Well, someone said to me a while back that you have to get so good that you can play even 72o for a profit. I think I've finally come up with a survey to find out just who is really that good...

Who here has 30k hands or more where they have played trash (presumably selectively) for an actual profit?

Here's what I'm defining as "pure trash": Unsuited cards worse than one-gappers (with the exception of 42o and 32o, which I'll let ride)--i.e., T7o, T6o, 96o, etc.

It's a fair number of hands, actually, and then one needs to filter for "not in a blind" and "voluntarily put money in." Those are the ones I'd like to count. Oh, and one other thing: At least 7 players at the table.

Actually, I do meet this challenge myself over my last 10k hands: I show a profit of 1.80 big blinds per hand on these--thing is, I only played 5 hands of this sort over the 10k period...

Can anyone here play these things (selectively, but more than "almost never") for a profit? Obviously, one is not playing the hand itself here, but a situation in which you think you can take down a pot with no real regard for your own hand; hence the filter for "voluntarily put $ in the pot."

Well I dont know if I count as a loose player, I am at times, especially in my live game play. Though for me even when I playing loose I see no reason to play these cards, for me when I play loose I add connecting middle cards, suited gappers, and sometimes suited 2 gappers and unsuited one gappers. The odds are so bad for offsuited book end straight cards that I wont play them unless I'm in the blinds.

I'm glad someone finally at least took a stab at this!

The reason I selected complete trash is simply that I wanted some where you can't be really intending to play your hand. On these, you have to be in a position to play your opponents' cards in order to make a profit--at full table there's no way they're profitable as hands. Essentially, these are hands that you might as well resign yourself to playing blind, I think, which isn't necessarily a bad thing... I'm just still wondering whether anyone except Scotty Nguyen can actually do it.

If you have some weird group that's actually profitable for you whenever you DO play it, which I'm also assuming is rarely if it's a pretty bad group, I'd also be interested in hearing about that, though, too, also at least some rough idea of when you do choose to play these things.