Beat: Hit by Lightning While Playing Poker

[prescient63]

I just posted this on 2p2 but i thought it was funny/odd enough to post here.

So on top of losing twice w/ quads to straight flushes this year (quad jacks are no good LDO), I got hit by lightning. So here I am just grinding away, and I hear some thunder. All of a sudden its like I'm getting hit in the head w/ a baseball bat as my body convulses. My games are still running and I'm sitting here a little scared and in shock like, "WTF JUST HAPPENED?" Then I start to put 2p2 together. Obviously I've been hit by some stray lightning! It went through my computer (probably got in through the ethernet cable) into my USB bus (crazy right?), into my midi/sound card and out through my headphones into my noggin. I run bad at life LDO.

On an unrelated note if anyone knows the odds of losing TWICE w/ quads 8's or better to a straight flush I would be interested to know what it is. I'm sure its fucking abysmal. Here is my post from the probability section that nobody answered.

What are the odds of loosing twice w/ quads 8's or better to a straight flush? The only way I could think to answer that is to look at the bad beat jackpot on UB. Lets say the average bad beat jackpot is 75,000, and every single hand gets raked for $0.50 so that would be 150,000 hands to get to the bad beat jackpot. We know every hand isn't raked but that isn't important. So would the odds of losing twice be 150,000 x 150,000? Or would it be that every 150,000 hands I should expect to lose w/ quads to a straight flush? Its been a long time since I've taken any kinds of stats so at this point I'm pretty curious if I have freakishly bad luck (To bad I wasn't playing on a site w/ a bad beat jackpot either time).

[Scientologist]

So do you have super powers now or what?

[Smocca]

This is the reason I stopped playing poker. Not the beats, I mean. It's the talk ABOUT the beats. It seems like when you play poker for a living you end up with friends who play poker for a living and all they do is talk about this crap all day. It barely makes sense. "I lost a hand and it sucked and now I'm going to talk to you about it." The day I caught myself talking to someone about a beat I had is the day I decided to quit forever.

What are the odds of a poker player not boring the shit out everyone with some "incredible" thing that happened to them at the table? Fucking zero.

PS and yea didn't mean to rant in your thread. I just had a conversation with a friend about this the other day so it was fresh on my mind.

[prescient63]

Originally Posted by Smocca

This is the reason I stopped playing poker. Not the beats, I mean. It's the talk ABOUT the beats. It seems like when you play poker for a living you end up with friends who play poker for a living and all they do is talk about this crap all day. It barely makes sense. "I lost a hand and it sucked and now I'm going to talk to you about it." The day I caught myself talking to someone about a beat I had is the day I decided to quit forever.

What are the odds of a poker player not boring the shit out everyone with some "incredible" thing that happened to them at the table? Fucking zero.

PS and yea didn't mean to rant in your thread. I just had a conversation with a friend about this the other day so it was fresh on my mind.

LoL it was actually just a probability question because it's been long enough that I couldn't figure out the answer and we have some pretty solid stats people on this forum.. Back to focusing on me being hit by lightning...

[prescient63]

Originally Posted by Scientologist

So do you have super powers now or what?

My ear hurts lol.

[Hake]

Losing with quads against a straight flush doesn't mean much, it depends on how it has been done.

In term of statistics :

1) If you have a pair in hands (let's say 4h4s), and that the board is (after the river) : 4c 4d 5d 6d 7d, then you have quads (by the 4's), but the probability that someone else has a straight flush is quite high, because two cards (3d, 8d) would do. It means 2 * 2/(52-2-5) = 8.8%. In this case, precisely, you have 91.21% chance to win.

2) Best case for you, is that you have a pair in hands (let's say 4h4s), and that the board is (after the river) : 4c 4d 5d 6d X, now to make the straight flush, the other guy needs 2/3d, 3/7d or 7/8d. Precisely, you have 99.698% chance to win (or 0.302% chance to lose)

3) It could even be better if it was by the ace, like : Ad Kd Qd 4d 4c, then probabilities are even lower: 99.9% to win / 0.1% to lose.

Considering that the probability to have quads is around 0.024%, if your hand was like the second one, and if you lost two games like these, then the probability that it happens is close to :

Bad luck = 0.00024 * 0.00302 * 0.00302 = 0.00000000218 = 0.000000218%.

Would happen once every 458'715'596 hands.

[Smocca]

I think that would just be the odds of it happening to a player in two consecutive hands. It's not nearly as low as 0.000000218%. You have to figure the chance of any one beat occuring (which is nearly impossible to do because of how many nearly intangible figures are at work) and then take into account how many hands he is actually playing (say 1,000 hands a day 5 days a week, about 250,000 hands a year. If he's been playing a few years then he's probably played about a million hands).

