I'm reading the tea leaves like Jeezus right now, which of course isn't always the case. It begs the question, "What is the nature of this phenomenon at the poker table the other night?"

I'm not describing the hand for strategy and probably couldn't. Just pointing up what happened. Bizzare, bizarre death run 20 times longer than is reasonable still live, still in my house. I pretty much quit over it. Only 3 plays this year including this one the other night when Rollings Stones trip was cancelled and had to get out of the house and do something late Saturday night midnight spur of the moment.

More card death first couple hours. Then I have 6-7 of diamonds and flop comes 8-9-10 of diamonds. 4-handed. Check around to preflop button raiser and then it goes bet, raise, shove in front of me. I"m in 1-seat and show hand to guy next to me discreetly, saying, "This hand loses." I triple smooth it. LOL. There isn't much money left so rest of the betting irrelevant.

Dude next to me is laughing. Never seen him in my life. I say again, "This hand loses. Jack of diamonds on the turn." Dealer fulfills the prophecy, 8-9-10-J of diamonds board now, cancelling my hi hand qualifier and now lone queen of diamonds beats me. Astoundingly no one had the queen of diamonds and I won the pot under duress with a flopped straight flush, on turn 6 card straight flush. Boy the perfect ending would have been the queen of diamonds on the river and 3 way chop (one folded). And I would have had a 7 card straight flush cancelled: board plays.

This led to a discussion between me and the dealer whether the fateful last card in the famed "Cincinnati Kid" was the jack or queen of diamonds in the climax straight flush versus aces full hand, Clancy Howard versus Steve McQueen. I got it wrong, the river there was the jack of diamonds.

Anyway, the weird thing is calling the death card then witnessing it ... this going on for well over 400 sessions. NO MATTER WHAT. I saw this for 20 sessions once decades ago. Then I htink I probably played lucky for 30 years, very part time, thinking I was good.

Well, it is definitely easier to play a neutral, or good run of cards well, than to play a bad run of cards well.

Damn, that's all you got? I expected to be lambasted, at least. Or ignored.

Yes a bad run a cards. A run of cards for 400+ sessions in which when you flop 8-9-10 of diamonds to your 6-7 of diamonds, the next card is AUTOMATICALLY, for thousands of hands in a row, the worst card possible, so relentlessly so that you just say it out loud and it comes. Something like 47 out of 50 times in this streak when calling the card it came that exact card. End of thread. This can only happen if the results of these trials are not random, and nobody on here is ready for that. Close thread:::::::: check!

It is too bad that James Randi died, because I'm sure he would have been more than happy to give you the million dollar prize for demonstrating your psychic ability.

I see you are still at level one of understanding this mysterious universe, and quite cocky in your shallow perception of it at that. I said non-random, not psychic, and the non-random has decipherability. Meanwhile, two billion believe in the magic of a certain religion where vampirism -- drinking blood for eternal life -- is a major tenet. What is a magic claim and what isn't needs further review by level one smart asses and ABCers/2+2ers in general.

I don't think I understand where you're coming from. Are you suggesting that you sometimes know what's going to happen?

I'll give you credit for good faith question as opposed to oversimplified overly skeptical scoffing. So, I would ask: would you say that you never know what is going to happen? Let's say you go home 6 hours late from a poker session and your wife is always pissed at such things. Do you know what's going to happen? Can you predict the future that she's going to be pissed? So see, this exposes the question "Are you suggesting that you know what's going to happen?" as grossly oversimplified and in conflict with the facts of normal daily life, a thousand times over.

Obviously, yes, we all many times know what is going to happen, and to imply overly skeptically that this is some kind of magic claim is bullshyt.

So what I'm suggesting is something practically impossible as the function of randomness is happening. Randomness is just a shortcut term anyway. When outcomes get stuck on the super unlikely and can be perceived, something about the nature of reality is being manifest. You know, that nature of reality that is anything but materialism, and where things are very mysterious. He who dismisses the known nature of reality in his shortcut to dealing with it, when he scoffs about its weirdness has already exempted himself by forgetting about its nature intentionally. My closing statement on poker, as on life, is: "This game is probabilistic, but it isn't random. Two very different things." One involves our interpretation and perception of it based on very limited knowledge; the other is about what is really happening, how, and why.

Operating under the thesis:

This universe is a conspiracy of atoms and our senses to create an experience which seems and feels real and material, but is not. Concomitant with this nature of reality, there are wavelengths of thought that are more and less attuned to this state of things. The quantum display and our senses are the conspiring elements, as to the designer, it is unknown. The quantum field is our place holder, and it’s a good one.

