May the odds be ever in your favor

I don't consider myself an overly lucky person, but the odds have certainly been in my favor the past few months.  Here's the story:

When I was about 13, my buddy and I somehow got into doing magic shows.  I think it was after watching some David Copperfield special or something.  We'd beg our parents to drive us to Salt Lake so that we could visit the only magic shop in Utah and blow all of our allowance money on new magic tricks.  It was tons of fun, but the hobby died out after a year or so.  But then, about 6 months ago, I ran across an economics article that was talking about the magic market, which is a "tricky" market (pun intended!) because you're selling secrets.  Once you've sold the secret to someone, what's to prevent them from giving it away free to everyone else?  Anyway, the article referenced a website called Theory11, which sold magic tricks.  I clicked through to the website, and was blown away with how cool some of the tricks on there were.  (Seriously, they have cool stuff on there--no magic wands or cheesy top hats!).  I soon found out that Theory11 held a Saturday Night Contest online each week where you could win free stuff.  The contests range from creating your own magic trick to simply naming a card that someone else is thinking of.  Now, me being a generally unlucky person, I wasn't all that inclined to enter the contests.  But some of them were really easy to enter (e.g. just name a card), so occasionally I would check in and throw my hat in the ring if it was a simple contest.

The end result:  I've entered 7 times, and won 3 of them!  I'm on an incredible run of luck here.  Now, you're probably thinking, "Well, there's probably like 8 people that visit this site, so he's bound to win fairly often."  That's actually not the case.  In the most recent contest, the goal was to guess how many cards were inside a box.  There's 54 cards in a deck (including jokers), so guesses could range between 0 and 54.  I was guess #109 that week, but no one before me had guessed that there were 50 cards in the box.  Actually, 50 was the only number left that hadn't been guessed yet (obviously, most of the numbers had been guessed multiple times, but 50 just seems like too round of a number so no one guessed it).   At least 100 more people entered the contest after me as well.  Guess what?  There were 50 in the box!  Winner winner, chicken dinner!

So far, I've won a free $20 magic trick, a "brick" of 12 decks of high-end playing cards, and a deck of collector's edition cards called "White Monarchs."  Here's a picture of my spoils:

The White Monarchs (in front) alone are selling for about $75 on eBay right now, and each deck of cards in the brick they gave me sells for about $6.  That's a total of like $160 of merchandise they've just given me!

Now, since I don't collect playing cards, the plan is to just resell most these on eBay, but I thought I'd better snap a picture to remember that, at least for a few months, the odds were in my favor.