Why You Guys Aren’t Crushing These Microlimit Games

This article hits home with me having been felted 11 times in the last three days by miracle cards on the river after I got all my chips in with the best hand on the turn. I was felted twice more because I was calling down a bluffer at the wrond time. I do not understand how someone reraises me with AK on the board(and in my hand) and catches a three on the river to make a set. Dumbfounding and tremendously unlucky for me the last few days. That combined with some bad plays made after some of these beats has dropped my banroll in half in a weekend. I have learned from the experience however the lessons are hard. I have to let bad beats roll off of me and play my game. Confidence is hard to maintain when you get results like that but I won’t focus on results. And I will learn the value of not building big pots on drawing flops. Thanks for your site and book Ed although the limit game is even more up and down then NL. More study more study…fold fold fold fold….then make em pay!

“”I do not understand how someone reraises me with AK on the board(and in my hand) and catches a three on the river to make a set.”"

Happened online, right? Of course it did.

Sure, it happens live. Chances are about one in twenty a 3 rivers (once we have established a situation where someone has decided that with an AK board to a presumable pre flop raiser they are going to pull off a turn raise bluff).

So it can happen live. But wanna know why I KNOW it happened online? BECAUSE ONLINE POKER IS NOT PHUCKING RANDOM. And until the poker world learns this and somebody proves it, instead of simply drinking the “all these experts tell us it ‘must be’ random” koolaid, online poker will never — for better or worse — be a true reflection of one’s actual poker skills played online.

And if it didn’t happen online, then that was one of the rare aberrations. Judging from the successive nature of the so called miracle feltings you experienced, most likely it was online.

Take a weird situation that has come up time and time again, often with a particular result. (For example, you are in a low stakes sng shootout qualifier online, and someone calls or pushes back all in with a lower pocket pair than your pocket pair, and just the two of you go to the flop with one all in, with a stack that is of a certain percentage size or greater …)…Then identify what the objective parameters are. Then take all your online play that involved every single hand that involved those parameters, and run a (binomial) calculation to calculate the probability of the observed number (or greater) of target outcomes occurring.

If you have played a few hundred thousand hands or more, and can find a few hand types where it “seems” you are winning a bit more or less often than you should, but the overall “hand distribution” for those hands when you DON’T break it down in this fashion is of course normal, and then do such a rigorous (and time consuming)and objective statistical analysis where you again DO break it down in this fashion (that is, for example, OVERALL number of times opponents hit a set against you as opposed to more rigorously analyzed and broken down examples), you may find one or more hand situation patterns where the probability was actually less than one in one million.

Meaning — if you had at least several hundred or thousand hand samples that fit the parameters (such as in our example of an all in higher versus lower pocket pair in a particular type of online tournament structure, e.g.) — either you have stumbled upon a bizarrely coincidental random variance instance, or, ta dah, online poker ain’t random.

Come up with a few different and otherwise unrelated examples, and if you understand basic statistical deviations (enough to grasp the relevance of your isolated sample size, both in absolute terms and in relation to your overall hand size, and correctly relate them to your overall results), you will be able to grasp that online poker can not possibly (within a reasonable degree of probability) be mathematically random, AND that no study that has yet “addressed” the question has even examined the right issues.

But the real bizarre question is not over “randomness” or non randomness,” but the lack of PROPER analysis on the question. That is, analysis in lieu of the almost hare krishna like beliefs that only undue cynicism, bad attitude, or bad play could lead one to conclude online play is not random, and beliefs that “we all know that it is random, it makes sense for it to be random, they tell us it is, therefore it is,” in lieu of the fallow and often highly nonrigorous and incomplete “independent” studies that “tell” us online poker is, in fact, random, and our studiously presumptive and uncritical acceptance of such studies as fact.

Go to forums like two plus two publishing, where poker discussion sometimes reaches near magical heights of insight and complexity, but yet where the presumptive belief that it is, that it MUST, that it HAS TO BE random online is nurtured and fostered with the petulance and intellect of a preschooler. Because such smart minds have no time for inane discussion regarding something which we all, hare krishna like, “know” to be true and which we are constantly told is in fact true.

The emperor of online poker wears no clothes. And some of pokers brighest minds, are, in this regard, completely blind.

“whateverdude”
you must have lost alot on poker… only the losers complain about internet not being random. The truth is, no one cares! We are all in the same boat, numbers dont favor anyone… people like you bore me to hell with their conspiracy theories.
wake up! no one cares.