You can be playing the most optimal poker of your career, yet still be hurt or angry about losing a huge hand to a bad beat. The competitive sporting nature of any game is often founded on the premise that if you are the best player, and if you play a flawless match you are guaranteed a win. A lot of us think of ourselves as the greatest player at the table, and we surely feel superior to the fool that called your all-in bet with one card to go and hit his four outer, but all of that is actually based on a false premise.
The reality of running bad in online poker.
Poker is not a competition in the conforming way and you are not always rewarded for good strategy. In fact, you can have a string of tournament or cash game sittings where you would be hard pressed to find a single fault on your part, and still be stuck.
Most of us understand the nature of bad beats in poker, but the trick with this, is to turn a bad beat experience around and make it lucrative for you long-term. The truth of the matter is, most players take a long time to truly understand bad beats. Of course bad beats pain everybody, even experienced players, but if you look at bad beats from a mathematical view, you also must admit them as inconsequential to your lucrative strategy.
As a result good players, will normally laugh off a bad beat because they know they made a moneymaking play regardless, and the winner of that particular hand committed a negative EV play. They also figure that if opponents did not make negative EV plays, then this profitable game of poker would not survive. They realize that they want players at the table who make mistakes and suck out to win a pot.
You really do want the bad players to stick around as long as possible.
Oftentimes, I am in poker tourneys and look at weak players who just raked in a huge pot and think to myself, “cool, he has a lot of money”. You too should want weak players to have money or stacks at the table.
Positive players that really understand the bad beat dilemma have an inherent nonchalance towards the final result of a hand, and are more engaged in how their antagonists actually played the hand, and what was the rational behind their strategy – if they had any. Moneymaking players will take notes of the situation, and their adversaries, and simply wait for an chance to win their money back and then some.
