Hey guys, thought i'd see what all your thoughts are on the topic of luck.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a consistent winning player, but I don't have any major wins or huge cashes. The most I really cash out is about 1000 a month, playing about 10-15 hours a week. There are, however, times where i feel like i absolutely CANNOT win.

A lot of players will attribute this to online poker being "rigged" per se, but I absolutely don't think this is the case. Online poker sites simply make too much money to risk alienating their player base. That being said, I should also say that at times, I cannot lose, and I win seemingly endless amounts of races. On the flipside of this, I experience downswings where I lose almost every race. When I am all in, the outdraws flow like narcissistic comments out of ganks mouth (though you're getting better buddy...keep it up).

Ive been on a bad streak recently, and i decided to sit down on my break from school and play a couple tourneys. I entered 3 this morning. One tourney I lost QQ v. JJ after a flop of undercards, the next I lost AQc to 99 after a flop of KJ8, all clubs. Last tourney I lost in the BB w/ 89h after AKh limped and flop comes HHH.

please note i am NOT looking for pity here

I am simply wondering. Do you guys believe this could be happening to me, and just about every poker player many times during their career because of something called "luck?"

I am talking about a force we do not control that determines whether we will be "lucky" or "unlucky" in every aspect of life for a given period of time. I am not a very superstitious person, but I think that i am starting to believe that there is some force called "luck" that seems to push or pull things one way or another for unexplainable reasons. Trust me, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I am much more willing to believe this than the fact that Lee Jones is out to get me with his "action-oriented" RNG.

I am not a religious person, nor do I believe in things like predeterminism or karma, but these could be other viewpoints on the same topic. I am very interested to hear some of your viewpoints.

thanks, wmpoker/thekosmonaut

Ok we've been thru this before so I know we can do it again.

Step 1. Roll down the car window
Step 2. Open the glove box
Step 3. Grab the Crack Pipe
Step 4. Throw it as far as you can!

Ok...all better.

dude , I just tried to throw it out my window ... and before I could roll up the window it flew back into my car WTF is up with that .......

Oh well , might as well just keep smoking from it .
Imagine seeing me driving , smoking a crack pipe , with my P5's tin-foil hat ( just a little crooked too , for that gangsta look )
Quite the site !!!!!!

Look at the hands, he wasnt sucked out on, he had the worst hand each time

There is a saying I heard many years back that went something like this:

We find that which we seek, all others fall by the wayside.

Here is some ground work that you might want to consider. First, a belief is nothing more than an idea or concept that you have attached a large amount of certainty to. A conviction is a belief with a huge amount of certainty behind it. In order to feel great about beliefs our mind constantly looks for supporting evidence to colaborate our beliefs. Our five senses pick up information and our mind processes it in a way that makes logical sense to us and files it away in memory. For example, if we truly believed the world was flat, we would look out at the ocean and notice that it drops off at what appears to be an edge (horizon) and process this information to mean that is the edge of the flat world. Then you'd watch a ship sail towards the edge and notice that it sailed over the edge and fell off.

If we start to get the feeling that poker sites are rigged, our mind starts recalling everytime we had KK and ran into AA or how we lost trips to runner runner flush. We start using those hands to back our idea that sites are rigged and if we get enough that idea turns into a belief. Now everytime someone sucks out on a long shot or you run your top pairs into higher pairs your belief gets stronger.

All the while, our mind is busy filtering out all the information that isn't inline with what we believe about what's going on around us. This is actually one of the roles of the Reticular Activation System (RAS). It helps prevent us from feeling absolutely overloaded with all the sensory information presented to our brains from senses. It helps filter out what is important and what is just background noise. And our brain determines what is important based upon your current set of beliefs and values.

So while all these bad beats are happening to you and you're running KK into AA for the third time in the past two nights, you RAS has filtered out all the information that might disprove all those crazy beliefs. How many times have you raised you big hands up and everyone immediately folds to you? How many times have you been on the other side of AA vs KK? See, we will remember that what we believe and conviently forget those things that don't match our beliefs.

So how does this benefit us as poker players? We I'd like to say that just having read this post, you'll never have bad beats again. Sadly, this just isn't true. In fact you due for even more down the road and as you get better you'll experience even more bad beats. The key to maintain the positive edge is to continually focus on the great hands and smart plays you make every day. Remember the play when you have AA in the small blind and were able to get the big blind to committ all his chips pre-flop. Or all the times you've managed to win when you were way ahead. This consistent focus on good plays and good results keeps our minds in a great winning mindset.

In that mindset, you'll find yourself winning more and more.

