Saved By Zero

Once again, I've chosen the name of a song for the title of a blog post. "Saved By Zero" was released by The Fixx in 1983, the year I started my software engineering career. Last night, my session was saved by zero; that is, I survived in large part by not betting when I was given the opportunity not to bet. My stack took a huge hit on hand 30, when an opponent hit a 4 outer on me; I had been a 90% favorite after the turn. I lost $40,942 on the hand, and was left with only $3,667. A common reaction to such misfortune is to try to win chips back too quickly, but I refrained from reacting that way. With patience and luck, I was able to end the night in the black. What do I mean by the opportunity not to bet? Simply, those times when I wasn't in either the small blind or the big blind. Tonight I wrote a program to calculate a new poker statistic, which I'm calling the zero bet percentage; it's the percentage of the time zero is bet on a hand when it's possible to bet zero on it. It turns out that I set a personal best in this statistic last night. Here are my top ten zero bet percentages for sessions of at least 10 hands:

0.657895 (25 38) 2013/04/18
0.629032 (39 62) 2013/02/26
0.622642 (33 53) 2012/11/23
0.619048 (13 21) 2013/01/11
0.615385 ( 8 13) 2012/05/06
0.611111 (22 36) 2013/03/23
0.604651 (26 43) 2012/11/12
0.600000 ( 6 10) 2013/03/21
0.591549 (42 71) 2012/11/11
0.583333 ( 7 12) 2011/11/02

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 55 hands and saw flop:
 - 3 out of 7 times while in big blind (42%)
 - 5 out of 9 times while in small blind (55%)
 - 14 out of 39 times in other positions (35%)
 - a total of 22 out of 55 (40%)
 Pots won at showdown - 6 of 8 (75%)
 Pots won without showdown - 6

delta: $2,160
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $4,731,524
balance: $7,180,932