The bad streak continues
OK, enough is enough. Time to do some calculations now after the 5th tournament in a row of being completely card dead. I don’t intend to make this sound like I’m whining, but this is just ridiculous. How is it possible that someone can be THIS card dead in 5 tries. This time, I played in the yesterday’s 3K buy-in at the Bellagio 2006 4th Annual Five-Star World Poker Classic. Fortunately, I chopped a 1 table satellite and got in for half price. I saw a ton of poker superstars, such as Barry Greenstein, TJ Cloutier, John Phan, Dave Ulliot, and Amir Vahedi. When the tournament started, I was surprised to be seated at the featured table! It was on a raised platform and all lit up, and overlooked the rest of the field. Jack McClelland, tournament director, was overseeing everyone play and the cards were in the air a little after 12pm.
So, lets run some numbers now. I figure that you probably see about 25 hands an hour during normal play. Since I lasted about 3 /12 hours, I saw roughly 85 hands. So, in that amount of time, I should have seen at least 5 pocket pairs, AKo probably once, AQo or AJo at least once, and a pair or any hand with an A in it at least 21 times. This is what I consider a “normal” distribution of cards. In the last 5 tournaments, I have not gotten anywhere near these numbers, and I am not exaggerating. I had 4 pocket pairs, and won on two of those fortunately. I never had AK, AQ, or AJ. In fact, I had maybe 10 hands with an A in it the whole time. I had some trapping hand like JT suited and KQ suited, but could play them because of the action in front of me.
On my last table, which was comprised of John Phan and Devilfish to my right, and Amir Vahedi 3 seats to my left. It was a very interesting table and was fun to see some of the pros play. My last hand was against John. I picked up my 4th pocket pair (99) on the button after John raised 3x the big blind. I decided to just call and see a flop because, with his monstrous stack, I knew he would call if I pushed. The flop came 883 with two clubs. John bet 1500 and I decided that he had two overs, so I pushed my remaining 3600 in. I knew he would call but I figured I had him beat so far, and I was right when he called and turned over AQo. My day ended when a Q came on the turn. Another frustrating tournament showing, but I’ll have my day in the sun one day, if I can just get some cards to play with, and have my favorites actually hold up.