Thanks,
Doc

Nice post ...... I fully understand beats , and all that comes with them psychologically .

I take it as part of the gm ........ its not gonna chg the way I play . But I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking it might be slightly juiced ......

Rigged & juiced , to me , are two totally different things .

Online pokr is not rigged .......

I think you've been hit by too many bricks ....

lol j/k hooks

I think I def fall into the rational category ...
The shit just happens ...... gotta keep on keeping on , or something like that

It never fails to amuse me how people fail to grasp statistical concepts. You could lose JJ to QQ 2,000 times in a row and still not be able to prove something is rigged. Statistics are based on huge samplings. Millions of hands played. When you are a 4 to 1 dog you could lose 2000 times in a row only to win 8000 in a row. Most poker players would be jumping off bridges if they had their aces cracked 10 times in a row, but it is the level headed poker player that after coming back to Earth know that in the long run that hand will win much more than lose.

ty ibarrio , that was my only real point . As much as believe its not rigged , I will never be able to prove it . It doesnt keep me from sleeping at nite , b/c I make a nice amt from online play ......

I don't think its rigged tho .........

F crack pipes with a mind of their own .... get outta my car !!!!!!

yikes...you guys REALLLLLY missed the point.

DoggerPA, in your post, you said:

"Ive been on a bad streak recently, and i decided to sit down on my break from school and play a couple tourneys. I entered 3 this morning. One tourney I lost QQ v. JJ after a flop of undercards, the next I lost AQc to 99 after a flop of KJ8, all clubs. Last tourney I lost in the BB w/ 89h after AKh limped and flop comes HHH. your examples 1, if you had JJ then you were not unlucky better hand won, if you had QQ then it happens but I will take that risk in every tourney i play any day 2, you had AQ? so the better hand won, right... were you all in on a draw which you will lose 67% of the time? Then you deserved it. 3, you had 89 vx AK, you mean the better hand won again? You are right, rigged, better hand never holds up that often for me"."

As for that statement, you seemed to have completely ignored the fact that I made it very clear that I don't think online poker is rigged in any way. (see original post). As your your "hand analysis," yikes again.

1. I had QQ, he hit his two outer, yes, it was unlucky. 2. I had AQc, which is damn close to 50/50 PF. 99 is a HUGE dog after a flop of KJ8c. I have flopped the nuts, and he needs running cards to catch. 3. the third hand was not a bad beat. That doesn't change the fact that it was unlucky.

What really blows my mind is that you guys think this is a post about my bad beats. I am simply wondering if ANYONE believes there could be some greater force that pushes the cards one way or another, live or online. I don't really firmly believe in this at all, its simply my creative mind at work.

Somebody get me some ritalin.

LOL actually i did read but didnt take AQc to mean the same as Ac Qc... my bad...

Better luck next time.

for your last point, yes everyone knows there is a poker god... he who prays to the poker gods the most wins

I think you can alter the online rigging by typing "gg" when being a huge dog. This triggers a line of code which 63.284% of the time will allow you to suckout. I've also found that if you type "I'm never playing on this crap site again because I get no good hands", that 93.753% of the time you will either get pocket aces or kings within next 4 hands. Only problem is your kings will get cracked 84.59% time by ace and random rag. (sampling based on 37 hands played)

this, I will admit, is actually true.

Crack pipes with a mind of their own. LOL CFH just so you know that comment wasn't directed at you. Just a blanket statement about poker being rigged. I read the statement that someones worst beat was live, that was my experierence also.

This is an interesting thread with some great posts within, but the original concept, the idea that there's some tangible thing called "luck," seems pretty absurd. I'm a scientific and mathematical minded person---in order for an idea to make sense to me, there needs to be some sort way to show or measure it.

If you are an 80% favorite to win a hand, then within some reasonable limit of deviation, you should win the hand 80 times out of every 100. The chance of winning exactly 80 of a specific 100 is actually pretty low, but the chance of only winning 60 of them is very low. The chance of winning all 100 is just about nil.

On the other hand, in this same hand, if you only have 10 trials, it is not terribly unlikely that you would win all 10 (about 11% of the time, this will happen). It would also not be at all beyond reason that you would only win 6 of them, or even only 4 or 5.

As your sample gets larger, the likely deviation of the %'s from what they "should" be gets smaller and smaller until it's practically 0. Now that makes sense. Saying there's some other weird force out there called luck doesn't make sense---there's just no way to quantify it or to envision it, whereas we have all kinds of data that make it plain and simple exactly why things happen (over time) the way they do. Each short term trial is just a part of how everything adds up to give the "correct" numbers over time.