So to figure it you have to figure the odds that any two hands out of a million are bad beats. You also have to figure whether or not you count beats that didn't happen (because someone folded a would be bad beat hand before the showdown). Along with a ton of other stipulations which compound the math to ridiculously tedious levels.

In short, its realistically impossible to figure and boring as shit to think about. Just take the odds of winning the bad beat jackpot * the odds of winning the bad beat jackpot like was said in the OP and call it a day.

[Malakriss]

The biggest problem with statistics is everyone always thinks MEMEMEME. 1 in 458,715,596 hands seems like a lot, but think about how many casinos, online sites, and home games are occurring simultaneously around the world. If there's 1,000,000 hands happening at the same time in the world, then it should happen to someone somewhere within 459 deals.

Your "bad luck" is being the statistic that happens at least once a day. Assuming the average hand time is 3 minutes (lot of leeway) then it would be every 22.95 hours.

Now getting hit by lightning on top of that... your fault for playing outdoors in the middle of a thunderstorm.

[prescient63]

Both hands i had trips on the flop, caught my quads on the turn, checked the turn, and villain hit a 1 outer for a royal flush, and same scenario on the second hand caught a 1 outer on the river for a straight flush, both happened w/in the last 177k hands. It seems like it would something simple like oh.. well assuming you have quads, this and that, but there are alot of intangibles like me having a pair, and the villain having two cards that can contribute to a straight flush, and then they hit it... If only i played w/ a bad beat jackpot....

Edit: Was inside when my ass got zapped. I'm assuming it went through the ethernet cable which is the only thing that isn't plugged into a surge protector. And I think its funny that this lone post has gotten me negative 2 internets.

[Vorph]

The odds vary depending on what you're asking.

8888x vs. all possible poker hands? Astronomical, but irrelevant in hold'em.

Pocket 8s and you get two more on the flop? Again, pretty damn unlikely you'll lose. Worst case would probably be 8x 8s 9s; you've got to worry about quad 9-A and five possible straight flushes, so 11 total 'hands' (turn/river/pocket) out of 178,365.

Realistically, all that matters are the cards you can see after they're all down. If you've got 88 and there's Ax 8x 8s 7s 6s on the table then the odds of you losing comes down to three hands: 9s 10s, 4s 5s, and 5s 9s -- a 1 in 330 chance. Odds of it happening twice are 1 in 108,900, but thinking about it like that doesn't make a lot of sense, as once you lose the first time the odds of it happening again are still only 1 in 330.

That's all assuming heads up play too, the odds of losing get better the more people there are at the table still, of course.

[Fog]

The lightning just went on through the ethernet and your USB cable and shocked you, huh?

I guess it doesn't take too many brains to win at online poker.

[prescient63]

Originally Posted by Fog

The lightning just went on through the ethernet and your USB cable and shocked you, huh?

I guess it doesn't take too many brains to win at online poker.

Umm.... my ethernet runs under my driveway to a detached garage w/ an office where I was playing.. so yeah not that crazy.

[Hake]

Originally Posted by Smocca

I think that would just be the odds of it happening to a player in two consecutive hands. It's not nearly as low as 0.000000218%.

Yeah that's right. I figured that since his two bad beats were close to each others in time it would be a good approximation to pretend they happened on two consecutive hands. The real probability has to be lower, but as someone else said it would be difficult to get more exacts numbers.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by prescient63

Umm.... my ethernet runs under my driveway to a detached garage w/ an office where I was playing.. so yeah not that crazy.

Firstly, if lightning struck outside near your house, it would be much more likely to strike something like a nicely-grounded metal pipe or drain than the CAT5 cable you have lying around.

Secondly, if lightning struck your Ethernet cable, it would have burnt up that piece of the cable in an instant, so you wouldn't be posting.

Thirdly, if some large amount of current managed to get down the cable to your NIC, it would fry the internal surge protector in the NIC and probably some other electronics, your network card would be inoperable, and that would be that.

Fourthly, there is no fourthly, because there is no conceivable physical way that the current could possibly get from the NIC to your sound card, or your sound card to your USB port, or your USB port to your ears, at which point it wouldn't hardly shock you, because that much current couldn't travel down the cable without incinerating it.

However, apparently you view lightning as some mysterious beam of wizardry, so I'd point out that if it really did manage to leap-hop up to your ears through some impossible chain of magic and shock you to the point of "convulsion" (you should probably mention this to your doctor), your computer would be a smoking doorstop.

For God's sake, please take a high school physics course, or read the Wikipedia entry on electricity, or somethng.

[prescient63]

If you can give me another plausible explanation I'll hear it. For the record I've had multiple pieces of electronics fried by lightning and never has one been left a charred smoldering anything