of Samoa and manages to not once run into his Achilles' Heel (Food challenges, but also some physical challenges), manages to get the lion's share of screentime, and is good at all the puzzle challenges. Conveniently, that's what most of the individual immunity challenges were! (Read: Challenges he had to compete in) That's some amazing luck if the producers weren't slanting the show for him and Russell.
 * Likewise, Rachel in the American Big Brother. She comes back with an unbreakable alliance with Brendon and is also paired up with Jeff and Jordan, who are likewise unbreakable. They are then put against people who barely know each other and have never played; the veterans (Rachel, Brendon, Jeff, Jordan, Daniele) have. The challenges are all something they're familiar with. After her boyfriend was evicted from the house, he somehow wins a popular vote to come back but is voted back out again. Then after things get turned around again and causing Jeff and Daniele to be voted out, then Rachel and Jordan are put on the block, Porsche is forced to open Pandora's Box...and the twist seems tailor-made to benefit Rachel and Jordan. Conveniently, the next veto competition (Read: That Rachel needs to win) is... a carbon copy of the first competition in the game that Rachel won, with a different prop. The twist manages to save both Rachel and Jordan, then the next head of household challenge is a challenge that Rachel had already won in the past - and just a couple days before, she was talking about how she did so well on it. When she's forced to open Pandora's box, it's not a game changing power that completely sabotages her game like it did to Porsche...it's a shopping spree. That's some amazing luck.

Other

 * Mad Magazine had an article (in issue #133) called "What is a Born Winner?" about such people. "A Born Winner is easy to spot. He's the guy who's drafted the morning the war ends. He's the guy who marries for love and then discovers his bride concealed the fact that she's a millionairess to avoid fortune hunters. He's the guy who's turned away from a fancy restaurant for not wearing a tie the very same night thirty-six diners succumb to food poisoning."
 * Transformers Generation 1 has Jackpot, whose main character trait is that he's possessed of uncanny good luck. This particularly shows up in the TransTech story "Gone Too Far", where he puts it to use hustling people with his partner Hubcap.

Tabletop Games

 * A version of this is part of a deity's legend in the Forgotten Realms. Tymora, goddess of luck, supposedly flips a coin for every person born in Faerun. If it comes up heads, that person will have good luck in their life. If it's tails, naturally, bad luck follows. And for those extremely lucky few where the coin lands on its edge...they make their own luck, not being fated to anything.
 * Savage Worlds has the "Luck" and "Great Luck" advantages, which give you one and then two more spare die re-rolls per game session.
 * Halflings in 4.0 Dungeons and Dragons have a power that basically emulates really good luck. And in 3.5 you had the Fate-Spinners, whose entire arsenal of powers was based around luck manipulation.
 * 3rd edition Halflings were inherently lucky as well, reflected in their racial +1 to all saving throws.
 * The 3.5 sourcebook Complete Scoundrel had a prestige class based around this trope. The "Fortune's Friend" could force so many re-rolls a day in so many different situations that he must have been as infuriating to the DM and his teammates as he was to his foes.
 * There was also the Luckstealer from Races of the Wild, who could curse others with bad luck, and claim their good luck for himself.
 * In GURPS it is possible to give characters varying levels of the Advantage aptly named "Luck". There is also Super-Luck which, while much more expensive, is well explained by a nearby picture of a man standing in an alleyway surrounded by bullet holes.
 * Mutants and Masterminds features "Luck Control" as a superpower which allows the user to change the effects of other character's dice rolls, helping your allies and hindering your enemies. "Probability Control" from the Ultimate Power sourcebook is a more traditional example of this trope; your power rank becomes the minimum result for any one die roll that round. To put it another way, a person with 20 ranks in this power could essentially throw their dice away and declare "I win."
 * Asian Dhampyr from the Vampire: The Masquerade supplement Kindred of the East are best known for their luck powers, a spiritual side effect of the unlikelihood of their existence. They are born to Asian vampires with more significantly more Yang chi than Yin, the only time said vamps are fertile.
 * Meanwhile, Vampire: The Requiem has the Bohagande bloodline. Their unique Discipline, Sunnikuse, emphasises draining the luck from others, typically supplementing the Bohagande's luck in the process.
 * Champions has the Luck power: the more levels of it you have, the luckier you are.
 * This is how the Edge stat works in Shadowrun - and humans get an extra point of it as a racial bonus.
 * Witch Hunter: The Invisible World. If a character had the Lucky talent, fortune favored them and always seemed to intercede on their behalf in the direst of circumstances.

