It seems like every game always on luck box. I play in a small stakes weekly home game. For the past 2 years the same person (mr. x) consistently cleans the table out and breaks the game and Tonight was no different. Table starts with 9 players and after 2.5 hours the game is down to 4 player. Each of the 5 players re-bought a full stack at least 1 time. The winner, mr x has done it again. I do not suspect cheating in any way as it does not matter who is dealing.
How does everyone deal with luck boxes?
It's good to have people chase cards with the worst of it but at the same time breaking up a full ring home ga,e after 2.5 hrs is not fun.

Dude, he's not a luck box. He's better than everyone. Apparently much better. Figure out why. Can you give some hand examples of his "luck boxness"? I mean several, not just one.... We can offer you feed back on how to defeat this guy!

OP, since you are talking about a weekly game for 2 years, this is a fairly decent sample size to spot some real trends. This is not variance if it is happening as often as you claim. Maybe you are simply dwelling on the times it happens and overlooking the normal nightly results. IDK of course, but if your post is accurate, then more than "luckboxing" is happening here. You have dismissed cheating, but it could be still happening somehow. However, it is much more likely that he is quite a bit better than the rest of you and has been able to hide it well. It is odd , though, since even very good players usually go on some kind of downswing from time to time. After all this is around a 100 sessions of several hours each you are talking about.

I feel your pain. My best friends wife is an ATC player (Any Two Cards). So frustrating to see them rewarded for AWFUL plays. Friday night was another example.

Flop gives me second pair, oesd. she has THIRD pair. Turn adds a possible flush to the fun, I shove having her more than covered, she SNAP CALLS with the worst hand, and the rive brings me two pair and completes her gutshot straight draw.

She then proceeds to explain how she "had to" call off almost 30BB at the turn with her pair and (terrible) drawing hand.


Just play solid cards and you will get the money . . . or someone else will.

First things first, I like most of 2+2 have played enough poker (25+ yrs) in my life to see normal things occur at the table from people on heaters to suck outs.

Of the last 6 sessions (3 months) this is the only individual to have quads ad he has had them a total of 8 times. Nobody else in the game has had quads even 1 time. Small variance, sure but getting quads 8 times in 30 hours is not normal. In fact on my last trip to vegas (40th trip) I played more than 120 hours on the trip and did not even see anyone at the table get quads 1x.

I am more than happy to provide you with examples of hands last night in the 2.5 hours played.

Game: .50/1 NL $50 max initial buy in
Style: semi loose roughly 3-4 people to every flop with a full table.

(1) 5 handed at this point
Mr X: big blind
Me: UTG +1 Ah Jc

I call $1 Stack is $80
UTG +2 (Stack is $120) makes it $4 folded around to Mr. x ($140) who calls $4 and I call.

Flop is Jc 5h 2d
I check, UTG+2 makes it $4, Big blind calls $4 and I make it $19. UTG +2 folds and Mr. x calls stating "I need runner runner", turn is a Qh and I get it all in and Mr. x snap calls flipping over Kh 3h only to spike a heart on the river.

This post is more of a rant. I want to play with players who play 85% of hands and get it in bad almost all of the time and break the game. It just fires me up to see the same inferior hands get there by the river each and every time and the game be broken after such a short period of time.

I will continue to tighten down the starting hands and get in it when i am good. It has to turn around sooner or later.

If you only had 6 sessions in 3 months instead of weekly , then your sample is about half as large. So variance "luck boxing" becomes an easier answer. He is still likely a very good player too. Still he should downswing eventually and your plan should help you even the score a bit if not a lot.

I'm glad you recognize this as a rant, because this guy is apparently aweful. But also, it appears you are not charging him as much to be aweful as he would allow you to. AJo vs 85% range!? Raise it up!!! Limp and a min raise!? Raise it up!!! Okay, so that's too simple to be real advice but c'mon, the guy never folds and you are goi to every flop 4-handed!! Raise it up and charge these guys, there is a plethora if info here to help you crush this guy.

Remember it I only through bad play we make money. The worse the play, the more money we make. Even when you lose you should ha k your stars he is putting it in. It's all about the g-buck!!! Good luck OP!

Also: truth is tightening down isn't as important as you may think...

I had quads three times last week. I only showed twice.

Thanks all for feedback. I have chalked this up as a rant and will lock it down to even a tighter hand range.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G850A using 2+2 Forums

They say that luck evens out over the long run. What they don't tell you is the long run can be very looooooonnnnnng. Seriously, someone can play bad, get lucky and stay lucky a long time.

What you do is trust the math. As long as you are getting your money in good, the luck will swing one day.

I had this conversation with someone who told me that some people will be lucky all their lives. They will get more great hands in their lifetime than other people. That is certainly possible, but it is highly unlikely. Besides, there is nothing you can do about it. You won't know it will happen until it has happened, and a lifetime has passed. But you have to accept that miniscule risk if you're going to play poker.

If the K3 hand you've described is truly exemplary of how he plays, then this guy is a completely awful player.

But we're talking about a biweekly game over the course of two years, if I'm reading correctly. He has not only come out a winner every time but has consistently cleaned house? That's crazy unlikely, even for a short-stacked game (and especially considering that people rebuy). If his approach to poker is as weak as the K3 hand suggests, he'd have to get lucky to even have an occasional winning night, never mind many of them. Consistently winning over 24-ish sessions is basically out of the question.

