[AaronBrown]

I was browsing the url=http://www.pokerroom.com/main/page/games/cardStats]stats[/url] at Poker Room and noticed that small cards are more common on the board than big ones. Maybe everyone knows this, but it struck me as interesting.

It's nothing you'd notice in a round or two, but over 332,894 hands that got dealt to the river, the river card was a 2 25,965 times and an Ace 25,209 times. I give this only as the most extreme example, you see the same pattern for all board cards and all small versus large cards.

The nonstatisticians will yawn, but a quick calculation shows that the odds of this happening by random chance are almost exactly the odds of dealing a spade royal flush in one try from a well-shuffled deck.

Obviously you're more likely to go to showdown if players holding Aces than 2's. But I don't think this should be true in theory. Aces make you more likely to bet, of course, but they also increase the strength of your opponents hands. You should go to showdown in situations where two (or more) players have good pot odds, not just when one or more players have strong hands. It's the uncertainty about hand valuation that makes a showdown (as the old saying goes, "it's differences of opinion that make a horserace") not strong hands. Whether horses were fast or slow, people would race them.

I'm not sure of this, I've been thinking it over, but I wonder if this doesn't indicate that the players in this sample overvalued Aces.

I don't expect to get rich exploiting this tendency, even if it turns out to be real. But it's interesting to think about.