The Surprising ROle of Chance in Our Everyday Lives. We underestimate the importance of luck in our lives, we think too highly of the golfer who wins the British Open and, if he loses the next tournament, we speculate that he slacked off. Although the winner is surely an excellent golfer, good luck is how the ball bounced and how it rolled afterwards outside of the golfer's control also played an important role. Gary Smith uses the role of luck to explain a profound statistical concept - Regression to the Mean.