[Oluwafemi]

[ QUOTE ]
i was going to give you an exercise, but decided to do it myself.

1 deck of cards, pencil, paper

removed (hand #1) A [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]J [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] & (hand #2) A [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]6 [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

i turned over 5 cards, noted the winner - shuffled, and repeated 25 times. here are the results:

1 - H1
2 - H1
3 - H2
4 - H2
5 - H2
6 - H2
7 - H1
8 - H1
9 - H2 (straight flush!!!!!)
10 - H1
11 - H1
12 - H1 (flopped J6JT6 - two boats!!)
13 - H1
14 - split (A222Q)
15 - H1
16 - H2
17 - H1
18 - H2
19 - H1
20 - split (AK288)
21 - H1
22 - H2
23 - H1
24 - H1
25 - H1

Hand #1 Wins: 15 (64%)
Hand #2 Wins: 8 (32%)
--2 split pots--

if someone had seen me play hands 3 through 9, they would have suggested that i stacked the deck (A6 is a 71% favorite?!?!). the simple point is this: the hands that i, you, anyone witness aren't nearly a large enough sample size to accurately obtain the given 'odds'. not to mention the psychological effect of being sucked-out upon...those events have the tendancy to adhere a little better to our memory than the times when we are on the sucking-out end. you are merely experiencing randomness in all of it's beauty and glory -- while some will bang the conspiracy drum, i choose to simply [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] in awe

[/ QUOTE ]

you're right about the randomness. however, tell that to a player who's lost 30 buy-ins [not me] in the last 1 or 2 days [the short-term] to enough hands like A J vs A 6 all-in.

i've played about 60 $5.50 NL SNGs on Stars [3 and 4-tabling] the last two weekeds and profited about $24. i dropped as much as 12 buy-ins during that period in 3 hours precisely to hands just like that. and the street i lost to those hands the most on? should'nt be hard to guess, the River. when i look at how many of those hands i lost too, as opposed to, how many i sucked out with--- it's nowhere near the same frequency. i can't count how many times i played a hand perfectly, whether pre-flop or on the other streets, only to have a dagger named "Miracle" float up on the Riverbank. after losing to so many hands like that i such a short period of time, the last thing i wanna hear or trust in is the "randomness". all it's done is piss me off about all the money that could be in my account right now.