Video Games
""They let me pick, did I ever tell you that? Choose whichever Spartan I wanted. You know me. I did my research; watched as you became the soldier we needed you to be. Like the others, you were strong and swift and brave. A natural leader. But you had something they didn't. Something no one saw, but me. Can you guess? Luck.""
 * The character Fortune in Metal Gear Solid 2 seemed to be literally Immune to Bullets because she was too lucky in battle to ever get hit; unfortunately, her luck in her personal life was as awful as her luck on the battlefield was good, and she became a Death Seeker.
 * Subverted, though, in that
 * Double Subverted:
 * Although it's called luck, it's really closer to Mind Over Matter distorting bullets paths or causing explosives to be duds.
 * Venus from Metal Gear Acid 2 demonstrates her supernatural ability to toss coins that only come up heads, dowse for water and hit targets with her gun a handful of times. Her initial assertion that she was 'lucky' seemed just to be her being obtuse, but by the time you fight her it turns out to be her power. She still got disappointingly little mileage out of it.
 * Kyosuke Nanbu of Super Robot Wars Compact 2, and the OG series has this. His backstory has him surviving a space shuttle crash, with minor injuries. In OG 1 a traitor sabotages a prototype Humongous Mecha and Kyosuke once again crash lands and escapes unscathed. It's also a reason given for surviving the beating that he got from Axel Almer. For some reason this inhuman luck does not actually include the Lucky skill. (Tasuku has this.)
 * It's been theorized that this luck is in fact what allows Kyosuke to perform well in his Alteisen, which is, in all honesty, an outdated Real Robot that really wants to be a Super Robot when it grows up. Anyone else using the Alt would probably find themselves shot down pretty quickly.
 * Then there's Arado Balanga in Alpha 2/Original Generation 2, who once survived his mech blowing up because he couldn't eject in time. In fact, for a long part of Original Generation 2, every mech he pilots gets severely damaged or destroyed.
 * This is Nell's defining character trait in the Advance Wars series. She has an occasional chance of causing more damage than normal, and her CO and Super CO powers amplify this luck immensely. Her sister, Rachel, doesn't have Nell's normal luck but her CO Power (though not Super CO Power) increases her luck for the turn.
 * This also applies to Flak and his Dual Strike counterpart Jugger, although it's more depicted as brute force (but works the same ingame) and comes with the drawback of sometimes inflicting less damage than expected.
 * Some characters in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney believe that Phoenix wins most of his cases by sheer luck since he always manages to turn the case around in his favor when all seems lost. Franziska von Karma even notes Phoenix's luck out loud after she finds out from Edgeworth that he fell through a broken bridge to a river 40 feet below (Said river was stated to be notorious for being deadly) and only suffered minor bruises and a cold - In the middle of winter, while the bridge was on fire! To top it off, in Apollo Justice, Phoenix gets run over by a car, sends him flying 30 feet in the air, smacks his head into a telephone pole, and only suffers a minor ankle sprain!
 * To quote Franziska herself: "As always, hard to know if he should be called lucky or unlucky."
 * The Lady Luck dress sphere in Final Fantasy X-2 has abilities based on luck, including rolling huge dice & spinning reels for results.
 * Kingdom of Loathing has several familiars and an outfit which embody this, including a pair of dice who help you and a Steampunk outfit which turns all critical failures into Inspector Gadget - style successes.
 * In Halo 3, the Artificial Intelligence Cortana says this to the protagonist of the series, Master Chief:


