If a black-and-white bird has been singing from your back fence lately, you’re in good company. BirdLife Australia’s Aussie Bird Count results named the Australian magpie as the bird we see most, appearing in one of every two surveys in 2025. The next count runs from 19 to 25 October 2026, so plenty of us will soon be looking up again.
For a lot of Aussies, seeing a magpie comes with a small reflex: a nod, a wave or a cheeky hello. That habit is one of many luck rituals passed down through our families, and they’ve followed us indoors too, right up to the moment we sit down at smokoscasino.com, log in and spin.
Let’s follow three favourites: the magpie greeting, the pudding coin and the horseshoe over the door. Along the way, you’ll meet the work of one of Australia’s best-known folklore researchers and hear from a psychologist who has spent years studying why a lucky habit can lift your mood. We’ll finish with a simple routine you can make your own.
Good Morning, Mr Magpie
The magpie salute came to Australia through British folklore. The rhyme ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’ was first recorded in 1780. According to The Spectator Australia, a lone bird seemed unlucky because the European magpie mates for life. People found ways to cancel out that sorrow, such as saluting the bird or saying ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie’, and you’ll still hear that greeting on footpaths around the country.
There’s a warmer side to the bird as well. The same Spectator Australia piece notes that magpies are signs of good fortune in East Asian folklore. In a country where so many families have roots in Asia, that’s a lovely thing to know. Your neighbour might treat the very same bird as a sign of good news.
Our love for magpies also comes with numbers. Australian Geographic reported that more than 64,000 Australians joined the 2025 count, and BirdLife confirmed a record of over 5 million birds tallied in a single week. That’s a lot of people noticing the birds outside their window.
There’s a twist most of us never learn at school. The Australian magpie belongs to a different family from the European bird. Settlers gave it a familiar name and brought the old rhyme with them. So when you salute the bird on your fence, you’re using an old greeting on a bird that’s all ours.
Birds aren’t the only place we’ve looked for luck, though. For generations, Aussie kids went searching for it in dessert.
Threepence and Pudding
Ask anyone who grew up with a home-made Christmas pudding about the coin, and you’ll probably get a grin. SBS Food recalls that Australian families hid a threepence in the pudding, and lucky diners might find a sixpence instead. Biting into one was a highlight of Christmas Day.
Then decimal currency arrived in 1966. SBS explains that the Copper and Brass Information Centre warned the new coins would corrode in the pudding and leave a metallic taste. For a while, it looked like the tradition might fade away.
It didn’t. The Royal Australian Mint now makes threepence and sixpence coins for puddings, and some families kept their old silver coins to use again every year.
Try thinking of your lucky coin as something that has moved house over the years. It began in the pudding bowl. Then it went into Grandad’s pocket, onto the car dashboard and into the dish by the front door. These days, plenty of us keep one next to the laptop. Its job hasn’t changed much: it’s a small object you can hold that tells you something fun is starting.
Game designers have noticed too. On Smokos, the favourites shelf includes Coin Strike: Hold and Win, which puts lucky coins straight onto the reels. Your threepence would feel right at home there.
Somewhere, there’s a nan who still keeps hers in a jam jar.
Coins fit in a pocket. Horseshoes needed a nail, a hammer and a good doorframe.
Which Way Is Up?
Horseshoes have hung over Aussie doors and sheds for a long time, and which way up you hang yours depends on your family’s roots. In parts of Ireland and Britain, the shoe goes open end up so the luck can’t spill out. In much of Europe and Latin America, it points down. Horseshoes were traditionally made of iron, which people believed kept bad spirits away.
Customs like these settle in and adjust wherever they land. Professor Graham Seal, who set up the WA Folklore Archive at Curtin University in 1985, has spent decades recording them. He co-edited The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore (1993) and describes folklore as a tradition in which ‘the forms may change but the process remains the same’.
