As Thin as It Gets

We were up to our eyeballs in celebrities at the WPT Celebrity Invitational poker tournament recently when I sat down at a fun table. I drew a seat at a table with a couple of top pros – Dave "The Dragon" Pham, attired in a spectacular jacket covered with colorful dragons, and Dave Singer, who was wearing headphones in an attempt to muffle the nonstop loud chatter from the exuberant player sitting next to him. From where I was sitting, I could see James Garner, Dick Van Patten, Vince Van Patten, James Woods, Meatloaf, Jason Alexander, Jennifer Tilly, and Mimi Rogers around the tournament area. This was going to be a fun, fast and furious tournament, in which you'd have to get in there and have a good time gambling to win. After several rounds of play, my chip stack had been moving up and down when a critical hand came up.



After starting with $10,000 in tournament chips, I was down to $4,400. The blinds were $100-$200 with a $25 ante. In late position, I picked up the A K and raised to $600. Dave Singer, with a good-sized stack, reraised to $1,500. Everyone else folded, and I called. My hand connected very nicely with a flop of A-9-6 rainbow with a heart, giving me top pair with top kicker, and a backdoor nut-flush draw. I moved all in with my remaining $2,900, and after briefly thinking, Dave called me with a pair of jacks. On the turn, he had only two outs and was "drawing thin," as they say. The turn was the 10, giving me the nut-flush draw and therefore eliminating the J (one of the two jacks left in the deck) as one of his outs on the river. In other words, with one out on the river, Dave was drawing "as thin as it gets" (one out) without actually drawing completely dead (zero outs). I was feeling pretty good about the situation; on the river, 43 out of 44 cards in the deck would put me back in business. As you can probably guess, a black jack fell, signaling me to go to the blackjack tables with a stream of steam coming out of my ears all the way there.

I haven't been on either side of a one-outer situation in such a long time that I couldn't even recall the last time I participated in one. This made me realize that the chance of Dave hitting his black jack on the river, which was 2.3 percent, wasn't even the long-shot part of this equation. The real long shot was actually the odds of ending up in a situation in which he was dead to a one-outer. This got me thinking about how many drawing "as thin as it gets" circumstances are possible on the river. There's probably much less than a 2 percent likelihood of seeing one.



Here are the families of one-outer hands on the river that I could think of:



1. One-ended straight-flush draw

2. Gutshot straight-flush draw

3. Quads draw

4. Trips draw with one card counterfeited

5. Situations in which other players generously share with you that they've collectively folded all of your outs except one.



The most common comment is, "I threw away one of your aces." And the polite response is, "That's OK, I don't need it – I'll catch the other one."



With a little luck, I'll win the next 43 times in my life that somebody's drawing "as thin as it gets" against me on the river.

Robert is the 2002 World Series of Poker champion, and you can play poker with him online by signing up at www.interpoker.com/rob, which offers up to a $121 limited-time bonus.

"Robert is the 2002 World Series of Poker champion and

you can play poker with him online by signing up at

offers up to a $121

limited time bonus."