Nothing"s a Lock
by Lee H. Jones
"Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds," I cry ...
When reading the Internet poker forums, you see a lot of complaining about the bad beats that happen on one poker site or another. "This kind of thing is impossible; it doesn"t happen this way in real life." "I had XX and my opponent had YY, and there"s no way he could catch up to me, but he did. The cards are obviously rigged." And you see the same thing when you actually play online; the same comments come up in chat: "That river card could have come here only on this site." I note with more than a little amusement that I"ve seen that comment on every poker site I"ve ever played, thus proving that these bizarre river cards are indeed limited to — er — all online poker sites.
There are several reasons why people make these comments, but I"d like to discuss a few of them right here:
First, you see many more hands online than you do in a brick-and-mortar casino or cardroom. Consider this: Suppose you"re playing in a cardroom with a pretty snappy dealer and players are acting promptly. Nobody is asking for deck changes too often, and things are running smoothly. You"re seeing about 30-35 hands per hour. Now, contrast that to an online environment. Suppose you"re playing two games at once, at a very reasonable 80 hands per hour each. So, you"re seeing 160 hands per hour — five times as many hands as you do in your local cardroom. And you will see five times as many wacky events, five times as many bad beats, and five times as many monster hands. ("Quads should never happen that frequently!") As live-game poker players, we"re conditioned to expect to see certain things with a specific frequency. For instance, if you play a lot of cardroom hold"em, you might make a straight flush with both of your cards once a year — and you remember them. Now, you"re doing it every two months and they all blur together.
Second, people seem to get a distorted idea of how frequently the best hand is supposed to win. For instance, consider the classic "dominated hand" scenario — A-K vs. A-Q. Whenever the A-Q wins, people go nuts; it wasn"t fair, the site is rigged, and so on. Try the following experiment: Get a pair of dice. If necessary, borrow them from the house Monopoly game. Start rolling. Every time you see 2, 3, 4, 11, or 12, A-Q beats A-K. That"s right, sports fans, A-K is about a 3-1 favorite over A-Q all in preflop (if they have no matching suits). So, A-Q gets there 25 percent of the time. With your dice, you"ve got 36 (6 x 6) possible combinations. One combination makes 2, two combinations make 3, three make 4, two make 11, and one makes 12 — a total of nine of the 36 possible combinations. If it will make you feel better, every time you roll 2, 3, 4, 11, or 12, yell, "These dice are rigged!"
My friend Bill Chen has a knack for explaining mathematical concepts so that we laypersons, who think math is hard, can understand them. He points out that A-Q beats A-K with approximately the same frequency that a big league ballplayer gets a base hit (if he doesn"t walk). Tell the pitchers facing a hitter that it"s a statistical impossibility when he gets a hit.
And it"s not hard to come up with other examples of "impossible" outcomes that really do happen. For instance, suppose you push all in with the 7 6 and run smack into two black aces. It"s time to pick up your bottle of water and go home, right? Well, probably, but it"s not as hopeless as you might think. You have about a 23 percent chance of winning the hand. Still got those dice out? Try this: There are four combinations each of the fives and nines, and 8?36 is almost exactly the chance that your 7-6 suited has against those ugly aces. Fire up the dice again. Every time you roll a 5 or 9, the aces get cracked.
Rigtig god...
Spillede et live game for en uges tid siden, hvor 4 ens på floppet blev slået af runner-runner straight flush.
Det er en oplevelse jeg endnu ikke har haft online (mener jeg).
Men det er i øvrigt meget naturligt, at folk giver sitet skylden, for hvad kan man ellers give skylden?
Jeg ser det også konstant i mit daglige arbejde på aktiemarkedet, hvor folk giver bankerne skylden for deres tab. Taber man 10% på en position, så er det straks Danske Bank, Nordea, Carnegie, Alfreb Berg eller en af de andre der manipulerer med kursen. Vinder man en uge efter 10% så er det selvgølgelig ens skarpsindige analyse der gjorde udslaget.
Det handler i bund og grund om, at vi mennesker ikke er meget for at tage fejl, og blander man dette med vores meget inderlige ønske om at vinde, så har man en eksplosiv cocktail.
Ender man med at tabe er det derfor meget naturligt at man vil finde en undskyldning, og da der ikke er nogen plausible undskyldninger må man finde en der er et godt stykke "out there in left field".
Så det gør man, og den med at sitet er rigged er derfor oplagt. Jeg har også engang på et kasino hørt en mand mumle, at dealeren pakkede kortene.
Det er alene noget folk siger, for at give tabet en årsag de kan acceptere selv. For hvis ikke det er sitet der er rigged må næste tanke være, at det er dem der har spillet dårligt, og så langt skulle vi jo nødigt nå, for vi er jo allesammen verdens bedste, når det kommer til poker.
Spørg bare Phill Hellmuth :-)
I hvert eneste interview jeg har hørt med ham siger han, at andre mener han er verdens bedste, men jeg har aldrig nogensinde hørt andre end ham sige det. Strange huh?
/DTM
Kanon artikel. Specielt "The order that the cards come out doesn"t matter" fatter folk ikke. Så sent som i går var jeg all-in pre-flop på et NL50-bord med AKspar mod KTo (Ja!). Floppet var to tiere og en spar. Turn og river var begge uparende spar, og så fik jeg "What a suck-out, u river rat". Så er det svært at holde latteren tilbage