 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Beginner's luck" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Beginner's luck refers to the phenomenon ofnovices experiencing a disproportionate frequency of success or succeeding against an expert in a given activity.[1] One would expect experts to outperform novices; when the opposite happens, it iscounter-intuitive, hence the need for a term to describe thisphenomenon.[2] The term is most often used in reference to a first attempt insport orgambling, but is also used in many other contexts. The term is also used when no skill whatsoever is involved, such as a first-timeslot machine player winning thejackpot.