Mathematically heater doesn't exist. Your probability is always the same. But so often i see people, sometimes myself, on a tear in a session. They can hit every card they need, they dodge all the suckouts and they find themselves in all the right spots. In other sessions, i see the same people playing normally. So does HEATER really exist or its my biased observation ?

This is a question you can answer yourself. Take out a coin and start flipping.

Pick any number you want--let's say 8. Mathematically, at any time, the chances of flipping 8 heads in a row is 1/256 (similar to your chances of being dealt pocket aces). At any given time, there's only a very small chance you're about to flip 8 heads in a row. However, if you flip over and over and over again, there's a very high likelihood that you'll do it at some point.

That's a "heater". They do happen.

But the important thing is, you'll flip 6 heads in a row much more often than you'll flip 8 heads on a row. So just because you already flipped 6 in a row, you shouldn't assume you're "in the middle of a heater" and start betting wild amounts of money that you're about to flip two more in a row. I think that is the answer to the question you are trying to ask.

It's your biased observation and there are a lot of subtle biases at work. For starters, you don't notice the people who aren't running extraordinarily well or poorly. And our idea of what "running normal" should look like makes up a small percentage of all possible permutations of good and bad luck, so it's natural that we observe something weird.

I think if your A game is much better than your C game then heaters definitely exist. Let's say your average win rate at 1/2 is $15/hr over a big sample. If you're winning several sessions in a row and you're always on your A game then during that streak perhaps your true win rate is $25/hr. So that would be your "heater" win rate. Alternatively if you've been losing and tilting a lot maybe your true win rate during those sessions could be as low as $5/hr or even 0.

One thing you realize when you start reading up on chaos theory is that random events tend to cluster. Bell labs did some research on this, but there's a common sense angle that iirc was mentioned by Newton; namely, that if random events were perfectly spaced out, that's actually not random at all. So say the telephone company notices a burst of static from time to time, which averages out to six bursts per hour. If each burst occurred precisely every ten minutes, that's actually highly structured and non-random. If it's REALLY random, then sometimes you will get 4, sometimes 8. Occasionally you will get 20 and every once in a while you will have a really bad hour and get 100. Likewise, you might rarely go for days without a burst.

You see this everywhere in nature. Florida once went 9 years without a hurricane and then had four in one season.

Venice10 likes to say he don't need no stinkin cards. Well, that's not precisely what he says. He says cards is the least important factor of several, among them position and aggression. I think how it works is, you consistently make good decisions, and with an average run of cards you will make OK money. If you have a bad run of cards, you won't do too badly. And when you have a good run of cards, you will make a ton of money.

I would say that a bad run of cards usually lasts a couple of hours, although it's not unusual for it to go 24 hours, and over the course of a lifetime, don't be surprised if you have a bad run that goes on for eight months, accounting for the sporadic disappearance of really talented players at times. The opposite is also no doubt true, and accounts (I suspect) for Moneymaker's brief rise to fame.

This isn't to say poker is random. If it were, you would get AKo as frequently as you get T4o (a holding I was dealt at least 300 times in the last week), and of course everybody knows that doesn't happen.

Sigh.

Locked.

This is a poker strategy forum, everyone. Not a "let me ask any question that pops in my head about poker" forum.