Rage against the myth of the bad beat....

I had a hand a couple weeks ago that put me on the the biggest, kick the dog, yell at the kids, quit your job and move to the Antartic kind of tilt that I had ever experienced. I had to do some serious thinking or give up the game as I was going broke ... again ... and helpless to stop it again.... and about to be staked by Slurpee Dude and pay him some stupid (but voluntary) interest when I made my recovery.... again.So I did some more reading, and writing and came up with some self help... Let me know what you think of the article I wrote below, I had a blast writing it and after hammering the points in it, into my thick skull, I have been playing some of the best poker of my life.Thanks,Big Felter aka Phase II aka micro limit (20x buy in or not sitting down) guy.
--------------

Title: Rage against the bad beat.... or JUST SUCK IT UP princess!

As I write this I am aware that the last thing that the world needs in yet another article on bad beats. However, before you tune me out, if after a bad beat you have any reaction other than a slight blip in pulse, for about a second, and then you wish your opponent a NH, then there is something for you here.My guess is we still have the vast majority of you with me? lets move on.

First of all you need to know that I am absolutely in the upper echelon for online players who will whine incessantly about a bad beat... seemingly forever. I have been known to email the hand history to everyone I know, tell anyone who would listen... including my mother in law, who doesn't know EVA from PMS. I whine to my wife who (and the sickest part is I KNOW its coming) will always use the bad beat as an ideal opportunity to remind me that I am playing too much poker and this is likely the reason why I was destined, no, likely deserved the hand to beat me severely. Surely the bad beats I take would come less often if I walked the dog more often. (I know, I know statistically and intellectually she is right).I am not proud of these things; I am trying to be a bigger person. However, at this point in my poker career I promise nothing.

So to the article: I, like so many writers, write because we generally want people to listen to us ramble. I believe George Carlin put it as "Dig me!", "look at me, aint I cute" while this is quite true, I am also writing this as a form of self therapy. So as you all read this article containing things that I truly do know, (but often react as if I don't), those that know me can add a chorus of "physician heal thyself" free of charge.

I bring to you 7 points worthy of your consideration:

1) "Bad beats happen so often to me!" What's your point? Oh I see, you are saying they happen to you more than the next guy? Bullshit. They don't and you need to keep reading to learn why they don't. Shut-up, Bullshit, stick it up your ass, it just doesn't. Now are we big enough boys to move on? With online poker bad beats do happen more often than ever before. But as we should all know by now, that is only because everything happens more often than ever before. Thanks to the speed of online poker you see thousands of hands where in live play you would only see a few hundred during the same time frame. Likely you have read that 1,000 times already from better authors, so moving right along? "Why don't they happen as often to my buddy?" They do, yes they do, one last time, yes they do, ok go to your room for a time out until you are ready to listen.

They do happen as often for other players. However here is the trick: They happen to the players who play with the same style as you, and play an equal amount of hands as you, as often as they happen to you.

Read that last sentence again then we will move on. You will experience more bad beats if a) you play more poker, or b) if you need to read the rest of this article for a whole bunch of other reasons why. For answer "a" let's do some simple math. If you play 20% more hands than your buddy you will get ?. You got it, 20% more bad beats than him. You will also get AA 20% more often than him and 72 off suit 20% more often than him. I can't think of any other way to drive this home other than with a ball ping hammer. No volunteers? Great! Moving on?.

If you still can't come to terms with it, your buddy (no different than you) is a gambler by nature and, (by the very laws of human behavior) this likely means that HE IS ALTERING THE TRUTH too improve upon his real results. That or he has already applied the principles in this article and has a different perception than you do on bad beats. Note that, perception of bad beats is the key!

2) Bad beats are more often than not far less "bad" than the loser would have us believe Often miscalculated pot odds -- When I get fuming over a bad beat because he landed a 10 to one shot on the river. I rarely am a big enough to person to say "hey wait a minute, well gosh silly me, I miscalculated that one, he was actually only a two to one dog. Nh sir nh I will get the next one k? " Screw that I have a good head of steam going and I am going to show the next guy that tries to raise me! Likely that lesson I give him will be: "how to donk off the rest of my chips to teach YOU a lesson" but he is getting a lesson by God!

