KK<<AA

How bad is it?

I had a good session of 5/10/20 last night. I made some good plays—profitable bluffs, profitable folds, profitable value bet sizing. I’ve been working on my Equitometer, which gives me peace of mind (more about that later).

The evening came to an abrupt halt after 6 hours of roughly breakeven play when I ran KK into AA all in preflop. I wasn’t emotionally ready to bounce back from that so I left.

In the moment I was good with what happened. I 4-bet jammed 150 big blinds versus a young player who will call wide. What I said in the moment was, “It was my turn.”

I was bummed about the loss, but not overly reactive. Switch the hands and you get the opposite result. No theoretical money changed hands.

As part of processing the lingering emotions, though, how often is it, “My turn”?

Edit: see below for correction.

KK appears once in 221 hands. Assume we always play it (because we do). 20 hands/hour * 5000 hours = 100K hands / 221 = KK 452 times. 1/221 for AA also means that our KK will run into AA roughly twice over that same timespan. And our AA will run into KK twice. Roughly.

Edit: this assumes I’m heads up. Which I’m not. If we’re 9 handed that’s 8 chances for someone else to have AA. 8/221 is 3.6% of the time someone will have AA. (A little more because I’ve removed the two kings from the deck. Since we’re just trying to salve a wounded ego here & not shooting for scientific accuracy I’ll just ignore that.) Or as Coach Tommy puts it, 1 time in 27, for a depressing total of 16 times. Or, also as Coach Tommy puts it, 16 times our AA will get paid off by their KK.

Salience bias amplifies emotionally striking events. I could swear that I’ve run KK into AA more times than that. And maybe I have. But that’s the math.

Coach Tommy gave me one of those beautiful reframings for situations like KK « AA: this isn’t a case of deployed poker skill. This was a coinflip and it came up tails.