Lazarus wins again

20 years or so ago, I was a big fan of watching candlepin bowling on T.V. on Saturday mornings. The show was called "Candlepins for Cash", and was hosted by a sportscaster named Don Gillis. Don did a wonderful job of explaining the intricacies of this very regional brand of bowling. It's much harder to get a strike in candlepin bowling than in ten-pin, since the pins are thinner and the ball is smaller and lighter. I'll never forget seeing a bowler named Paul Berger bowl a 500 triple on the show. That's an average of 166.67 pins per string, an incredibly high standard in candlepin bowling.

Don had some great bowling terminology; much of it was devoted to describing the configuration of the remaining pins after the first ball had been bowled. A very common "leave", as it's called, was the one pin, two pin, four pin, and seven pin; Don called this "four horsemen, left side". Its mirror image, the one pin, three pin, six pin, and ten pin, was also common; Don called that one "four horsemen, right side". When you had four horsemen, your goal with the second ball was to hit the pocket between the one and the two (left side) or the one and the three (right side); you hoped the two would take out the four and the seven (left side), or that the three would take out the six and the ten (right side).

Believe it or not, the four horsemen was one of the easier leaves. A tougher one was one that Don called the diamond. The classic diamond is the one pin, two pin, three pin, and five pin; you can also have a "diamond left" consisting of the two pin, four pin, five pin, and eight pin, and a "diamond right" consisting of the three pin, five pin, six pin, and nine pin. With the diamond leaves, you still had to aim for the pocket between the lead pin and a pin immediately to its left or right; if you could convert 50% of your diamond leaves into spares, that was doing well. One of the phrases I heard Don say many times was "Diamond wins again", when someone failed to convert.

It took me three paragraphs to come to the point, but I'm finally here. In honor of Don's "Diamond wins again", I've titled this post "Lazarus wins again". That's actually shorthand for "The Lazarus line wins again". When your stack falls below the Lazarus line, and you subsequently hit the felt, the Lazarus line has won again. Last night, my stack fell below the Lazarus line on hand 122. Eight hands later, all my chips were gone.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 130 hands and saw flop:
 - 13 out of 17 times while in big blind (76%)
 - 8 out of 17 times while in small blind (47%)
 - 51 out of 96 times in other positions (53%)
 - a total of 72 out of 130 (55%)
 Pots won at showdown - 6 of 14 (42%)
 Pots won without showdown - 11

delta: $-50,000
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,334,707
balance: $7,691,660