3) Misunderstood pot odds -- Many a poker table argument has been held around a plain old incorrect pot odds calculation. Since there aren't as many professionals at the table as we would like to think it took for us to have a down session, many of us have a poor to tolerable grasp of the correct odds of your opponents draw. Before you get truly steamed check it out on your pot odds calculator. If you were right then go ahead and do your little Helmuth dance. Otherwise try your best to either make a note on the error you made and how you will behave next time, or if you can't do that leave the table. Your pride and ego don't mean shit here. Nobody is paying attention to you anyway, and you may even get a little respect when you leave with your small stack intact. You want discipline?! Try to pick up your last 13$ off a table when you bought in for $400, right after a guy drew out on you. "No way! I won't let that happen. I have my pride! I am going to throw this 13$ on whatever the hell I get handed to me next hand. That will SAVE my pride!? Wise move, dumb ass!

I want to highlight what I just said, there is NO place for pride or ego at the poker table. If you want to find a dick measuring contest at the poker table I suggest you take up a different hobby?. Like dick measuring. Seems appropriate, and I hear the dick measuring World Series is real blast for people like you. What you need is patience, confidence, and longevity. Likely your dick has none of those things or you would be in porno. Moving on...

4) "There are only two hands I am worried about here, so my odds of him hitting are?" -- Hold on now, before you push or make that call, what are the starting hands that could beat you here really? If any A9, or A2 would beat you and there is one two and two aces on the board, there are 8 possible starting hands that could beat you here, not two. Some of those hands may even make sense for the player to have. A9 suited? . even A2 suited? is not an impossible starting hand holding. "But I raised pre-flop!" Good for you, you made the right decision, and the right play, feel good about it. You have reduced the odds that he has a hand like that. You haven't eliminated them. The only way you can eliminate the odds of him starting with that hand is for you to not have sat down to play poker in the first place. Other than that you have allowed a percentage of the time for him to be holding the hand that you are worried about. The point here is, give it some thought. There are likely more starting hands that have you beat now, or they have better odds than you are giving them credit for.

Now if I have shaken your confidence and now you feel too much fear to make the push all in when you think he is a 5 to 1 dog? then stop playing poker. Get your money in when it is the right decision. If you want a sure thing? put your money in? WAIT A MINUTE never mind poker. NOTHING is a SURE thing for your money. Even your mattress may get discovered by the drunk friend of your cousin that passed out in your bedroom last night in his own vomit. You have reduced the odds that it will go missing but you haven't eliminated them?.

After the fact pot odds DON?T MATTER -- The odds of you winning can only be what you determine them to be before the cards were all turned over. They didn't improve or change after the fact when he drew out and, you learn the horrible reality of how thin he was drawing.

For example I had a hand (the hand that made me re-think my play, and write this article). In this hand I determined that if I was to push in against my two opponents, one or both of them would call as the turn had made a full house for me, but one, or both them just hit trip aces and one, or both were going to call because they were just that kind of trout. I calculated the odds of the board pairing, or of either, and or both of them pairing their kicker on the river to be a better full house. I determined that there were four outs for the board to pair or another A to come that would beat me, and three outs EACH for them to pair their kicker. So the odds of me winning this hand were at worst 3 to 1 drawing against ten outs (at worst). So roughly 3/4 times I am going to win this hand. When I pushed, and they both called, not only did they each have an A removing one out, but they shared a kicker, taking away another four outs! Truly they were drawing to five outs, not the ten I may have been up against.

Suddenly I went on a full blown tilt. I put my money in trying win with either fold equity, or with the 3 times I should win this hand. And loosing one in four times is something I can handle? but the reality was they rivered me with a pathetic chance of winning, so I lost a hand I should win approx. 8 times to one! NOW THAT HURT! Sure those hurt but when you made the decision you could not have known how good you were, so you can?t flip out over the real odds. You put your money in on a 3 to 1 shot, good for you, correct decision, feel great about it, over your lifetime of playing poker you will find the other three outcomes (you likely won?t remember them like you will remember this one). Now if you won't survive long enough on your bankroll to let those odds average out, then that brings me to the next point?..

