Deuce of Spades and Ongoing Card Tricks
The murderous cooler beat as soon as you sit down trend continued as I noted in my last session. First hand I played I’m
914 sessions of the super death run now. Playing "ROE" half & half tonight, good game, I was treated to the following hands:
1. 5-5 Hold'em I have 4-4 and limp in early, button raise and four of us to the flop of 2-5-6 rainbow. Button follows for 100 and all 3 of us call. Turn is a 3. I lead for 300 and button insta-calls, other two fold. Queen/ blank on river and she insta-calls 300 again. I turn mine over. And here comes her hand out, like keeps happening, when for all the world my hand is supposed to be good. And she has ..... 4-4. "Nice card trick, " I compliment the dealer. Weird.
2. I raise on button with 8-8, 50 to go. One call. Flop comes 6-7-9. Pretty good. Of course it was the perfect flop for his hand against mine. Just of course it was. He had 8-9. Lose stack.
3. Another long session of PLO with no nut straights or nut flushes. It utterly abandoned me 914 sessions ago. Made one full house which was the bottom board of a bomb pot. Uncontested.
4. It just keeps happening in this run that I either win one hand or none, and the one winning hand, as was the case tonight, bringing me back to between 100 stuck and even, but still forever stuck in the run. It's mind altering. It's medicine. So when I do win this one pot, over and over in sessions, the whole death run starts again in effect doubling the length of time to lose the 3 or 4 buyins that I commit. And stuck the whole time.
5. The one winner I had was an A-9-9 flop to my K-Q-J-9. Of course I can never like that hand with lots of pre-flop and flop action, I could be closed out, but it won about 1000 pot when I was 1100 in.
6. No nut flushes, no nut straights, no flopped wraps, no matched flops, no flopped top sets, no cheap catches on the turn, zero .... nothing nothing, nothing, nothing for 914 sessions.
7. Hold'em flop of Q-10-3 to my Q-10 suited ... he has pocket 3's. Lose stack. Just the perfect flop.
8. Coup de gras ... I have 8-9-9-J doublesuited and went ahead and shoved almost a nickel pre-flop versus some raising. Flop 10-Q-K. Second nut straight and straight flush draw. I'm heads-up and And I'm zero percent to win the pot. He has A-J-J-5, with the nut flush draw and my straight flush blocked. My straight can't reach the ace. No back door flush draw. As soon as we turn the hands over someone said they folded the other pocket nines, so I can't trip. If the board trips out his jacks beat my nines. No win.
Cosmic card tricks delivered by The Trickster. Amen. It teaches me about self and reality (which is its whole game plan). Some angst, but no complaints. The worst run in the history of poker: 914 sessions over 10+ years, all live play, started on Jan.1 2016 with a one-outer beat, set over set in holdem, in a pot where I was afraid I was going to win in a walk with K-K, made a min raise, maniac calls with 3-3, flop is K-9-3 ... and he takes my stack. That's where it started. It's real.
It's possible but unlikely. Are all these sessions live? Are they held in different cardrooms or all in the same place? I know omaha is b... but 900 sessions?
It's possible but unlikely. Are all these sessions live? Are they held in different cardrooms or all in the same place? I know omaha is b... but 900 sessions?
Thanks I've described before that all sessions are live in about 10 different casinos/cardrooms, including mostly major ones (Hard Rocks and Caesars, some Florida rooms). My latest new joint, my last two sessions, exact same story. Utter card death, zero connection with flops or as near zero as you can get. I even won a dime during one of these sessions as aces unhelped shipped preflop tripled up. That, by the way, was the third win of a dime or more in the 915 plays now, in mid-size/fast 1-2 + 5-10 winner straddle forced.
I would like some input in particular on what percent of sessions are the "everything goes wrong nearly all terrible runouts" type disaster session, normally? I always said 1%, but that could be well off ... maybe 2-5%?
I'm sure you are just checking the cliff's, and I don't blame you, but I've described that before this started I was on a super heater sun run including winning 31 sessions in a row, and tons of other streaks. Insanity reigns, it seems. Apparently this was a quarter million-to-one shot or something given a long established 66% win rate in a set of 4000 or so plays, if I remember right. I would like that run again: 66% win rate, over 4K sessions what are the odds winning 31 in a row at any point?
I play only hands with a bunch of outs, mostly nut outs (if full game). The way the completion of the hands went to zero, on top of whiffing bizarre percentage of flops, is way, way beyond any even outlier, extreme bell curve standard deviations. That's 915 sessions of being the coldest player at the table and in the room almost all of them. I've played it for 40+ years now. I had one 20 session stretch like this over that long span. To be more representative, I might call these 915 half-sessions, as they are about 4.5 hours on average. But its 915 mind bending actual playing sessions. I realize it is the amount of hands that is the important thing: I vary on estimating that. 125, 000?
