Quote Originally Posted by Bigdaddy View Post
Wow - 200 max bet loss in 270 hours! You've experienced this and are still playing? Honestly, if I had a run like that, I'd either quit (probably half way there) and/or hire a private investigator to check out the games I was playing to see if I was being cheated. I certainly wouldn't even think about questioning my gaming skill because that factor is miniscule compared to the variance you've experienced.

The odds of a -4 SD event are about 1 in 31,500. So if you're logging 810 hours per year (three 270-hour sessions per year), you would expect this unfortunate occurrence to happen about once every 10,500 years! (Global warming will kill us all off long before then ). Looking at it another way, if you take a group of 31,500 serious blackjack players who all play a 270-hour session, one of them would have this kind of luck.

What would be even more amazing would be if someone responded to your post and claimed that they too had a run like that....
Came close to a run like that a few years back. In addition to the unbelievably bad run of cards, I likely wasn't on my A game either. The run started at an ATH point. I had just been told, that a surgery which I needed, delayed for quite a while due to risk factors, would go forward. I was also told to get my affairs in order. This was not due to Complexity of surgery, but rather to risk factors. never knew for sure it it was affecting me, but I never discounted it either.

On the other side of the bell curve, I've had a win streak, which in terms of dollars, easily exceeded the loss just described. That may have been 5 sigma. Not even sure of how to calculate it. It absolutely crushed, 3 months running, any previous month by significant margins. The run continued for another 2 months on top of that, earning only 10-12 k per month. I played a lot in those days.