PLAYING $1 AND $2 NO LIMIT CASH GAMES
with Sam O’Connor
YOU GOTTA LOVE THOSE BAD BEATS
Tired of listening to the whine of bad beat stories? You’ve heard them all. Those bad beats never happened to you, right? Of course they did.
I’m going to assume that you and I are very good poker players. And with that in mind, the purpose of this column will be to simply define, maybe clarify, what we know about bad beats.
Winners renowned and celebrated look upon bad beats as working FOR them! Yet every now and then someone will tell me he is losing, not because of his play, but because of bad beats. And his stories will hold all the depth and mystery of the deuce of clubs.
A “bad beat” by definition occurs at the moment the longest odds of making a hand win an inordinately large pot – against us. (If the long odds win FOR us, then we simply played well.)
The great players do not look upon bad beats as the devil at work or the poker gods favoring someone else. In fact, the great poker players’ devotion to the entire game explains it all. Bad beats are part of the benefits of the game.
You see, all great players (which are not necessarily just the famous players) have an understanding of the game that the ordinary player doesn’t have. (How else could they be great?) The great players know the full vision of the game includes bad beats and the greats know they win because the bad beats help them win. They know it, not just because of the mathematics of probability, but because they have the records to show it. No, not the records they have ready for the tax collector, silly, the other ones - the happy records.
The game does not have a crude and willful bad beat entity that moves against us at will. The game is full of statistics and it is a numerical fact that long odds will sometimes surface, even in a string of events, and defeat us but the short odds occur more often and prevail.
So, how does the bad beat work in favor of us?
Quite simply, it works like this: Every time the draw out player takes a pot against the odds – not just completion odds but also pot odds - the good player knows he made the bad beat opponent pay a disproportionate price to draw to that inferior hand. And, because the opponent won the hand, it encourages him to try again and again. As long as the bad player keeps trying, the good player knows the money will come back to him with dividends.
How does the good player know this? Because he sees a bigger picture than the whining bad beat story telling player whose friends are tired of hearing about it.
Let’s be clear. If the bad beat happens in the last hand at the final table in a tournament, there can be no recovery in the moment or in the tournament. The loser of that final bad beat hand must settle for second place. The second place player’s only regret is he can’t continue the tournament against this lucky long odds first place winner, because he would most certainly beat him in a longer run. In this case, the tournament player didn’t lose first place because of a bad beat; he lost first place because he couldn’t re-buy.
Let’s be sure we’re talking about real bad beat stories. We hear novice players talk about the curse of pocket jacks getting a bad beat. That usually means the whiner is expecting too much from the jacks or even his/her pocket queens and kings. Those starting cards, along with Big Slick and Big Chick aren’t supposed to win every time and most combinations will lose more often than win. Some players will say they know that but, they will still say, it seems they don’t win enough. With a little investigation, we find that those complainers are usually on a slim bankroll and they are counting too much on the hands they selected to play.
Then there is the mental bankroll. Some people can afford, financially, to lose several days in a row and yet they are overwhelmed mentally by those repeated losses. They just can’t accept the fact that they can lose at the table. The losses crossed their mental watermark and they can’t cope with it. Those players probably should not be playing poker at that level or perhaps they need to re-evaluate the game of poker, its odds, and what can be expected from it.
But, generally, we should be thankful for bad beats. Keep the bad beats coming because bad beats encourage some of the worst play at the poker table.
What is the most common regret for the ordinary player when experiencing a bad beat? Interestingly, the most common regret is not the disappointment of the bad beat hand; the most common regret is the loss of the major part of a bankroll because the player risked too much of it. When players play with a short bankroll, one or two bad beats can destroy it and all that remains is an all too familiar whine for their friends to endure.
But we know better than to be under funded when we play, don’t we? Bad beats that do not destroy our stash can be laughed off and the money recouped in a later hand or in another game.
Huck Cheever in the movie, “Lucky You”, was a “blaster”. He bet it all when he had the edge; he played his entire bankroll. And it worked every time for him except for that last time when the long shot took him down. He, therefore, found himself repeatedly at the pawn shop with “borrowed” property, trying to raise new money for a new series of blasting.
If we aren’t under funded and can continue to play, the bad beat player will pay us back many times over. Got a wimpy bankroll? Find a smaller game.
Bad beats make us money. We just have to be able to finance them.
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Sam O’Connor is the author of the book How to Dominate $1 and $2 No Limit Hold ‘Em and a principal actor in Lucky You. You can contact him at Howtodominate@aol.com