In one sense I was a pretty remarkable bubble. As not even a legit favorite in the game against the modern lineups and the rake, I won 31 in a row, shortly after winning 17-out-of-18, and 93-8 for the year. This was long after the two best players that I came up with were having major trouble winning in the current environment. I was nowhere near their caliber, not a poker pro at all ... was just on a super duper heater.
What is that? Apparently something like a quarter million-to-1 shot? The flip side of that apparently -- in this enantiodromia (the tendency for extreme bell curve anomalies to turn into their opposite) reality of mine -- is 915 sessions of death, with only one session in the lot that felt close to "routine." That is, no rushes for the duration, only one rush would have happened if I played every hand, and just bizarrely everything went south, went antarctic cold, then went Pluto cold. I'd seen it for 20 sessions once in 40 years, now I've seen it for 915 sessions. (Funny, in writing this I had two synchronicities with the words "bubble" and "absolute zero.")
I did make the worst fold of my life the other night in hold'em. It's just gotten too much in my head. But it's okay ... another life track is better. I certainly got my play in over the years, got way more jollies probably than warranted, and I still have the sneaky feeling that perhaps for the whole decades I was running considerably over my expectation in terms of connecting with flops and completing the hands, and only in this last streak did I get any hint of how cold it could go. Perfect summation: certainly a lot of angst, but no complaints.
The way I used to catch:
Earlier today I was reminded of a very memorable hand. Amarillo Slim was in the game, the only time I ever played with him, and he had just bluffed me out of a pot. He showed it and said, "You had me, pardner." Real chummy like.
Very next hand I think it was, playing PLO, I flopped top set and an open end straight flush draw on a 8-9-Q board. I got raised by an all-in, and said, "I guess I gotta call, " facetiously. On the turn I made quads and on the river I made the straight flush. LOL.
So I lean forward and croon my neck just for half a second, like studying the board. "Quads and a straight flush" ... I called it before turning it over. "What?" everybody is thinking. "He's joking, surely."
I rolled it out. Slim was snickering and I said to him, "What was your name again, Hollywood Slim?" He absolutely loved it. Those were the days.
Another obscenity of a poker session last night, after taking 3 months off without playing a hand. 6 hours of hold'em with not a single winner, until the last two hands. Flopped 5-10-10 to pocket 5s, everybody folded for $5 bet. LOL. They finally call me for PLO.
I take one more hand Q-10 of diamonds, flop 8d-Jd-As. Double gutter straight, flush draw, straight flush draw. I bet $10, everybody folding around to the last guy who hesitates. I couldn't take it any more. "Here, I'll help you out, " I said, turning my hand face up. "Two deuces beats me." He hemmed and hawed around some more then threw it away.
PLO immediate obscenity. I have aces single suited, 3 to the flop, one guy in the dark (every hand, he doesn't touch cards until after the flop). Flop 10-10-10. Dark guy with the short stack checks, I bet, other guy calls, dark guy calls. He then inexplicably, drunkenly, says, "Oh I'm just begging to have a 10, " and starts turning his cards over one at a time. We just kind of watch him. The first one answered his prayer, a 10. That leaves me in with the guy with a good stack, me with the nuts. Turn is a jack. The frickin' guy had jacks. Nearly wipes me out.
I restack. I have QQxxx and the flop is Q-9-9. Dude rocks into me twice. I raise the turn. He has Q-9. But guess what he gets to say on the river? You know, when another 9 comes. "I have quads." He turns over Q-9-7-5-4. Yet another 1-outer against my nut full. The fact that he had that other queen -- queens full of nines versus nines full of queens -- was just beautiful. Just absolutely perfect. He can't fold, he's super trapped ... voila, miracle, he gets to say that refrain I hear when I've got the nut full but trips hits the board on the river, and the little full takes my stack: "I've got quads."
I know what a trillion-to-one looks like, and it just keeps happening like this. 920 sessions, live play, across 4 states, 10 or so joints. "Show me another card trick, " I've started saying to dealers for about the last 800 of those sessions, and those were two pretty good ones tonight for damn sure.
True ... the theme running through this streak of horrendous runs all night, followed by the one-outer beat way up in the morning in the "get out of the trap pot, " is an insult to anything reasonable. Except for one thing: it's not an insult to the ultimate truth of what's going on in this streak, which in fact is an enforcing of dharma.
With this new paradigm operating, it's untenable to continue to play. I certainly got my play in, in terms of hours, years, decades, half centuries. It's no longer a winning move to play. Long live the Trickster, for his mayhem is sage!
Another session after several weeks off. First hand when I sit down, I'm A-Q in bb, fold to a raise (I hate the hand). Flop: Q-6-2, off. Pre-flop raiser has 6-6 ... perfect set up to lose stack on first hand, but I ducked it.
Then several hours of nothing. I did win one hand.
PLO game breaks about 4 AM. Move to hold'em table. First hand I take down. Second hand I'm A-K. Raise, one caller. Flop A-8-2. Opponent has 8-8. It ended like it started, but I couldn't duck it. It laid in wait.
