Where is Hannibal When You Need Him?

Integrity online - something I've never been 100% convinced of, and whilst I continue playing, I'm very cautious to try and not over committ financially and leave myself in the position of a recent work colleague of mine. Not through poker mind, his was horses. The losses he incurred caused him to borrow money from people that charge interest rates akin to the number of times 'Rooney' and 'Foot' are mentioned in the tabloids. His wins stopped and the losses mounted and he began to pay for his losses by fiddling at work.

He was caught, of course, has now lost his job, his family life and has had to move out of the area to try and escape the people he owes money to. A sad situation and a shock to those that knew him, however little.

Anyway, back to my main point and time to be controversial. These pages are not just about what we do on the tables, but also our thoughts and feelings related. As I said, I've never been 100% sure of any poker sites integrity, and I gave up believeing it was 'random' a long time ago.

Now before you start thinking, uh oh, here's another nutter that thinks the system is rigged, pause. I do not think that at all. If that were so, I would be working for one of them, finding out for sure and then blackmailing them mercilessly. It's just a totally different 'random' that exists in any real live card game, for a variety of reasons.

I have been making a few (actually, a lot) of notes and saving my hand history and viewing it from time to time as a whole to see any patterns or to learn from it. Then, last night, I experienced something that has me puzzled. I backed off the tables and viewed my hand history (now over 50k hands in it from variuos sites) and spent a little time thinking about it (maybe this was my mistake). So before I voice my thoughts, let's go through the hand.

I'm on a 50c NL table for about 20 minutes, with 5 other fairly solid players. One in particular has been steadily building his pot by about 25$ in the time I was there, and I never saw him lose a showdown (the hand history proves this to be correct). I'm in mid position when I get dealt AA. I rasie to 5$ and all fold except the above mentioned player on the BB who re-raises to 10$. This is now expensive for me and AA does tend to lose more than it wins online at the lower levels, so I just call.
The flop is rainbow A 10 7 so I bet 10$. My opponent re-raises me to put me all in for my remaining 34$ which I call after thinking, what the hell can he have. Pocket 10's or 7's? He turns over 5 6 suited.

A few players instantly 'lol' and 'amazing' as the turn shows an 8. Then after that momentary pause that seems a lot longer, the river is a 4. He has hit a straight.
Imagine your feelings as that river cards flips over. 60$ of my money has gone to a call that can only be described as incredible. Incredibly stupid? Incredibly lucky obviously, or just incredibly incredible. Or was it?

Think through your experience of playing poker online. We've all played against players that are so bad we clean them out fairly quickly. These players have usually matched lowest pair, or top pair with average kicker and refuse to believe that you have hit your straight or flush. Or they keep calling with a gutshot or 4 to a flush, irrespective that the odds are not in their favour (and yes, occasionally they hit).
But have you ever seen a hand go like this? My pre-flop raise indicated I had a pretty decent hand, he'd been at the the table with me for at least 20 mins and this was the biggest raise I'd done. We all see players that refuse to fold 'sooted' cards, but a re-raise with such low cards (this was also his first re-raise pre-flop). On the flop, my bet of 10$, 20 x the BB, indicated I had a strong hand. Then he massively over-bets and raises to all in (he had 56$ in his pot at this stage)!! Surely my 10$ bet clearly showed I had something strong. Was he trying to steal the pot by representing the Ace, putting me on KK or QQ - again, surely my 10$ bet showed my strength. To hit the turn and river as he did were just amazing. Maybe he was also feeding the 5000 as he played, or perhaps he was walking over Lake Michigan with laptop in hand - it's that kind of miraculous (OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little).

The main thought I couldn't shake was 'he knew what was coming'. Was this a real possibilty or was I just looking for a way to justify it to myself. I don't know and never will, but it doesn't stop me thinking that he did. I e-mailed the poker site with the hand history, asking them to look at his history but maybe that was just sour grapes on my part.

I closed my poker programmes and decided to look at my hand history as I've not done this for a while. A friend has written a pretty good excel spreadsheet that I can download my hands to (don't ask me how it works - I sell holidays!!) and it gives you some amazing statistical information. I now have 50k hands in this download, enough to say there is enough, and I'd like to share just 4 with you and see what you think.

The first one is the most amazing for me, something that sticks in the mind as happening so often, as well as noticing it in hands I'm not involved with. If you hold pocket pairs, you will lose to a player holding a lower pocket pair 52% of the time. That's more than 5 times out of every 10. Odds are around 25-30% depending on table size. (Most of the time I play on 6 seater tables.) This 52% is made up of the total hands won by lower pocket pairs, whether I was on the winning or losing end of it.

When I hold KK, there is an A on the table 82% of times. Can't find any odds or stats for this, but seems very high.

Next is the one lot's of players comment on when at the tables. There's a pair on the board, and someone always seems to have a third in their hand. The odds say, on a 10-seater table, that there is a 40% chance that someone holds a third. Just from memory I'd say that was rubbish - but it's in the poker books as well as my odds calculator - and sure enough, my download shows over 70% of times. Now, there are a lot of hands that are folded to a bet when a pair is on the board - and we don't know if the player had one or not. Even running a 40% calculation on these folded hands, and the % overall is still in the high 60's. I know we play a lot more hands, but odds are odds surely? Incidently, my download shows that 32% of the time, there are 2 players holding another and your kicker wins or loses it, and rarely would they be folded so a more accurate %.

Lastly, the flop is 7 7 7 and you hold the 4th (or any other 4 of a kind). Apparantly the odds are about once every 20k hands (give or take a few). I've had this 7 times in my 50k, and lost to it a further 5 times. Again, there are folds to a flop of trips, but even assuming all of these were semi-bluffs at least, I still have 13 occasions in 50k hands.

So what do we learn from these stats? Are 50k enough? Maybe I should just scrap them and forget that odds and probability exist as they seem to bear no resemblence online, as they do in the real world. Just play the hand in front of you, think only of what is releveant to the cards you see, and the cards you hold, and then as soon as the hand is finshed, forget it and move on the next. Maybe the sheer volume of hands mean it is a totally different kind of random, as I said earlier. Maybe online is the correct random, and we've been mistaken that the real world is random? Or, have I have missed the most obvious answer to all of this? I just don't know.

Or, as my favourite childhood programme used to say: if you have a problem that no-one else can solve, and you can find them, maybe you can hire The A Team?