T-Rod, you're misunderstanding the concept of "regression to the mean."

In the long-term future, say the next 1 billion times you have a pocket pair, you will flop a set almost exactly 11.7% of the time.

Now take that 117,000,000 times you will flop a set over that 1 billion hands, and add to it the 58 times you flopped a set over the 1,000 hands you just played (or 116 out of 2,000 or whatever.) You have now flopped a set 117,000,058 times out of 1,000,001,000 times, for a ratio of almost exactly 11.7 percent. Maybe it's 11.6999 percent. But you get the picture.

Your 5.8 percent number over the last 1,000 hands will move closer and closer to 11.7 percent. But that's because all of your future hands (in the long run) will be almost exactly 11.7 percent -- not because some particular subset of your future hands will be greater than 11.7 percent.

Someone posted the coin flipping simulation a while back, found .

The same type of simulation could be used for hitting sets in hold'em poker. K3nt is correct in that as the number of random events apporached infinity, the actual result will approach the expected result. And there is no way to game it.

T-Rod, the point isn't the billion hands. The point is that you have zero reason to expect that it will "even out," in the sense that you will flop more sets than expected, over ANY time period in the future.

Let's say you flopped 0 sets over 1,000 hands with pocket pairs. A serious statistical anomaly. Then over the next 9,000 hands, you flopped the normal number over every 1,000 hands: exactly 117.

Here's your data set in format (X, Y) where X = pairs, Y = sets

(1000, 0) ==> 0.00% sets
(2000, 117) ==> 5.85% sets
(3000, 234) ==> 7.80% sets
(4000, 351) ==> 8.78% sets
(5000, 468) ==> 9.36% sets
(6000, 585) ==> 9.75% sets
(7000, 702) ==> 10.03% sets
(8000, 819) ==> 10.24% sets
(9000, 936) ==> 10.40% sets
(10000, 1053) ==> 10.53% sets

This data set is "regressing to the mean." By percentage, you are getting closer and closer to 11.7 percent of sets flopped. But by number of sets flopped, you are remaining exactly 117 sets lower than would have been expected. There is no time period over which you (can expect to) flop more sets than expected.

In short, "regression to the mean" simply does not mean that you ever get to flop more sets than expected, over any time period.