The luck has been mostly in the red ever since I put a miner over here. It must be my fault!
Anyway, as soon as WestHash cools off I'll be moving another 4.5TH over here that I pulled from BitAffNet.
Heh - no - luck is simply just that - luck.
It goes up and down, but there is no control over it.
I guess I should point out another thing that may not be obvious:
Luck is the only thing here that affects your payout.
The PPLNS doesn't reduce it in any way, it only means that there is no gain from hopping.
When you submit a share, it is paid out in each block found in the 500% after the share.
Thus, there's no loss from not mining after the share, it's purely the luck of how many blocks are found in that limit after the share.
I also noticed you made a comment about a 5% loss moving from that other pool ... yowsers that's a worry.
So if you have an outage, or are unable to mine for whatever reasons on their pool, your misfortune becomes a pool payout penalty? Ouch!
The more hash we have the merrier. 
