So the subject isn't bad beats ... it's about an impossibly anomalous streak and the nature of reality. About enantiodromia, and better yet, about a prescient enantiodromia delivered tailor-made by the (so-called) Trickster. That makes it very Jungian.

When I say it is about a prescient enantiodromia, I lose almost everybody, and that's because when you get to esoteric truth, you almost by definition lose plausibility with most everyone. It's lonely out in space.

You know, when a lot of people discuss the whole subject of the nature of chance (of course a subset of the nature of reality), they try to explain what is happening with a whole cloth conflation of probability and true randomness.

Come to papa. I am what I am. If we have people talking to god and revealing his thoughts on here, we can have an actual metaphysician. This anomaly is teaching me something else, something besides this taken for granted conflation.

I seem to be pulling a Bowman, a Dave Bowman. It's quite a meaningful and revealing path. And since I was delivered into this world by a Dr. Stats, the teleology of the cosmos, built into nature, is hardly something to be scoffed at, but rather ultimately embraced.

Here I sit ... the betting is done
It's impossible to say what was lost and won
Money and chips were a small part of it
What it was all about requires some wit.


The hands from tonight, the 907th session in the death run. Last session for me.


As-9s-Jk-Jh-Qd ... Flop Jk-10s-6s. Top set, nut flush draw, open end straight (all the nuts) ... lose stack heads up.

K-K-J-J-9 ............... Flop K-4-5 rainbow. Lose stack heads up to pre-flop re-raiser.

7-8-9-10-J ........... Flop 6-7-A rainbow. Five of us ship and aces full wins it. Lose stack.

7-7-6-5-4 ............. Flop 7-6-3. Top set, nut straight and straight flush draw. Lose stack heads up.

J-J-10-9-7 .............. Flop J-5-2 rainbow. Lose stack heads up.

K-Q-J-2-4 ............. Flop A-10-8 rainbow. Runout 3-5. Runner runner nut wheel for me. Dude makes very slow crying call with trip aces (he says). But he also has the wheel unknowingly. Split pot slow roll.

Flop nut flush. Up against top set who bet into me. Quads first card off.

A-Q-J-9-7 ............. Flop A-A-4. Lose stack to 4s full.

10-10-J-8-8 ............. Flop A-10-6. Two players flopped aces and sixes and turn is the case ace, both making aces full.


Those were all within one hour.


Good night, fellas. I don't need this. On the upside, I have learned that this phenomenon isn't random. It is probabilistic, but not random. And also that it doesn't matter much, which was a big news flash.

Oh, I forgot:

Sitting in a Hold'em game waiting for PLO seat, my very first hand was A-J of diamonds. I raise in cutoff, get re-raised by button. Call. Flop, three babies with two diamonds. I'm check-raising him. Check, check. Turn J of clubs. I bet 125. He calls. River K, not a diamond. He I check, he bets 125, I pay it off. He turns over A-K (2 outs from my turn bet). Just ridiculous, ridiculous coolers awaiting every session.

So, I'm in the 7-seat, guy in 9-seat, 8-seat open. Dude comes up and sets rack of chips on the rail, and walks off. 9-seat doesn't see it, elbows it, and there is 500 worth of red chips all over the floor. Right then I predict there will be one missing and I'll be the suspect as they are all over, many right under me. Sure enough one chip missing. I go to PLO as the suspect. Later they said they had found it under a scooter. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I had never seen in almost 50 years a full rack knocked off the table. Now I have.

914 sessions of the super death run now. Playing "ROE" half & half tonight, good game, I was treated to the following hands:

1. 5-5 Hold'em I have 4-4 and limp in early, button raise and four of us to the flop of 2-5-6 rainbow. Button follows for 100 and all 3 of us call. Turn is a 3. I lead for 300 and button insta-calls, other two fold. Queen/ blank on river and she insta-calls 300 again. I turn mine over. And here comes her hand out, like keeps happening, when for all the world my hand is supposed to be good. And she has ..... 4-4. "Nice card trick, " I compliment the dealer. Weird.

2. I raise on button with 8-8, 50 to go. One call. Flop comes 6-7-9. Pretty good. Of course it was the perfect flop for his hand against mine. Just of course it was. He had 8-9. Lose stack.

3. Another long session of PLO with no nut straights or nut flushes. It utterly abandoned me 914 sessions ago. Made one full house which was the bottom board of a bomb pot. Uncontested.

4. It just keeps happening in this run that I either win one hand or none, and the one winning hand, as was the case tonight, bringing me back to between 100 stuck and even, but still forever stuck in the run. It's mind altering. It's medicine. So when I do win this one pot, over and over in sessions, the whole death run starts again in effect doubling the length of time to lose the 3 or 4 buyins that I commit. And stuck the whole time.

5. The one winner I had was an A-9-9 flop to my K-Q-J-9. Of course I can never like that hand with lots of pre-flop and flop action, I could be closed out, but it won about 1000 pot when I was 1100 in.

