The murderous cooler beat as soon as you sit down trend continued as I noted in my last session. First hand I played I’m K-8 of clubs, flopping K-8-2, two spades. I get check-raised by the big blind, I hesitate just for a few seconds to consider, yes, the deuce of spades is the death card here. I go over the top, he shoves, I insta-call, and he immediately turns over 2-8 super confident. Turn is the 2s and I’m on my second buy-in.
So with this fresh in mind as I sat for my next session a week later, this Saturday night, I had a fairly impossible anomaly of deuce occurrences awaiting me. First one I’m pocket deuces, and I get a phone call in between limping and the flop, like perfectly inserted in that couple of seconds. I ask the dealer point blank, second time I’ve ever played here, can I answer? “No,” she says, point blank, “not if you are in the hand.” I send the call to voice mail. Everybody at the table immediately speaks up, “Yes you can talk on the phone any time here.” And then she says “Oh yeah. You can.” Why in the hell the dealer can’t give me the straight answer to the question is a little weird.
Flop immediately thereafter comes, reminiscent, K-8-2, but rainbow. No action. Winner. Quad deuces on turn but high hand is quad 3s. Win $30 or so.
30 minutes later deuces again. Flop nothing dry board. Check around. I say “deuce of spades “ out loud this time. Comes deuce of spades. A 25 bet, a call, I raise 100, two very slow folds and some kind of nasty antagonistic comment toward me, 100 a big overbet in this game, pretty much.
As god is my witness, in the next hand my first card is the 2clubs, next card is pitched at me, hits the auto shuffler, sticks straight up in the air and stands there. 20 seconds everybody just stares. Dealer freaks. No one’s ever seen it. I’ve played 40 years, never seen it. The card has it’s back to me and everyone is saying “deuce of spades” and laughing over the freak occurrence. I take my camera out. Snap it. Proof. I fold pre with whatever the replacement card was, flop is K-9-7 rainbow. Checked around. Turn … you know it: deuce. Dude had flopped top two under the gun and checked it. But my deuces were fouled, you know, standing straight up on the table. The same deuce of spades eerily freaking with me.
I’m called for PLO. My first two cards are black deuces, next two black fives.
I get involved in a pot, all my chips about an hour later, dude’s first or second hand at table. I have a set and a gutter, he has an overpair and a deuce for a wheel draw. If he hits his overpair for trips it makes me the nut straight. It comes the deuce of clubs.
Game breaks. Take hold’em seat waiting for main game PLO. I play a hand in the dark in a 1-3 game. Flop 6-7-8. I bet two calls. Turn 6. Check, check, check. River 8. Under the gun bets out, next shoves … I look. First card: deuce of spades, why not?. Ruh roh. Second card 8. 8’s full. LOL. Reshove. Uh huh, oh yeah. Dude has same hand: 2-8.
Very next deal I’m 3c-5c flop is 6c-6h-4c. Blank. River I call out loud for “deuce of clubs.” Thousand for high hand dude in pot only has 40 so doesn’t matter much. And it came this black deuce … this haunting black deuce of spades.
Kind of super weird. That’s 444 sessions of this otherworldly run, of the worst card possible turning off that deck immediately over and over and over and over. And “otherworldly” is exactly it. For 444 sessions and 5 years, the very idea of flopping a wrap and completing it, was a thousand lightyears from me. Over and over and over for 444 sessions I watched Omaha flops to which I had no pair, no draw, no backdoor flush draw. Constant double-suited hands the flop is the other two suits, and I show it. And this happened again last night for the umpteenth time. Dealer after dealer after dealer, week after week after week, month after month after month, year after year after year …. A zeroed out flop as if they checked my hand and hunted thru the deck for the three most unrelated cards.
Because here is the kicker: right when this started, five years ago, I had made a commitment to try to correct the “lost in the shuffle” aspect of my life. There is really only one possible thing that could do it: to stop winning, just like for an alcoholic, to stop drinking. On cue, when I started thinking like that, the universe delivered a trillions-to-one shot streak of bizarre savageness and impossibility to aid in the endeavor. This is a very mystical and spiritual universe. Any discounting of that in the goings on of life is inept.
I’m not unlucky. That’s not the point. What this is is the wisdom, the agenda, of the telos of nature in action. The quantum field is capable of exactly this, and nothing else is.
Okay, here’s a good secret: the weight of the minds at the table changes the distribution of the cards, which is not random, but is approximated as random in our limited knowledge science of probability. The telos of nature, the agenda of the universe, is the ultimate driver of outcomes.
Funny, I didn’t really lose that much. I cut way back, didn’t play that often, went way down in stakes, shorter buy-ins, and only playing one, one and a half, two buy-ins. Amazing during the whole streak that was so full of beats, coolers and card death, I would win either zero or one significant pot in each session. And I would count those chips up after the one big winning pot, and over and over and over and over and over I was exactly $1 behind. One time, right as I put up the middel $2 blind while stacking my only winner of the night, six hours in, I realized, “that $2 blind is going to make me $1 behind.” Sure as a daisy, I counted up $699 in front of me, $700 in. There was a rule governing the deck: he plays and stays loser; that’s his medicine.
As reported, I was red hot for five years previous to this, and insanely hot the year before it. That last torrid year I won 10 in a row, then 10 in a row again, then 17 out of 18, then 31 in a row. It started with a 1-outer beat on Jan 1, 2016, hold’em, trip kings over trip threes. River. And then it was on me.
It becomes like the Buddhist dharma: Can you let it go? Can you let the thrilling yourself with gambling wins as a way of life go? And what is there if you do? “Oh, you committed to this value, to this truth, to this reality … instead of the mesmerizing diversion from all that in the cards? Okay. Here is a run to help you that is utterly beyond the realm of the feasible, trillions and trillions to one against if you figure it by rote odds. BUT, this is your medicine. You know, grasshopper, that you have been lost in the shuffle and that this is a cheapening of life, an addiction, and you were sincere in your intention to redress it. I, the universe, the cosmos, nature, the quantum field, will help you in this sincere intent. The only way for you to learn this is to quit winning, to quit medicating yourself with chips, to quit diverting from critical truths in your consciousness via the games and the highs, faux wellbeing, and fool’s gold they can bring.”
So, the part of us that has inclination to know ourselves and value our actual reality, instead of employing full on attempts to escape, when awakening, this part of us has a mighty trickster archetype in cahoots with the telos of nature in service to it. Don’t miss out on this so-called mystical aspect of life. Just as there are many levels to the games, there are many levels to this reality in which, at levels below, explicate and implicate orders (Bohm) have a threshold that holds the mystery of life. This principle visits where you live, of course. Nothing special about a deck of cards. It’s just part of the universe, part of the interface between quantum field and surface level perception like everything else. It has an agenda.