Blowing it

Some time ago, just a few weeks back, I was in some discussion on some thread where a question was asked about the odds of getting the same hand on two successive hands, and I remember answering that very recently I had AQ of diamonds on two successive hands.

Well, the same thing happened to me last night. Two successive hands with AQ diamonds. On the first one I raised and was called, then blasted out of the pot on the flop. On the second one, I just shoved preflop and took down the blinds.

What is the odds of the same hand two times in succession?

Well, the odds of getting the same cards on two successive hands is only 1326:1, but the odds of getting a specific hand (like AQ diamonds) two times in a row is 1,758,276 to 1. Whereas the chance of getting any royal flush by the river are only 1 in 30,940 hands. (I have only ever once had a royal flush on RP.) So the odds of getting AQ diamonds two times in a row within a few weeks was pretty darn remote.

This seemed very odd to me, so I wondered if this was AN OMEN and that the cards were giving me a message.

On the very next hand, two other stacks at the table butted heads all-in preflop and both were KJ, one mixed suits, and the other the KJ of Spades and they split the pot.

On the very next hand after that I was dealt the KJ of Spades. What was going on here? I raised and was reraised all-in, so I called and got whacked by AK. Of course! KJ is not that good a hand to call an all-in for your whole stack, because it is often dominated by AA, KK, AK, or KQ.

So was I just superstitious? Not exactly. This was the 1-million buy-in tournament that starts at my local time of 9:30 pm and we were just a few minutes short of the 2-hour mark, so it was coming up to the break at 11:30 p.m., and I was tired and wanted to go to bed.

This was a very unusual final table, because there were still 8 players left at this point, with prizes for only 4 out of the original 30-odd starters and the stacks were almost equal, with the lead changing hands almost every hand. I could see that this would go on for quite a long while until we got to the bubble, and that the outcome would probably be decided by pure luck, so I decided to just take a big chance to see if I could double up, and if not I could go to bed before the break. And this is what happened.

There was no secret message in the cards after all, but I got a good night’s sleep.

1 Like