Streaks in Poker?

I'm going to start with a quote from a player that maybe some of you have heard of, just maybe. His name, which has become synonymous with aggression, is spoken in reverence by the entire poker community. A southern gentleman, a mentor to many, the man who literally wrote the book on poker, Doyle by birth, better known as "Texas Dolly".

Rumor has it he can play some cards too. Doyle Brunson made a very controversial series of claims in his book, How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker. His claims more than allude to a belief in rushes and streaks. So much so that he claims that if he wins a big pot he will be in the next pot regardless of what two cards he holds. Superstitious hogwash, or million dollar insight? That's what I wanted to know from the minute I read it.

Doyle went as far as to say that "he only knows one world class player that doesn't believe in rushes and, well, he's wrong". He states that "scientists do not believe in rushes but they make $1,500 a month, and he asks how many of them can play poker anyway." Anyone who's read my articles has probably figured out that I am a mathematically-based player. I play when I feel I have an edge, and I pass when I do not. I have to admit that these claims about playing rushes and going on streaks struck me as unreasonable and nonsensical right from the beginning. I have never taken a card off for a mathematically erroneous price because I "felt lucky" and, honestly, I shudder at the thought. I play with a group of players, a "poker team" if you will. We have spent a great deal of time arguing about the existence of these, so called, rushes. We used to go back and forth and back and forth discussing all the times when you are just "in the zone" or "surfing the wa", or rushing or whatever. My brother swears to me that there have been times when he felt so in tune with the flow of the game that he could actually predict what card was coming off the deck next. He's yet to prove it to me though, but he's not the only player I've heard make a claim like that. Even I have to admit that there have been a number of times when I just really thought I was going to take a bad beat or deal one, and the accuracy of these "gut feelings" has, apparently, outperformed probability.

So, do these poker streaks really exist? We set out to find the truth.

Over a solid month my brother and I, while living together in Deltona, Florida, did a study on the "rush phenomenon". I called it "operation gypsy" and vowed, and I mean absolutely vowed in no uncertain terms, to quit playing the game or buy a magic crystal if we uncovered any truth to any of it. The study went like this: I watched as he played countless hours of internet poker, no limit hold 'em. Every time he won two consecutive pots he would automatically get involved with the next pot and continue to play pots until he lost one, completely regardless of what two cards he was dealt. Because he was playing cards at absolute random, we based our figures simply on the likelihood that he should take the next pot down and just considered the statistical probability of him winning the pot, should be (x to 1, against) where "x" is equal to the number of players contesting the pot against him. After all, if he did pick up aces, we figured, that could just as easily be attributed to his "rushing" as hitting a perfect flop. We averaged out the number of those pots he should have won through natural probability, and we tracked what his actual wins. We then compared the numbers to see if there was any apparent truth to the claims of streaks and rushes. So, what did we find? I'm reluctant to even say.

Much to my humiliation we discovered that over the course of 70 hours, and I don't remember how many hands, there did appear to be a trend towards winning the third pot after two consecutive pots. I couldn't believe it, but if we tracked our numbers right and had the correct mathematical ideas in line, it looked like my brother won about 30% more pots while he was "streaking" than the statistics can account for. Had we discovered a sort of magic at the root of all these numbers? Were there really "poker gods" - deities of luck and chance that saw fit to deal out portions of luck in clumps and bundles rather than just sporadic and random assignment? I still doubted it. In my attempts to reason away this "magical" phenomenon I purposed that the statistics were really being skewed in some way. My best guess was that it was actually natural to win more pots than expected when playing more aggressively and gambling more. I thought that was all that was going on. My brother, in his quest to prove me wrong, was more than happy to take the worst of it in order to suck out and win a pot. He was also bluffing more and just taking more chances. I figured that if that were behind this apparent "fluke" in statistics, then it would stand to reason that, although he had been winning more pots, he had to be losing more money on the pots he lost. That was the "fuzzy logic" leading to the belief in chip magnetic streaks. Sure he had won more pots, but at what expense? I thought a new study was in order.

This experiment was much less difficult. All we had to do was count the money he won on these rushes, and subtract the money he lost on them. My hypothesis was that he would be losing money on these hands on average. By playing suboptimal hands from any position it would be nearly impossible for him to turn a profit. We would find that, although he was winning more pots, he was actually showing a net loss per hand. Surely that would put an end to all this talk of playing rushes. That's not exactly what we found. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but something very peculiar did, in fact, seem to be happening. It actually seemed that he was profiting by playing these rushes. Well, I still haven't stopped looking for a logical reason to all of this. Maybe his table image as a player on a streak was at the root; maybe the confidence that comes from dragging in pot after pot was helping him to make better plays. Maybe, or maybe, to quote the legendary Texas Dolly, "If you want to take the money off…I mean, make a big score…then, you've got to play your rushes." It's that simple. I'm not really convinced myself that it's that simple. I've still never played 72o out of position after taking down a pot or two. I still don't make mathematical mistakes on purpose just based on a "feeling". However, I did go out and buy myself a magic crystal for good luck, and you'll never see me at the table without it. Couldn't hurt, right? And it was either that or swear off the game forever - that was the arrangement. Good "luck!"

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