I whooped my best friends ass in poker and he got so mad he wrote a whole article about it

Quarantine has everyone doing one of three things: finding new ways to make money, finding new ways to save money, or finding new ways to lose money. Recently, I fell a hard victim to the latter option. While essentially locked down in my house, I’ve started playing a lot more poker, including with a group of friends with whom I Zoom while we play over a mobile app. Am I the best poker player ever? No, certainly not. But am I a bad poker player? I would also argue no. Yet, this app seems to think differently. Now, everyone will get bad beats, every poker player knows this, but recently on this app I had been feeling like I was getting bad beats at an abnormally high rate. Maybe I just like to complain, that’s probably what my friends I play with would tell me, and I could have believed that, until I was dealt a hand during our game this past Sunday night. This hand confirmed that either the algorithm of this app, some poker god somewhere, or just the universe hates me.

At the bottom of this article, you will be able to find a video of how the hand played out. But before we get there, I want to take this hand step by step. See, this hand seemed so unlikely, so incomprehensible, so disgustingly wrong to me, that I could not just move on and say “hey, it’s just a game”. Absolutely not, this was personal. So, I’ve set out to analyze just how personal this hand was. The goal for this article is to figure out just how likely it is that each part of this hand happens in such a way that I somehow lose it.

Basic Information:

To understand the full context of the game, here are some basic pieces of information:

• Stacks were as follows:

• Mine: 10,000

• Villain: 12,000

• Other player in hand: 24,000

• Blinds were 100/200

• Other player in the hand was dealt the Ace and King of hearts

• Villain is directly to my left, other player is directly to my right

• There were other people at the table, but I do not know what they had, so it would be

unfair to discount their cards from the deck. This changes the math slightly, but not significantly enough to render the numbers I use incorrect

Hole Card Probability:

We have to start where all poker hands do: the two cards you are dealt, and the two cards the person who is either going to give you money or take your money is dealt. What came my way was the Ace and 5 of clubs, for him it was the 9 of clubs and 9 of diamonds. I considered discussing the probability of myself and the villain being dealt these four cards, and I even did the math. The probability was 0.028%. But, does that really matter? Two people will always be dealt four cards in Hold ‘Em and the probability of picking up those cards is all relatively similar. It’s less likely someone picks up a pocket pair, and the fact that my cards were suited makes things more improbable as well, but the fact of the matter is when you pick any four cards and ask “what’s the likelihood two people were dealt these four cards?”, the answer is always pretty much the same: low. So, now that the hand is started, let’s take a look at how it played out.

Disclaimer:

Every player plays poker differently and that makes it difficult to add in willingness to call, likeliness to raise, etc. into calculations. There are a few spots where I find it appropriate to add them in or note them, but for some, it will simply be a recount of what happened for accuracy, not so much analysis.

Pre-Flop Action:

I was in the small blind (SB), villain was directly to my left in the big (BB), and the only other person in the hand initially is directly to my left, on the button (OTB). OTB raises the

blinds to 660, and villain and myself call. Knowing now that he had a pocket pair above average relieves any need for analysis to know that nearly 100% of the time, someone makes that call. According to beatthefish.com's odds calculator, villain had the best equity of those three hands, with a 48% chance to win the hand. From there, we can move to the community cards.

The Flop:

The first three cards to come on the table were built for action between myself and villain. Maybe not immediate action, but for sure would pique both of our interests. It came the 8 of clubs, 10 of clubs, and 6 of diamonds. I was first to act, and being first, with the nut flush draw I was comfortable checking to see what the other players would do. With the second top pair in his hand and a gut straight shot on the board, the villain checked as well. Then OTB fired off a standard continuation bet of 1400 despite his AKs not improving at all. It may have worked as well, if not for the hands the other two of us had. Based on the table below, players will call a post-flop bet with a flop of T-8-6 two-suited about 69% of the time (nice), with the hands myself and villain had, we certainly fit into that 69%.

