 If you play poker for long enough, you will encounter hands where you held a fantastically strong hand against your opponent, only to be beaten as they catch an incredibly lucky card on the final round. These can be incredibly frustrating, as you can have the best hand by far up until the last moment, where your opponent some how hits all the cards they need to take the pot that should have been making its way into your stack. We call these ‘bad beats’, and they are something that every player has to get used to if you intend to sit at the poker table.
Here as an example of a typical bad beat situation:
Say we hold A K and decide to make a healthy raise preflop. One other player in the blinds makes the call and we both go to see a flop. The flop comes A K 6 , giving us a great top two pair. Surprisingly, our opponent bets out around the size of the pot and seeing as we have such a strong hand, we decide to raise their bet. After making our raise, our opponent returns with an all-in push with their dominating stack. We make the call, and to our relief they turn over A J, and we breathe a sigh of relief as we wait for the final two cards to be dealt and for the pot to shift into our lap. However, the turn comes the J, and the river comes the J to give our opponent a full house, and in turn our entire stack.
This bad beat actually happened to me in a cash game before, and it still makes me feel ill to think about it. My frustration was at an all time high, after being so close to picking up a huge pot and being a big winner for the night, to being a loser after my hours of almost perfect play at the table. I felt robbed that such a great hand like AK on a flop like that could lose to a hand that was so far behind. Even though I had played the hand perfectly, my entire stack was sitting in the lap of my opponent, as they carried on playing and I had to dig into my bankroll to buy back into the game.
The particular hand above is only one example of a bad beat, as they can come in all different shapes and sizes. Some bad beats are only small where your opponent has a fair chance to catch up with you, whereas in others you might be a monster favourite only to come crashing back down with a bang. The fact of the matter is bad beats are something that every player experiences from time to time, and they are completely out of our control. Even though on the odd occasion it will feel that you are the unluckiest person alive, as you miss every flop and your opponents always manage to catch all the right cards whilst you are left with nothing.
To help combat the effect of a bad beat, a good point that I like to remind myself about is that I had the best hand when all of the money went in. After all, it wouldn’t have been a bad beat if I wasn’t the favourite to win the hand. Getting your money in the middle with the best hand is never a bad play, and it is the situation you always want to be in when both hands are turned over. However, after all the money has gone into the middle it is all down to luck, and there is nothing that we can do as we hope that our opponent doesn’t get lucky and that our hand holds up. So we shouldn’t concern ourselves too much about events that are completely out of our hands.
Although it may be hard to believe, bad beats do serve a purpose in the game of poker. Bad beats are a bi-product of luck, and so they allow bad players to experience big wins from time to time even though they are unable to play the game profitably in the long run. Therefore these players may continue to play poker for weeks and months under the impression that they are good players, yet they leak away their money to the better players little by little, and blame they’re losses on ‘bad luck’. So even though bad beats can really test my patience every now and then, I am more than happy that they are there to help keep the bad players coming back to the tables day after day.
As already mentioned, bad beats are a part of poker that we are going to have to be prepared to get used to if we intend on playing the game for extended periods of time. You will find that the more your game improves, the more bad beats you will experience, as you will more often than not be the one with the best hand when all the money goes into the middle. So you could well say that an increase in the number of bad beats that you experience are a sign that your game is improving! At the end of the day however, even though a number of pots may swing out of your favour from time to time, you will be winning more than you lose in the long run, so keep your cool and try not to become too frustrated with them.
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