Unless your other players are somehow much worse than Mr. X, he's bucking very steep odds to come out the big winner so often. If we were talking about limit stud or something, it'd be less striking. If he were loose and aggressive, that might also explain it. But no-limit hold'em is very unforgiving to weak loose/passive players of this type. He should be getting crushed like once an orbit.

I think you have to be suspicious of cheating at this point. A player manipulating the deck while it's in his control is not the only way to cheat.

If you flip a coin 24 times, and it comes up heads all 24 times, you have to entertain the idea that your coin ain't fair. The odds against a run of 24 heads is 16,777,215:1.

Now consider a poker session. With 9 evenly matched players, the odds against any individual player being the biggest winner of the night are 8:1. The odds against the same individual player being the big winner 24 times in a row are about 79,766,443,080,000,000,000,000:1.

That's with 9 evenly matched players, and we're not even talking about that. We're talking about a bottom-of-the-barrel player who should be far worse than 8:1 to come out the big winner in any given session. Though we may not be talking specifically about 24 consecutive big wins out of 24 attempts, that's just to have an example to start with.

If his results have been even remotely close to "consistently cleans the table out and breaks the game," it seems insanely unlikely for Mr. X to have performed this way honestly.

What are the odds of winning the lottery? Yet, with so many people playing, someone eventually wins. Likewise, poker. Many millions play, so someone must have this sort of luck at some point.

I only said it was extremely unlikely, but not impossible.

The odds of one ticket winning, for example, the Mega Millions jackpot, are about 258,000,000:1.

The odds for our equally matched 8:1 shot to clean house 24 times in a row are about (1/9)^24, or 79,766,443,080,000,000,000,000:1. Spiking the MM jackpot on a single ticket is about 310,000,000,000,000 times as likely as this kind of run occurring on any specific group of 24 poker sessions (Again, notably, this is with all equal players. The probability is hundreds of millions times less likely if he is, say, a 20:1 shot to come out the big winner in any specific game.)

Moreover, it's almost inevitable someone will win the MM jackpot because there are many millions of tickets sold for each drawing, and two drawings a week. Our sample of 24-session groups witnessed by 2+2 users is much smaller.

Originally the OP said it was a Weekly game for 2 years. That is considerably more than 24 sessions! IF the guy was a regular and the rest of the crew was somewhat steady too , that would make it even more unlikely than what Jim was posting for a weak player. Either the situation is overstated by the OP , OR the player would have to be much more skilled. IDK what's really going on of course , but it seems a difficult story to keep the different parts together. Hell , Eneely might be right too.

I would want a LOT more data from OP before I tried to find causation. Let's try to look for other explanations before we jump to "Master Cheater". Cheating is a rare thing in my experience. Cheating so well you always win and never get caught is more myth than reality.

A player with a huge win rate just about never goes on a long losing streak. {I'd be happy to offer the math behind this in a separate thread if needed.} Their bad sessions tend to look more like break-even rather than serious losses. Of course anyone can have one or two losing sessions but the chance of such sessions clumping together are low. {the best players in my games tend to win 70% to 80% of their sessions}.

The one thing I can say about OP's "luck box" is that luck is very unlikely to be the explanation. Maybe OP isn't remembering as well as he thinks. Maybe the guy is truly much better than the field. Maybe he is a master cheater. But the results are not a matter of variation {luck} There is a systemic cause, we just don't know what it is.

DrStrange

I'm afraid I only responded to part of the above post. Sorry about that, and all the unnecessary math it triggered you to do.

I'm taking the OP with a grain of salt. He said it was a rant. I think there is some hyperbole there. 24 consecutive winning sessions is not that surprising, but it might have been 4 out of 5 sessions. "Clean House" is a nebulous term. I think this villain is on a hot streak, and perhaps not always as awful as OP suggests. We can't take one hand as typical.

You posted about 24 coin flips, and I said that was unlikely, but not impossible, with enough coin flippers flipping enough coins. But I think a better simplified analogy would that villain has won something like 4 out of 5 coin flipping sessions.

My first post above was a general statement about how losing a significant percentage of flip hands over a longer period of time can seem damned unlucky, but it is just the way variance goes.

Cheating (relatively poorly if things like 8 quads in a few hundred hands are happening) or poorly described.

I think the OP was overstated. And I wasn't making a case that it is literally true. But I do think someone could post something true that is a 17M:1 long shot. Again, I could post someone winning the lottery that is much longer odds. We would not dismiss that as impossible because of the odds.

I could also post a video of the WSOP hand that was quad As against a royal flush. If someone posted that had happened in their home game 24 hands in a row, we might be more skeptical.

Doesn't matter much. There's more than enough "evidence" to make the game worth not playing, thinking anything else is setting yourself up to put it mildly. If accurately described obviously.

Two days ago in the space of less than 220 hands I lost to a Royal and a 7 hi straight flush playing Omaha hi, and a steel wheel playing O8. I also had a flopped royal which was not shown down.
Sometimes weird stuff happens.

Could be luck. Could be cheating.

But I think mr. x may be a better poker player than you give him credit for being.

I'm thinking the success of mr. x is probably a mixture of skill and luck... unless most of the time he has gotten quads has been when he, himself, has been dealing... and then maybe there's a bit of clever card manipulation involved too.

Watch him.

Buzz

Who brings the cards?

I think we all assumed the OPs group was playing a standard weekly NLH game. If they were playing Omaha Hi that would help explain the larger amount of of high hands, but would not explain why one person was getting them all and winning them all for such a long time (two years !!) In fact with the variance of Omaha Hi the player in question should have a lot more losing sessions than the OP posted about. Especially in a low stakes home game environment..