 * Which makes sense, since the aforementioned character not only is the only one Spartan left alive (well, he was), but he is also able to avoid almost certain death several times during the 3 games of the series.
 * Princess L'Arachel from Fire Emblem the Sacred Stones appears to actually be divinely blessed; she wins coin tosses when the tosser is cheating. This is reflected in her growth rates, as she'll almost always max out the Luck Stat on her own.
 * In Fire Emblem Jugdral, the people who have Ulir Holy Blood (like the sisters Adean and Briggid and their children) have Luck growths of at least 30%, among the best ones in the whole FE franchise. In-story, this is supposed to be tied to a blessing bestowed upon Ulir the "Bow User", creating a whole legend in regards to their descendants - now the Royal House of Jungby.
 * Touhou
 * Tewi Inaba has this as her main ability, and can even spread it to others. One chapter in the Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth manga had her digging a pool for Princess Kaguya, and every place she she dug had her striking gold, silver, and other assorted treasures.
 * The main character Reimu Hakurei also has this power. Her luck mostly manifests in each game as her literally wandering around until she stumbles upon the Big Bad of the latest incident. The last chapter of Curiosities of Lotus Asia even mentions that Marisa hates to play dice with Reimu because Reimu always wins.
 * The Wood Elf Gaenor from the Morrowind expansion Tribunal is a bit of a Bonus Boss. You first meet him as a sort-of beggar in Mournhold, where he will demand that you give him some money. If you do, he will continue to ask for more until it reaches outrageous sums you probably won't be able to pay and even if you can, we won't believe you really have the money anyway. Either way, pay him or deny him the money, he will get angry. Come back a few days later to encounter him again. This time, he is wearing a full set of (extremely expensive and powerful) Ebony Armor. He will confront you and tell you how he came upon a Lucky Charm. Ever since he found it, he had insane amounts of luck, money was practically falling into his pockets all the time, he never lost a fight, hell, he never even got injured. Then he decides to take revenge on you for the money thing earlier. While in battle, he lacks any significant uber-destructive attacks, his insane luck makes more than up for it. You see, in the game, all the important chances, such as whether or not a blow will hit or miss or whether or not a Magic Reflection/Damage Reflection spell will kick in, is influenced by a certain stat. You guessed it. And yes, you heard that right, damage reflection and spell reflection. The guy has very powerful amounts of that. Gaenor is so lucky that he can make you kill yourself by attacking him. Should you, despite all the odds, manage to kill him, you can loot the lucky charm from his pockets, but while the enchantment is certainly powerful, it only grants 20 Luck points. Attribute-Wise, however, Gaenor had 770 of them...
 * One of the most straightfoward ways of beating him is to temporarily increase your own Luck to similarly absurd levels with potions.
 * Joachim from Valkyria Chronicles II has fortune smiling upon him, but he never sees it that way, being a glass half-empty kind of guy. If something good happens to him, he'll still find something to complain about: Girls like him, but he wants to be left alone. He was saved from a bullet by a statue, he loved that statue! You get the picture...
 * In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas you can select your Luck SPECIAL stat at the start of the game. This mainly determines your chances of getting critical hits in combat. However, in New Vegas it influences your gambling ability.
 * In older games, it still determined critical chance but setting the Luck value to maximum and picking the Sniper perk made every single hit scoring a critical. Even better, picking the Jinxed trait with Luck maxed out is the epitome of assholishness to your opponents.
 * Mr. House of New Vegas is also noted as an especially lucky individual. He's even got max Luck in SPECIAL.
 * Woozie in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is blind, but he's so incredibly lucky that he can often pass as sighted anyways. He can even race a car along a narrow, winding ledge!

Web Comics

 * Ray Smuckles can't seem to turn around without falling into a pile of money
 * Andrew Smith of Gunnerkrigg Court has this as a superpower extra-normal ability. That is, his very presence allows things to go smoothly. Examples here and here (back up three pages for context.
 * In Dubious Company, Sal is the future high priestess of the god of Randomness, things tend to go her way.
 * In Spinnerette, this is an explicit superpower of Benjamin Franklin. So long as he's in a future the existence of which depends on his surviving to return to the past, anything that might harm his person will miss him and every strike will be a lucky perfect hit.

Web Original

 * Less Than Three Comics' Pixel and Rabbit both have luck-altering powers.
 * Renard of Oktober is basically this trope condensed into a physical form, and he knows it. You should ask him to do a card trick for you.
 * Several characters from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe have Luck as their actual superpower. Others are merely very, very lucky.
 * Andrew "Lucky" Day was a Golden Age hero who used his luck to make up for the fact that, otherwise, he was just an ordinary guy.
 * Andrew "Lucky" Starr is "Lucky" Day's grandson, and has inherited not only his grandfather's love of adventure, but also his incredible good fortune.
 * Lady Luck of the Knights of Norfolk is an active probability manipulator.
 * Bedlam, a supervillain from the same setting, isn't so much lucky himself as he is capable of instilling bad luck in everyone around him (thus giving himself the appearance of good luck). Jinx is another villain who has the same powers.
 * Homestuck has Clover of the Felt and Vriska Serket. Though, we don't know if Clover was born lucky, or just received the power from his master, and Vriska actually steals luck from other people.
 * The 'probability Warpers' of the Whateley Universe have this. Currently there are so many of them at Whateley Academy that the administration has problems spreading them out among different dorms. Kismet also has magical powers. Hazard also has some kind of precognitive gift. Clover is trying to become a powerful wizard too. Then there's Murphy whose luck is usually bad.

