A 1 in 270,725 occurrence

If you play poker long enough, you'll see freaky things you never believed you'd ever see. That's one of its appeals, at least for me :-) There's essentially no cap on the number of times you'll see something you've never seen before, no matter how long you've played. That makes poker forever young!

I've played online poker for 16 years. In that time, I've played 4,413 sessions. I don't know the precise number of hands I've played, for two reasons:

1. I didn't start keeping track of the number of hands I played right away

2. some years ago, PokerStars removed hand histories from the data they make available for play money tournaments

Nevertheless, I can calculate a ballpark figure for the number of hands I've played. The average number of hands per session for the sessions where I have the hand histories is 114.84. To be conservative, I'll assume the average number of hands per session for my career is 60.  That means I've played roughly 264,780 hands in my career.

Now for the freaky thing that happened yesterday: in the first tournament I entered, I was dealt pocket rockets on one hand, called a shove made by an opponent on the flop (which put me all in), and didn't win the pot. The freaky thing was not that I didn't win the pot. The freaky thing was why I didn't. I didn't because I chopped it, and I chopped it because my opponent also had pocket rockets! Such an occurrence is very rare - the chances of it happening to you are 1 in 270,725. It never happened to me before, but I plan on playing for many more years, so there's a decent chance it'll happen to me again :-)

style flavor buy_in  entry players entries paid place winnings

MTT   NLHE    44000   6000       9     339   81    71    89000
MTT   NLHE    44000   6000       9     235   63    12   175000

delta: $164,000
2024 balance: $3,255,000
2024 blue distance: $7,000
balance: $16,064,303
MTT NLHE ITM pct: 41.56 (1222 of 2940)