I realize this is going to sound like I'm a total fish, but bear with me for a moment.

I'm under the distinct impression that I run much, much worse in hands like KQs vs AJs than standard equities would indicate.

I've been playing PLO for most of my "career", and only switched to Holdem satellites fairly recently.

The mind is obviously going to play tricks on you when so many crucial situation boil down to whether you win or lose those 60/40s. In fact, it's often 1st place money (1st place paying out just the same as 6th place if 6 seats are awarded) which is something like 10x the buy-in or ZERO depending on whether you win or lose one crucial hand.

With that said, I've gotten it in so many times holding a hand that's slightly behind (which I couldn't know when I jammed) but it feels like my equity instantly drops (close enough) to zero.

Is there any way to make logical sense out of this?

Here's two ideas (mind tricks aside):

1) barely anybody will fold a trashy ace in a short stacked situation but most people wouldn't open jam K2o UTG => when I open jam KQs, many Kx type of hands will fold/have folded already but Ax won't hence my actual equity in terms of live cards may often be way below 40%?

2) endgame situations in satellites are played with super short stacks a lot of the time and high card value becomes MASSIVE in those situations so Ace high is much more valuable compared to playing with deeper stacks

Can you name any other reasons as to why the actual equity might be lower than what equity calculators would suggest?

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that I'm the poor soul who gets unlucky (lol) but trying to find a logical explanation for something that seems to happen quite a bit.

Before you try to figure out why something is happening, you should first try to determine IF it is happening.

Let's think about this. If you lose more than 60% of the time when you should only lose 60% of the time (and this is consistent over large samples) then there could be some reason for that to be happening. And if it there is such a reason, then you should be winning more than 60% when you get it in as a 60/40 favorite. Clearly, if there is something going on that makes 60% favorites really 75% favorites, this would work both for and against you. If it only works one way, and you lose more often than you should in both scenarios, then the answer is clear: They have written software simply designed to screw you, because they don't like you for some reason. If that is true, then I think you need to sacrifice a goat or chicken while chanting "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over again.

So perhaps your first step is to record every all-in preflop situation you have, and the result. After you have gathered a good sized sample, you can look at the results and see if they vary significantly from expectation. If they do, you can start thinking about possible reasons. If they don't, we can just chalk this up to selective memory, or the possibility that you have just been unlucky in a small sample of those situations, and it isn't going to happen over the long term.

I wasn't suggesting anything like that at all.

I just remembered that people correct Paisting all the time when he moans about running bad and they point out that he will always run below EV because his cards are so bad in so many hands that most of his "live" cards will have been folded already.

You're obviously correct about the need for a decent sample but it would be quite the hassle to build a solid database given that I play a lot on CoinPoker and PartyPoker which make retrieving hand histories a rather tedious affair.

I know you weren't saying it was rigged against you, I was just having some fun.

Here is the thing - you don't need full hand histories for this exercise. Just have a spreadsheet open - and whenever you get all in preflop (don't worry about hands that get in on a different street where you have to incorporate the board) just put in the info. All you need are 3 columns: Your Hand, Opponent Hand, and Winner. It might look something like this:

You Opp Winner
AKs 99 99
KJ AT Kj
...

And then don't even worry about it for a long time. At some point you will realize you have a bunch of them, and can look to see whether or not the percentages are matching what they should.

The bigger thing, though, is that I don't see why this should really matter. I'm sure you are never planning on getting all-in with a hand that is a 40/60 dog. When you get short-stacked in a tournament, a lot of the time you really don't have much choice but to shove, or sometimes call a shove. But if you think it will help you make a decision, you should at least have some data to back up that decision, rather than relying on what you seem to be seeing. Keep this in mind, though. If somehow you have less equity, on average, because of cards people have folded, I'm pretty sure it would only be a very slight deviation from expectation. Not an amount so large that you would have noticed it, and certainly not an amount that could be reliably detected without a pretty large sample. Much more likely is that nothing unusual has happened, but you remember the losses much more than the wins.