a note to you conspiracy theorists (or good news for stars)

[C M Burns]

No doubt many of you have at least considered after a couple bad beats, maybe the system is biased somehow, favoring all those fish. Well I decided finally to do a little "reseach" on this subject. What I did was keep track of a number of pre flop head up allins to see if they check out.

These hands are all at Stars over the last moth or so. Mostly sng (turbo since i was impatient) but a few from multi's. To qualify two, and only two people had to be in an allin situation pre flop, then i recorded the hands and who won, only about 1/3 are mine, i computed the expected win rate and compared it to observed (tie hands were excluded)

175 hands in total. Expected win probability for favorite was .66, and the favorite won .67 or 67% of the time. You do not need to be a statistician to see that this is right in line with what is expected.

And 175 hands may seem small but it is actually a reasonable sample to make some conclusions. I won't go into detail but this is very much like telling whether a coin is biased, how many flips do you need? Of course it depends how big a bias but 100 flips would be a reasonable amount to detect a .1 bias (e.g. .6 head) There is more variablility in the hands of course but, we are talking hundereds of hands not thousands to make a reasonable conclusion.

However, what about my hands. 61 hands were mine, of those I was favored 69% of the time. Ok I guess since most of these were high blind small stack situations. My expected win was .55, and observed was .46, a considerable diference, not rediculous but one would expect this only about 10% of the time (run of these 61 hands). I guess I should be happy i was slightly profitable over than run. Of course then if you take my hands out the favorite wins much more than expected (.75 to .66).

So the bottom line is that Stars tourney allins seem to be fair for all of you. Whether they are out to get me is still to be decided.