Western Animation
"Edward: "Hey, Lazlo, how come you're so lucky?" Lazlo: "Don't be silly, Edward. I don't believe in luck!" (It then zooms out to reveal it's storming, all except for a sunny spot following Lazlo.)"
 * In the animated series, Class of the Titans, the phenomenal luck of one of the main characters, Neil, allows him to win everything from battles against mythical creatures to coin tosses. This is especially useful for him since, unlike the other Titans who are descended from ancient Greek heroes and possess incredible fighting abilities, Neil is descended from Narcissus and only has his ancestor?s good looks and vain personality.
 * Gladstone Gander, listed and pictured above, makes a guest starring appearance in an episode of DuckTales, where his luck is actually weaponized by Magica De Spell in order to bypass Scrooge's security system. Despite being hypnotized into stealing it he is still cursed due to using his luck for evil and is instead saddled with bad luck. Naturally, but the end of the episode he gets his luck back and refuses to learn his aesop about relying on luck for everything.
 * In the Futurama episode "The Luck of the Fryrish" the seven-leaf clover given to  Philip J. Fry, granted him lifelong luck. "The ever-lucky Fry made his fortune after striking oil in the bathroom of the mansion he had won in a lottery."
 * In Kim Possible, Ron is definitely lucky. It's explained by a combination of the Ron factor and the Mystical Monkey Power. His own father, an actuary, calculates that Ron should've been taken out years ago on Kim's missions.
 * Princess Azula of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been called "born lucky" explicitly: everything comes naturally to her, earning her her father's "love" and a place as heir apparent to the throne. Shame about the family history of mental instability...
 * The title character of Camp Lazlo counts.


 * An animated short called Lucky Lydia wherein the title character had impossibly good luck. Examples include waking up to a rainbow (complete with a pot of gold) every morning, finding several hundred dollars in loose change, and winning a poker game when her opponents had marked the cards. In fact, about the only unfortunate thing that happened to Lydia throughout the short was her friend being unable to come out and play (said friend had gone to the doctor to have her blood dyed red).
 * An episode of The Powerpuff Girls focused on a small-time crook who had this power... to an extent.
 * In The Fairly Odd Parents, the Turners' next door neighbors the Dinklebergs show signs of this. For example, the moment the Turners buy their current house, the one next to it goes on sale, which the Dinklebergs buy for less money, even though it's bigger and fancier.
 * Mr. Turner did have a hand in that event by being the one to throw the "For Sale" sign out of his yard... at which point it landed upright in the yard of the next house over.
 * In Ben 10, Gwen managed to get her hands on a magic amulet that made the holder lucky beyond belief. She made a superhero outfit and did heroic acts just to get back at Ben, who was being a Smug Snake at the time. Basically, she showed up, stuff happened, and crisis averted. Then she destroys it, along with the other 4 in the set, for no apparent reason.
 * There was the matter of her causing Ben bad luck, hogging the limelight and potentially breaking the plot. That and avoiding the problems if someone else got hold of them.
 * Ultimate Book of Spells: The episode "Lucky Gus" featured Gus being extremely lucky and alienating his friends because of that. It turns out Zarlak was behind this good luck wave exactly to keep him apart from his friends. It also counts as Loophole Abuse, since he used the luck spell because the boarding school where the heroes live is protected against Dark Magic and lucky spells aren't dark. Fortunately, Zarlak forgot the spell on and Gus used his luck to save the day.
 * One segment on Schoolhouse Rock featured Lucky Seven Sampson, who "never did a whole day's work in [his] life; still, everything seems turn out right."
 * An episode of the Animated Adaptation of Krazy Kat revolved around Krazy being this trope. She would win contests she hadn't even entered and miraculously be the 500th customer at an ice cream parlor simply by "strolling along, minding [her] own business". When a jealous Ignatz demands how she does this, she replies "I guess I'm just born lucky."

Real Life

 * Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly had as a hiring policy that whenever he was asked to decide between two people with equal recommendations he'd ask them if they were lucky. Reasoning that if you don't know who to pick, you might as well pick the one who has been lucky thus far.
 * Counts as a kind of justified trope, in fact - someone who is "lucky" may simply have some unquantifiable or unnoticed skill or other factor aiding them.
 * Adolf Hitler survived dozens of assassination attempts, most of them by sheer luck.
 * In one of the few instances where alcohol actually did something good, Seth MacFarlane slept-in with a hangover on the morning of September 11th and missed his flight-Flight 11 to be exact.
 * Mark Wahlberg was about to take one of these flights too, but decided to fly to Canada instead and visit one of his friends.
 * A man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. He was injured and spent the night there before returning to his hometown. Which was Nagasaki. He survived again and lived to the ripe old age of 93. If that's not simultaneously the worst and best luck in the world, then what is?
 * Even more than that, Yamaguchi returned to Nagasaki still significantly injured, so he went to see a doctor. The doctor asked him how he had been injured, and as Yamaguchi was explaining the vaporization of Hiroshima, the second bomb dropped. In the middle of his explanation. That's remarkable coincidence.
 * As a result of being one of very few people to survive the only two offensive atomic bombings in history, and the longest-lived of them, he became an extremely vocal opponent to nuclear weapons, and his voice was respected in Japan (which, to this day, refuses nuclear derivatives--although nuclear power plants are just fine).
 * Amongst seafaring cultures particularly, a child born with the amniotic sac attached over his/her head was considered a sign of good fortune (and protected against drowning.)