I didn't feel dissed. I was just scratching my head looking at your tables compared to mine and hoping I got the right answer! One point of the post was show the calculations for anyone interested. I'd love to have your programming skills.

I'm not a night person, so my midnight maths are always suspect. Defo the computer would count them accurately, and probably a good programmer could write and debug a program faster than I did the analysis above. NH!

The "playability" of the draws fors sc's, 1-gappers, and so forth are very different, as you pointed out. The sc's flop the the "nut flush draw" way more often, so the playability when you do hit your straight draw is superior with 98 vs 96. I like thinking about the patterns and understanding how they would play out.

We flop the "nut straight draw" 5/6 of the time we flop an SD with 98, but only half the time with 96, for example.

The SD patterns with 98 are:
  • xx98
  • x98x
  • 98xx

If "S" is the card that completes the straight, the three patterns above lead to 6 possible made straights (discounting our hole cards pairing the board and 6-card straights, etc):
  1. Sxx98
  2. xx98S
  3. Sx98x
  4. x98xS
  5. S98xx
  6. 98xxS

Except for pattern #1, the suited-connector flops the nut straight draw every time it flops an SD.

For the 96, just to use an example of "lessened playability," here is the pattern:
  • 9xx6

Not only do we hit this SD less often, only half the times we hit it do we have the nut straight draw:
  1. S9xx6
  2. 9xx6S

Only #2 is the nuts.

As you probably know, JT has the distinction of - every single time it makes up part of a straight - being the nut straight. The sc's are even more playable (vs. gappers) than the "frequency of draws/combos" table show because of these playability problems with the gappers.

Having the donk end of the SD can stack you in a hurry.