Where you and pedantic dumbasses like Randi are completely fallacious is that there is no such thing as repeating a trial and our interaction with it. Every one of them is completely unique influenced by sextillions of virtual particles/waves and their googolplexes of interactions. The Randi experimental design does not respect the nature of reality. He’s great at debunking charlatan fork benders and online psychics, and the like, but he himself does not respect science. Observation itself is extremely biased and unreliable under this set of truths, which undercuts, to some degree, in the deepest analysis, the scientific method.

So if one is trying to think about how weird things happen, and excludes the nature of the universe in so doing, it’s safe to say that his ramblings are going to be wayward. This universe is not materialist but a mentation, this is all but universally acknowledged in modern physics. So to continue in one’s orientation toward trials as if they are materialist is just stupid, stubborn, fundamentalist, willfully blind, oversimplified … at best a shortcut about what is really the nature of trials. So we have a probability system that sits in as a shortcut to predict in the face of our billions of unknown factors and influences. And we call each one of these an independent trial, then immediately deny its independence and uniqueness.

If this relationship between cosmos and consciousness is ignored, if the teleology of consciousness is ignored, if an oversimplified version of quotidian “reality” THAT WE KNOW ISN”T A TRUE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY is adopted as fundamental … then the scoffing “skepticism” one wields while employing this false fundamentality is not only limited and handicapped, but blind, closeminded, and idiotic.

If you think about what a trial is in a dream state, then you are more in touch with reality about the situation. Mentation chose its creation. And consciousness -- that same thing that seemed to create space-time and objects in our dreams -- is doing the exact same thing ALL THE TIME. There is no right to demand that its dream function be different. That’s a mere custom that has been overruled by science itself, that is, by the science which acknowledges this deeper state. Matter is not made of matter: period. Materialism adjourned. Every trial is a mentation. Not of the self certainly, but of consciousness writ large which the self is interacting with.

There might be a doorway in consciousness which leads to this perspective. Something like the lens of perception recalibrated, refocused, reoriented. We know that realm is there so there must be an orientation to it. Our “physical sciences” have proven as much. Then we forget. And start being a pseudo-skeptic.

Well, OK then. Based on those last two posts, I'm going to assume a couple of things: You're smarter than average and you're young: 18-30 ish. Also, I'm hoping this isn't a level. While I'm in my '60s, I remember thinking along those lines clearer than most people around my age and have come to a few conclusions.

First, yes the human mind is capable of some kind of extrasensory transfer of information, however, it is foolish to expect to control it, because you can't. It's going to happen, when it happens and tends strongly to happen between people that have a strong emotional connection. That said, people underestimate their ability to absorb the information collected by their senses and process it, both at a conscious and unconscious level. Until one learns some specific things, it's easy to confuse.

For an easy example, engagement.

By the time the vast majority of us reach adulthood we know when someone is engaged and interested in whatever is going on. But very few of us could describe the specifics of what we're seeing that tells us that. So, in your mind it's going to be felt, not reasoned out. When this happens, it's your subconscious that picks up the clues and gives you the idea that something psychic has happened. This simply isn't the case, you observed an organic change in behavior and responded in an organic manner.

The specifics, once specified, will be recognized by just about everyone. Engaged people sit up straighter, their head rises, they move closes to whatever is interesting to them, the tone/tenor of their voice changes and their movements become more fluid. Also, because of heart rate and blood pressure changes, skin tone can change as well. As social creatures, we are all tuned to these things, some more than others.

Combine this with the fact that we know people behave in patterns and our subconscious "predicts" what is about to happen, often with great success. The thing is, people tend to remember their successes and discount their failures, thus ending up with an overinflated sense of their abilities - that is, until reality smacks them in the head.

I trust you can see how this applies to a hand of poker.

The object lesson I'm getting to is that when you think you're sensing something, it's because you observed something and need to figure out what that something is.

Wow, great reply. What you just described is Jung's exact definition of intuition, so like I'm saying all along, I'm not making magic claims, but sound psychological claims, much of which we don't know where it is coming from. However, those of us of an intuitive bent and reading exhaustively on the subject, have a much better idea of how this works than those who don't. I'm your age. Thanks for the response. There is a point where intuition starts to look very freaky though, would you agree?

Perhaps and perhaps not. The problem is that people weigh their successes more than their failures (which is strange since failures are more painful, but I digress). That's why so many poker players think they're bigger winners than they are, or losing. It takes a special effort to weigh everything evenly.