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why does the big stack always seem to LUCK out?
allibone03
Member Posts: 99
in Poker Chat
is it just coincidence that every time i go all in in a tournament the big stack wins regardless of hands. i only ask because twice today ive gone deep in a tourny and this has happened. firstly pocket 10s vpocket 9s 9 on river and just now QJ suited vs 86 and a 6 hits the river. Now i dont want to start another thread accusing sky of being b ent but this happens with regularity on here is this also to be put down as variance as usual? Its just becoming a bit annoying when i seem to sit down for hours in a tourny quite often, playing reasonably good poker only to be mugged on the river everytime im hu against a larger stack.
Comments
You’ll lose it one in three
I think it just appears that they always hit because they are happy to go to war against a stack that can only cause a flesh wound with a slightly wider range than they would against somebody who could take most of their stack. So suck outs are bound to happen.
It's just the nature of bounty hunters.
tl;dr version:
A lot of people don't understand percentages - People often don't realise just how close something like A7o v T9s is pre-flop, so when their A7o loses they think that the site has screwed them somehow, but in reality it's like 52/48 or so. (I'm sure I've been screwed by those percentages somewhere before... Hmm...)
If you enter a 200 runner tournament, you're going to get knocked out roughly 199 times out of 200, give or take a negligible amount for being above/below average ability that we can safely disregard for the purpose of this post.
A decent amount of those 199 times, you'll get knocked out when you have the best hand, especially when a lot of the time we're dealing often with situations that are 60/40, or flips where we have the pocket pair and we're a marginal favourite with the made hand. Some people will consider 22 losing against AK AIPF to be 'losing with the best hand' despite being a marginal underdog equity wise, and get tilted by it, which I always find odd.
People don't realise, or even consider, just how often they're going to get knocked out of a tournament when they have the best hand pre-flop, but they get tilted when it happens with any regularity. Of course it's going to happen a lot when you get knocked out of nearly every tournament you play at some stage, and the other guy is going to have like 30% against you even when it's AK v AJ or something, and often it's a lot closer than that.
It's going to be how you get knocked out of a significant number of tournaments, and there's nothing you can do about it - Unless you're getting it in with the worst hand all the time, in which case, you have bigger problems.
To add to that, there's the cognitive bias I mentioned earlier - Does it hurt you more if you realise you lost £5, than it makes you feel good if you find £5?
Likewise, your brain will write off the times you win with QJ against AT AIPF, and remember the times that their AK lost to KQ AIPF, for instance. For that reason, your brain will not give you a fair assessment of luck. If any poker player out there tells you they always run bad, or some variation of that, then they're probably wrong, but they do likely perceive that as being the truth.
People have tried all sorts of things - I've seen diaries of people logging any flips pre along with the result in an attempt to (dis)prove any thoughts about the fairness of a site. However, this is flawed in the same way - People doing that forget to log wins, and remember to track losses. So not only is it a total waste of time and energy, it isn't even producing a reliable result. It doesn't stop people doing it, then pointing to their results and saying "Hey I lost when I was favourite 70% of the time so your site is rigged", but their result is meaningless because of unconscious biases.
Ultimately, the only solution is to just grind through it and try to ignore it as best as you possibly can. I know that's unhelpful advice in a way - It's a bit like when you tell someone to calm down and it just makes them more angry.
It's not easy to ignore variance (I would argue that nobody can completely, I certainly can't), but it's particularly hard for players who play small amounts of MTTs because they might take weeks or even months to win something significant due to lower volume. However, running bad is something that does effect every single Poker player out there at one point or another, even if it feels every dealer and RNG in the world is against you at times.
The only thing you can do is work to improve your own game, so that you're in a position to benefit from good luck more often. You make your own luck, in that sense.