Far too often I seem to get punished too severely for my mistakes in declarer play. More so than I would expect based on probabilities. Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Last week I got to declare this 3NT contract, at MP's, ♦4 lead (1-3-5).

Trying for at least four ♣ tricks, I planned to take the ♣K finesse first, and decide later to either finesse the ♣10 (if required) or play for a 3-3 distribution.

So I unblock the ♦'s, then put down ♣9, East plays ♣4, and dummy... "small". It took me about half a second to realise that this what not what I had intended to do. Than the hammer came down.

West took ♣10, switched to ♥7, and my fate was sealed. The ♥ layout was as bad as could be.

The ♣10 was the second entry that West needed to butcher my ♥ suit, so I went down 1. To add insult to injury, the ♣ suit layout was perfect, so everybody else made at least 9 tricks.

This kind of thing seems to happen to me far too often. A mistake or sub-optimal play that has a good chance of not costing anything, ends up in a zero score because the exact layout that punishes me the most happens to be the case.

Is it bad karma, did I do something terrible in my past life? Or is it just a biased memory?

BTW, I do not think I could have corrected my unintended dummy play, even if I had been faster than RHO. Correct?