Quote Originally Posted by youngunpoker
Hello,
This is my first post on this forum and have been looking at some other posts and found that this forum is very helpful.

Now to the reason of this post:
I have been playing Online Poker for almost 2 years, I have never deposited money onto any site and i have had never more than $20. I try to cash in freerolls but I always seem to be beaten by the bad beat. How can it be avoided? I flop top two pair and get beat by a straight, should i not be pushing with top two? I have not been successful Online(or Live for that matter), but I love playing the Game. Any advice on how to avoid being busted by the bad beat?

Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks
younguns87
You can't "avoid" bad beats. They are part of the game. All you can do is make positive expected value plays (i.e., bets that will likely pay off, over time, a greater amount of winnings than the cost of the losing bets).

Without getting into all sorts of specifics, it important, unless you have a good read on your opponents and can confidently put them on a hand that is not likely to improve to beat you, to bet to protect your made hands. If you have 2 pair and your reads tell you that you have the best hand, you need to size your bets to give any opponent bad odds on a bet to suck out. Then you win either way-- either your opponent calls and you have just been given a positive expected value proposition, or your opponent folds and you take down the pot.

While many "bad beats" arise from pure luck (e.g., when you get all your chips in with a straight and your opponent catches two running cards to complete a flush), many others occur because a player was playing his or her cards too slow and gave an opponent free or cheap cards to suck out on. This, in turn, arises from players' inability to use the information given to them by opponents to determine a meaningful range of hands that the opponent might be playing. Put simply, they don't realize that they are not as far ahead as they think, so they don't realize they need to act to protect their hand.

There's much deeper concepts involved than this. But this is the basic outline. You can't avoid "bad beats", but you can make them less likely, less costly, and outweighed by greater winnings when your hands hold up.