The land of the ones

Years ago (truth be told, decades ago), when I was in college, I occasionally played Risk with my friends. I'd never played it before college, and haven't played it since, but had fun playing it then. In case you don't know, it's a board game where the object is to conquer the world, played with dice and pieces representing army troops. The world is divided into countries, and you try to control as many countries as you can. Each country can only have armies of one of the players occupying it. To conquer a country, you have to use troops of yours from neighboring countries which you already control, and face them off against the occupying army. The battle is decided by dice rolls; if you roll a higher number than your opponent, you get to remove some of his troops from the board; if he rolls a higher number than you, he gets to remove some of your troops from the board. You conquer a country when you've removed the last of the enemy troops from it; at that point, you move troops of your own onto it from the neighboring country you attacked it from. You now control it. What often happens when a player starts conquering countries is that he'll extend himself too much, moving the bulk of his troops into the conquered country, leaving only a token force behind for defense in the country he attacked from. The smallest number of troops you're allowed to leave is one. What this strategy often creates is what one of my college friends dubbed "the land of the ones". This is when a player for the most part has only one troop in each of the countries he owns. If this player doesn't succeed in conquering the world, he's left himself open to devastating attacks from the other players; they can march through his countries like a knife through warm butter.

I like the phrase "the land of the ones". I like it so much that I'm going to use it in a new context, with a new meaning. In hold'em, at least as it is played on the PokerStars site, the maximum number of players at a table is nine. That means that, all things being equal, you should expect to win 1 out of 9 hands, or 11.11111111... percent of the time. Hence, the land of the ones. The trouble with the land of the ones is that this is a very low percentage, and it's easy to get used to the better odds when there are less than nine players at the table and then not sufficiently account for the worsened odds when the table fills up again.

As I've mentioned a couple of times before, I invariably join a table which has exactly 6 players; I become the seventh. Therefore, my poker radio is tuned to the frequency of winning 1 out of 7 times, on the average, or 14.28 percent of the time. If two more players join the table after me, I keep playing as if I still have 1 in 7 odds, and therein lies the trouble.

As you might expect from this long preamble, for most of last night's lengthy session, the table had the full complement of nine players. I played pretty well, but eventually hit the felt on the 94th hand. I then reupped for the max, but continued my descent. When I managed to bring my stack back up to $20K after falling all the way to $9K, I figured I'd seen the best of my luck and called it a night.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 135 hands and saw flop:
- 8 out of 17 times while in big blind (47%)
- 9 out of 19 times while in small blind (47%)
- 50 out of 99 times in other positions (50%)
- a total of 67 out of 135 (49%)
Pots won at showdown - 4 of 12 (33%)
Pots won without showdown - 5

delta: $-60,000
balance: $2,003,460