5) Playing at a level that you can afford -- Likely this will be the most important lesson you can ever learn. You can make an awful lot of mistakes at the 10 cent or 2 cent tables. But when life is good and you are riding the "Wa" and you sit down with your entire bankroll at 20$ NL cause you are "ready" for the big time (or as I said when I did it, "I am going to step up, and I will never look back!" and that worked out, as well as you all likely would expect. Funny, and I seem on the outside to be fairly intelligent too. A far better poker player than I once said, first get your money in 10 to 1, now be prepared to lose that 20 times in a row. This means that you need to follow the 20x buy in rule. No not rule COMMANDEMENT! Burn it into your brain, tattoo it on your ass, and name your kids 20x buy in and 20x buy in Jr. and then maybe you will be on the right track. There is nothing more stupid than doing something that you accept to be a fact, a universal principle, and then ignoring it and playing above your 20x buy in level anyway. If you ignore this rule, and loose all your money to a one outer, good, fuck you, you dumb mother fucker. You deserved what you got shit head (really talking more to myself than you)

6) Giving a name to the "beat" gives it power. NOTHING is truly a bad beat. Poker is a game of odds. If you can reasonably expect 3/4 times you will win a pot then guess what be prepared when 1 of the times you loose. Do you consider the % of the time a "good beat"? Do you spend as much time celebrating the % of the time that it came through as you do focusing on the % that hurt you? Stomping around because something that you know can happen one in four times and did ? well that's the second dumbest thing I have heard today. (The first as you may have guessed, was detailing the bad beat to my mother in law earlier this afternoon.)

Define bad beat, and stick to that definition. If you use the definition that the casinos usually use, you will find that a bad beat is anything equal to or worse than your boat, Aces full of Jacks getting cracked by quads. What! You mean that hasn?t happened to you? Then what are you whining about? Frankly if that happened to you I hope it was at a casino with a bad beat jackpot. Likely it was the best beat you will ever take in your life. So we may want to lower that definition a tad. Say when your opponent hits his 2 outer? Remember that is going to happen approx 5% of the time. Still too high? Well, where do you want to set the bar for your drama queen crying session? A six outer? OK so now you need to get yourself all worked up approx. 14% of the time.

You are welcome to do that but I personally don't have that kind of energy. I suggest that you determine a bad beat as an outcome that will happen 5% of the time or less. Also it should be when you were all in and he had no better than that 5% chance to win. I can feel the bad beats slipping away as we speak. Those bad beat "chips" on your shoulders are suddenly shrinking up pretty quick aren't they? All of this is to drive home the point that poker is NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE PLAYING RIGHT NOW. Never was, never will be. If you get pocket AA 100 times or 1000 or 1,000,000 times, you will win with them most of the time. But that does not affect at all how this hand will play in any way. So you need to consider all of the points above and develop a long term game plan that will suit your temperament, your skill level, and your bankroll.

Now if you still want to email me your bad beat hand histories, here's the deal. Keep it until you have 1000 occurrences of that scenario, when you have it, compare the results to the expected results statistically. Now... yeah I thought so. I can move on right?

Luck is for suckers! If you are playing the game optimally you don't need luck, ever! Your opponent is going to need plenty though. How do you make this happen? Get your money in when you have the odds on your side. BAM instantly he needs the luck. If you can't clearly yet determine where you are at in a hand, and what amount of luck your opponent is going to need, then I suggest you tighten up, or drop limits until you have a pretty good idea. This strategy will require a whole article on its own to discuss. But for now, play in a way that the odds are in your favour when they strike back at you. Then let the odds do it's work. More often than not, a bad beat for you means, if you keep your head, and play good poker, you will get it all back anyway. He will be giving it away; it's only a matter of who it will go to.

See you at the tables,Big Felter