"In the end, every champion is an aberration"

So says Tennis.com's Steve Tignor, referring to Andre Agassi in this thoughtful look at the state of American tennis.

No matter how good he or she may claim to be, it is impossible to determine the level of a chart purely on the basis of a chart. If it's true that about 360,000 people are born every day , then dividing by 12, that means 30,000 people have the same chart basic natal or rasi chart as you. And, obviously, it is not the case that all of you will have the same fortunes.

Yes, subdivisional charts will narrow things down (the rising sign in the navamsa chart changes every few minutes rather than every two hours, for example). But even then, thousands are born the same day with the same rising sign in both rasi and navamsa, and they don't have the same fortune.

Who is the aberration? And who is ordinary? This was St. Augustine's criticism of astrology in the Confessions: that his friend and his servant had the same chart, yet one was the master and the other servant. That never struck me as a devastating criticism (his other criticism was more weighty): their fates, after all, were certainly tied. Nonetheless, there is no question about it: astrology alone is insufficient, not only for predictions but even counseling.

That's where intuition comes in. Sadly, it's one of many places in the practice of astrology where even intuition may not be good enough.