There was an article about a girl who put sticky tape on her monitor where her whole cards are and took the tournament without looking at the cards. Google for it
Annette Obrestat. She claims to have done it on stars in 07, but i couldn't find documentation or evidence of the actual feat. I call bull shit.
Either this is a hoax and a lie, or she actually did it by having one of the absolute luckiest runs of all time poker history, period. I don't believe she actually did it. I'm sorry, but I just don't. The statistics involved are so absurd, which is why it is hard enough to win when you are actually playing the cards. Also, it says she bested only 179 other players, which is not really that impressive to me. That's not that many more people than we get in the daily CC game, which is a totally different monster than the mtt's with 2500 entrants, or even 500-700. Had she had to play a game with 500 or more entrants, she would have had to play nearly twice as long, give or take.
It also says this little feat has never been repeated. This here is what really makes me most skeptical, and makes my bullshit meter go through the roof. Anyone who took science courses and paid attention knows that a conclusion and results are no good when peer reviews fail to ever repeat them.
Until someone either does it live with witnesses, or is filmed doing it online and we can verify the claim and results, I simply do not believe it, and neither should any of you, unless you are comfortable with being a gullible rube.
Thinking about it more, I wouldn't say it is impossible, but so unlikely and difficult that it actually works against the claim it is trying to make--that poker isn't really about the cards at all. Not looking at the hole cards, the strategy I would go with would be to try to build my stack by
bluffing. Find patterns at the table and target the players who fold to re-raises most often, and just make small check raises and re raises to try to take the pot without ever going to showdown. You would want to avoid showdown as much as possible, for obvious reasons--if it isn't obvious to you...showdown would be very risky because the
odds will always be greater that your hand is worse than your opponents hand, if only because players rarely take total bluffs or A high
hands to showdown; and because you would have to just assume that you do not have a pair or made hand, the odds are always going to be in favor of the opponent who can actually see their hand and decide if they think it's good enough to take to showdown. So, long story short, showdown = higher risk when hole cards are hidden.
This basically amounts to a handicapping, and a fairly significant one, and is a foolish thing to do for any other reason than to try to replicate Obrestad's supposed results, or to win a stupid prop bet. I see no benefit to doing it. The argument that it could make you better at playing your opponents rather than getting too focused on the cards is not very strong either, because you could argue that a player does not need to play without seeing their hole cards to practice playing their opponents rather than the cards. Although I could see it being a pretty entertaining prop bet.
Finally, let me ask this: If everyone started doing this, and you had a table with all 9 players opting to play without looking at their hole cards, you are no longer even playing poker, but instead you are playing a very strange form of bingo. Hey, you could even have the player who wins the hand stand up and say "BINGO!!!"
