Why Unlikely Things Happen All The Time In Poker

There has been a long tradition in live poker of players believing in luck. Unbelievable things seem to happen all the time in poker, and the human mind seeks an explination. Ironically this can be as bad or worse in players who understand the basic framework of poker odds (though lack an understanding of randomization); these players see hand after hand that they have read are very unlikely, and as such they seek an explination in the form of higher powers.

Blame the deck. Blame the seat. Blame the dealer. Blame the chips. Blame God. Blame someone for talking. Blame the wife for calling. Blame the day of the week. Its all the same really.

This tradition has contiued in online poker, though online a single target takes the overwhelming majority of the blame - the integrity of the sites. Its all the same really.

In this blog I hope to shed some light on why crazy things are happening all the time. First of all I need to bring up a very big, and very important number 52! . For those of you who either don't remember or never learned what n! is, 52! is equal to aproximately 80658175170940000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. That's how many different possible orders there are to a 52 card deck.

Now depending on the game you are playing, and the circumstances of that game, there are likely to be a number of cards that do not come into play, and as such are interchangable (reducing the number of relevent orders to the deck by orders of magnitude), however the numbers are still enormous. To put it in perspective, if you play any game that uses 20+ of the cards (eg.a full table of holdem) you will almost certainly never in your life time see two identical deals (that is, every seat got exactly the same cards as did the board).

Of course, there are certainly people who think they've seen the same hand, but that just brings me to my next point. One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of human beings is our ability to group things. In many ways the very definition of intelligence is our ability to recognize patterns and put like things together. Like many other times in life, in poker you must be able to see patterns and grouping in order to be able to succeed at poker, but you must also understand when your mind is failing you.

In learning poker we learn ways to group certain situations. But our grouping are ones of convience, relative to the rules of the game, and not necessarily great for expressing the odds of a situation. To put it another way, we have a small number of hands that we think of as being very probable, and a large number of hands we think of as improbable; while these measures are fair if comparing one hand to another, they are not fair collectively because there are so many improbable hands. This situation is made much worse by the fact that players choices in the game lend to strong hands (that we think of as improbable) being exposed and weaker ones (that we think of as likely) going unseen.

Another related item is the numerical advantage that poorer players have over strong ones. How often have you heard/read a player complaining about how fish are beating him all the time? The thing is that he is comparing himself to a collective group of players.

Imagine that at a 9 seat table you have 6 fish and 3 good players. According to Barry Greinstein a strong player will have about a 3% edge. That means on any given hand there is a 65% chance that a fish will win and that relative to any one good player, the fish collectively have only just shy of a 6 to 1 advantage.

So, to summarize unlikely things happen because there are so many events that we consider to be unlikely, but then group them together, making them collectively not unlikely. This is made worse because the information made available to us, and that we are likely to remember favours the improbable.