Before moving on to the turn, I want to explore how likely a flop like this is. I hit two cards of my suit to give me the nut flush draw, and he drew a gut shot. That type of hand could have been one of a couple things:

• Q, J, 8

• Q, 10, 8

• J, 10, 7

• J, 8, 7

• 10, 8, 6

• 10, 7, 6

• 8, 6, 5

• 8, 7, 5

• 7, 6, 5

Based on what I was holding, I excluded any King high straight draws given that my Ace would give me a better straight, and when factoring in suits, any draw that includes a 5 would necessitate the other two cards being the clubs since I was holding the 5 of clubs. Yet, even setting suits aside for a moment, the odds of pulling one of those draws out of any possible three card flop is 9 out of 2,197 , or 0.41%. Math is boring, though, I want to see how it could actually play out. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or attention span to sit through thousands of poker hands to get an accurate sample of how many times one of those flops comes, so instead I wrote a basic program in Python to run simulations of hands and see how many times we would hit one of those flops. I ran the simulation 100 million times and of those trials, the program spit out one of our flops 508,171 times, for a rate of 0.51%, a little above what our math predicted. Already, we’re looking at a highly improbable hand. But the turn card is where it gets interesting.

The Turn:

Given how the flop came, I now had significantly improved my chances of winning the hand, to a little of 34%.

I am sitting in my spot hoping for a club, villain is hoping for a 7, OTB just hopes neither of us have anything and can somehow squeeze something out. Would anybody like to guess the card that came on the turn? That’s right, the 7 of clubs. Villain hit his gut shot, and I hit my nut flush. The odds of improving from a flush draw to the flush from the flop to the turn, according to primedope.com is 19.1%, and the odds of hitting a gut shot on the turn is 8.5%. Using this math, the odds of hitting both is about 1.62%. Another way to look at it is that there was one card to complete both of our hands, out of 43, giving it a 2.33% chance of hitting. So, I decided to run another program to see how often it would actually happen. Turns out, my math is pretty close. In 100 million trials, the 7 of clubs came 2,221,709 times for a rate of 2.22%.

With the nut flush, I decided to slow play my surefire hand and check, but villain, being a more aggressive player, bet north of 2,000 chips. OTB promptly folds and I decide to milk this hand for everything I can. I shove my remaining 8,500 chips or so. Villain promptly calls and turns over his two nines.

Playing online poker moves much quicker than an in-person table which means I didn’t really have full time to digest what he had, what his outs were, if any, and eventually barely had time to digest the river. But, recapping it is a slower process, and we can take time to go through it. Here’s what I had to make my hand: The Ace, 5, 7, 8, and 10 of clubs. There is no meaningful way to improve my hand. Here’s what the villain had: The 6 of diamonds, 7 of clubs, 8 of clubs, 9 of clubs, and 10 of clubs. A 6 to 10 straight, with the ability to improve to a flush, but not a flush as good as mine. He would be dead in the water, except that the three clubs that came for me happened to come in a way that gave him just a sliver of hope.

The River:

If you know anything about poker, then you have no need to read this section. You know what came next. Villain has an open ended straight flush draw, the best hand in the game. The most unlikely hand in the game. It is so rare that statistically it happens once every 72,193 hands, a rate of 0.0014%. In our specific case, even with four of the cards already made, and opened ended, it had less than a 5% chance of happening. With one card to come, I had over a 95% chance to win this hand.

I was so ready to double up and put myself in good position. Finally a draw came my way, and someone bet into me! But, this godforsaken app had other things in mind. The app rivered the 6 of clubs, completing villain’s straight flush, and rendering my Ace and 5 of clubs completely useless. Utter shock ran across my face, a feeling of defeat not felt since America entered in Vietnam, simply put: pain.

When faced with such pain, there are two things you can do: dust yourself off and pick yourself up, or write a lengthy article specifically detailing every step, every moment that led to your pain. Now we know which kind of person I am.