Sklansky's purgatory -- how often does this happen?

[RiverDood]

Let's start with the issue in Saw7988's post -- he got ground down to nothing playing in an STT with a long stretch of dead cards plus QQ and JJ that didn't work out.

Now let's describe the general problem: going for an entire session without a single opportunity to put a lot of chips to work while having the best of it. (For this truly to be Sklansky's purgatory, we'd have to know our opponent's exact hands. But for practical purposes, let's assume that we can put everyone on logical ranges of hands, and that our reads are good.)

I'm guessing that such circumstances happen in no more than 2% of online tournaments, but as much as 5% of home game tournaments where the blinds go up faster and there aren't as many hands played per level.

It's rare. And most of the time when we bust out, it's because we misplayed some hands -- or missed some steal opportunities -- or got hammered by a bad beat or two. All the same, it strikes me that every now and then, it's possible to play intelligent poker for the entire session and end up staring at the felt.

Thoughts?