That idea fits your pre-spin routine very well. Here’s how some old Aussie luck has found new places to live:
| Old habit | Where it comes from | Pre-spin version |
| Saluting a lone magpie | British rhyme, recorded 1780 | A cheerful hello as you sit down |
| Pudding threepence | Colonial Christmas tables | A lucky coin beside the keyboard |
| Horseshoe, open end up | Irish and British custom | A charm or photo kept in view |
| Taking a turn at stirring the pudding | Stir-up Sunday family tradition | Choosing the game that feels right tonight |
The last row comes from an old family custom. On Stir-up Sunday, each person took a turn stirring the pudding mixture and often made a wish as they did. Choosing your game for the night has a similar feel: a small, personal moment before the fun begins.
You’ll find those old symbols in game themes as well. Smokos lists Clover Flames on its favourites shelf, and Betsoft’s 3 Pots of Wishes is in its lobby too. Clovers, wishes and coins have kept their charm for centuries.
If Seal is right that the forms keep changing, why do we keep doing any of this at all?
The Science of Crossed Fingers
Let’s be clear first: a ritual won’t change what lands on the reels. Results are down to chance, and knowing the common betting biases that can cloud your judgement helps you keep that in view. What a ritual can change is how you feel as you start, and that’s a perfectly good reason to enjoy one.
Psychologists have tested this. In a 2010 study published in Psychological Science, Lysann Damisch and her colleagues gave some participants a ‘lucky’ golf ball and told others ‘we have our fingers crossed for you’ before a skill task. Those people did better, and the researchers linked the boost to a rise in self-belief. A later attempt to repeat the golf experiment didn’t find the same effect, so it’s fair to describe the result as encouraging rather than settled.
Research from Harvard Business School adds another piece. The researchers found that performing a ritual reduced anxiety, measured both physically and through self-reports. A 2026 study in The Open Psychology Journal found that more than 80% of its participants used at least one superstitious ritual while performing. And in January 2026, a British Psychological Society research digest reported that rituals which ‘push away’ or ‘pull in’ luck feel more effective to people. Think of throwing salt over your shoulder, or closing your hand around a coin.
Stuart Vyse, psychologist and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, summed it up in a 2016 interview with the BPS:
“There is evidence that positive, luck-enhancing superstitions provide a psychological benefit that can improve skilled performance.”
So how might you build a pre-spin ritual of your own? Here’s one simple approach:
- Make your favourite drink first. A Nine poll found 44% of Aussies have no tea at all in a typical day, so a flat white counts.
- Put your lucky coin, charm or photo where you can see it.
- Decide your time and spending limit before you open anything.
- Try a new game in demo mode before playing for real.
- Say hello to the magpie on the fence if he’s around.
The demo step suits Smokos well. You can try many games for free before putting any money in, and the site runs in your phone’s browser without an app, so a cuppa on the back deck can be part of the routine.
The best rituals work like a bookmark. They mark where your leisure time starts, much like the kettle going on marks the end of a workday. From fence posts to pudding bowls, the objects keep changing while the feeling stays with us.
Luck Lives in the Little Things
Look back over these rituals and you’ll notice that most of them are shared. Thousands of us count magpies together each October. Families stirred their puddings as a group. Horseshoes were handed down along with the stories that came with them.
Online play can carry some of that togetherness. Smokos sorts its library of around 7,000 titles into shelves picked by staff, such as Clayton’s Picks. It’s a lot like a mate across the pub table telling you which machine they liked. A recommendation from someone else’s luck has always been part of the fun.
Before your next session, you might join this year’s Aussie Bird Count from 19 to 25 October. Head outside, see how many magpies turn up and bring that small bit of joy back to the desk with you.
Keep the rituals that make you smile, set your limits early and let the luck part be what it’s always been: part of the fun.
Advisory Notice: Play for fun, not for profit. Decide how much you’re willing to lose before you begin and hold yourself to it. If you catch yourself trying to win back losses or feeling unable to stop, take that as your cue to step back.