6. No nut flushes, no nut straights, no flopped wraps, no matched flops, no flopped top sets, no cheap catches on the turn, zero .... nothing nothing, nothing, nothing for 914 sessions.

7. Hold'em flop of Q-10-3 to my Q-10 suited ... he has pocket 3's. Lose stack. Just the perfect flop.

8. Coup de gras ... I have 8-9-9-J doublesuited and went ahead and shoved almost a nickel pre-flop versus some raising. Flop 10-Q-K. Second nut straight and straight flush draw. I'm heads-up and And I'm zero percent to win the pot. He has A-J-J-5, with the nut flush draw and my straight flush blocked. My straight can't reach the ace. No back door flush draw. As soon as we turn the hands over someone said they folded the other pocket nines, so I can't trip. If the board trips out his jacks beat my nines. No win.

Cosmic card tricks delivered by The Trickster. Amen. It teaches me about self and reality (which is its whole game plan). Some angst, but no complaints. The worst run in the history of poker: 914 sessions over 10+ years, all live play, started on Jan.1 2016 with a one-outer beat, set over set in holdem, in a pot where I was afraid I was going to win in a walk with K-K, made a min raise, maniac calls with 3-3, flop is K-9-3 ... and he takes my stack. That's where it started. It's real.

It's possible but unlikely. Are all these sessions live? Are they held in different cardrooms or all in the same place? I know omaha is b... but 900 sessions?

Thanks I've described before that all sessions are live in about 10 different casinos/cardrooms, including mostly major ones (Hard Rocks and Caesars, some Florida rooms). My latest new joint, my last two sessions, exact same story. Utter card death, zero connection with flops or as near zero as you can get. I even won a dime during one of these sessions as aces unhelped shipped preflop tripled up. That, by the way, was the third win of a dime or more in the 915 plays now, in mid-size/fast 1-2 + 5-10 winner straddle forced.

I would like some input in particular on what percent of sessions are the "everything goes wrong nearly all terrible runouts" type disaster session, normally I always said 1%, but that could be well off ... maybe 2-5%

I'm sure you are just checking the cliff's, and I don't blame you, but I've described that before this started I was on a super heater sun run including winning 31 sessions in a row, and tons of other streaks. Insanity reigns, it seems. Apparently this was a quarter million-to-one shot or something given a long established 66% win rate in a set of 4000 or so plays, if I remember right. I would like that run again: 66% win rate, over 4K sessions what are the odds winning 31 in a row at any point

I play only hands with a bunch of outs, mostly nut outs (if full game). The way the completion of the hands went to zero, on top of whiffing bizarre percentage of flops, is way, way beyond any even outlier, extreme bell curve standard deviations. That's 915 sessions of being the coldest player at the table and in the room almost all of them. I've played it for 40+ years now. I had one 20 session stretch like this over that long span. To be more representative, I might call these 915 half-sessions, as they are about 4.5 hours on average. But its 915 mind bending actual playing sessions. I realize it is the amount of hands that is the important thing: I vary on estimating that. 125, 000

In one sense I was a pretty remarkable bubble. As not even a legit favorite in the game against the modern lineups and the rake, I won 31 in a row, shortly after winning 17-out-of-18, and 93-8 for the year. This was long after the two best players that I came up with were having major trouble winning in the current environment. I was nowhere near their caliber, not a poker pro at all ... was just on a super duper heater.

What is that Apparently something like a quarter million-to-1 shot The flip side of that apparently -- in this enantiodromia (the tendency for extreme bell curve anomalies to turn into their opposite) reality of mine -- is 915 sessions of death, with only one session in the lot that felt close to "routine." That is, no rushes for the duration, only one rush would have happened if I played every hand, and just bizarrely everything went south, went antarctic cold, then went Pluto cold. I'd seen it for 20 sessions once in 40 years, now I've seen it for 915 sessions. (Funny, in writing this I had two synchronicities with the words "bubble" and "absolute zero.")

I did make the worst fold of my life the other night in hold'em. It's just gotten too much in my head. But it's okay ... another life track is better. I certainly got my play in over the years, got way more jollies probably than warranted, and I still have the sneaky feeling that perhaps for the whole decades I was running considerably over my expectation in terms of connecting with flops and completing the hands, and only in this last streak did I get any hint of how cold it could go. Perfect summation: certainly a lot of angst, but no complaints.

The way I used to catch:

Earlier today I was reminded of a very memorable hand. Amarillo Slim was in the game, the only time I ever played with him, and he had just bluffed me out of a pot. He showed it and said, "You had me, pardner." Real chummy like.

Very next hand I think it was, playing PLO, I flopped top set and an open end straight flush draw on a 8-9-Q board. I got raised by an all-in, and said, "I guess I gotta call, " facetiously. On the turn I made quads and on the river I made the straight flush. LOL.

So I lean forward and croon my neck just for half a second, like studying the board. "Quads and a straight flush" ... I called it before turning it over. "What" everybody is thinking. "He's joking, surely."

I rolled it out. Slim was snickering and I said to him, "What was your name again, Hollywood Slim" He absolutely loved it. Those were the days.