Comments: Dealing with bad beats

Original post here: http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...st-t61079.html

Put comments and questions in this thread!

Originally Posted by taipan168

2. Good players suffer more bad beats than bad players.

this is a very important concept that beginners def. need to be aware of.

I gotta say, this is so bang on. The hardest thing for beginners to learn is tilt management. It is so important to your improvement as a player and moving up, that without it, you will never get to $200NL, $400NL or $5KNL. Everyone tilts, even the great CTS or SBRugby. But not just because they got their AA cracked. everyone has there threshold, just most have much higher than one hand thresholds. I've posted about this before,and I will quote it again,

Do you plan to ever move up? Do you plan to ever play for pots bigger than $10, $30, $100. Losing buy ins is part of the game, having downswings is part of the game. The only thing that you spoke about that is not part of the game is tilt. If you are tilting at any point, over losing a hand, a buy in or having a downswing, take a break. A long break. Maybe quit poker.

This may seem a little harsh, and this is not directed just at you, but all the beginners out there. I've been spending some time discussing tilt with some players that not only play higher stakes, but play for life altering money. If you understand poker. The math involved in every decision. The math involved in AA getting cracked. The math involved in running into AA with KK. And the reasons why we have BR management, to protect against inevitable downswings and variance, then why are you (or anybody) tilting. GET OVER IT! The only unforgivable aspect of your play will be losing more money, playing on tilt.

Why would someone with half a brain (again, not just pointing this out to you) that understands poker, understands the math, studies the game, practices good BR management to protect against variance, TILT because of said variance, and turn a 3 or 4 buy in down swing into a 10 or 15 buy in downswing by not playing optimal poker on every hand.

And I'd like to point out, if you can't learn to control tilt at the $10NL, $25NL and $50NL levels, how in the hell will everyone of you, EVERYONE OF YOU who dreams of playing like our beloved FTR regulars at $5/$10 and higher ever be able to play in a $1000 pot and push that edge. Ok, maybe I'm wrong, maybe you "just play for fun" and don't want to play at those stakes. Then why all the tilt?? If it's for fun, and you play to relax, why Tilt??? Have fun, smile and type NH, move on, but either way, pick a side and stop tilting.


SERIOUSLY, STOP TILTING OVER NICKLES OR THE $1K POTS WILL NEVER HAPPEN, EVER!!!! learn to play without tilt now at $10NL or you may never play for fun or money.

I also want to say if I tilted last night because of some beats, this would not have been a good night for me.

Another classic.

nh taipan!

very nice post Taipan, and pretty much spot on

Another superb post.

GJ Tai.

Excellently written. Thanks for this!

Superb.

What the F*CK? How can this donkey call my preflop raise with 75o, call a flop bet and a big re-raise not to mention my turn shove with just a gutshot draw? F*CKING DONKEYS is why my kings never EVER hold up EVER! Let's look this guy up on Sharkscope. HA, I thought so - fishy icon, -60% ROI, down $4K. [Now on the table chat] "Hey Mr 75o, I can see why you're down $4K when you play like a MORON you DIPS HIT".

Have you been watching me?! This is almost verbatim.

alright, I've grown a bit... I'm somewhere between two and three, closer to three. I'm working on it.

Excellent Post!

Originally Posted by martindcx1e

Originally Posted by taipan168

2. Good players suffer more bad beats than bad players.

this is a very important concept that beginners def. need to be aware of.

I totally agree, and I will suggest one more thing. Be very wary of the bad beats you put on other people - it means the opposite, that you got your money in bad. We should be learning from those bad beats, too, if we played it poorly.

Overall, AWESOME post.

Originally Posted by martindcx1e

Originally Posted by taipan168

2. Good players suffer more bad beats than bad players.

this is a very important concept that beginners def. need to be aware of.

Overall a very good post.

I don't necessarily agree with what's posted above though. If you're talking about the awful player that will call raises with K3o or go a long way with any piece of the flop.. yeah they will probably put a few bad beats on you since they are almost always getting it in bad.

In tough games I sometimes notice the opposite effect though, albeit not to the same extent. Good players are often playing very close to ideally and are picking up small and moderate sized pots left and right. Then when they actually do run into a monster in a big pot, they might be taking slightly the worst of it (e.g. flush draw with big fold equity in a moderate sized pot that happens to run into a set) in big pots. This happens to me frequently.

also fwiw, I've just learned to take bad beats in stride to be honest. In the earlier stages of my career it was VERY tough. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY feels like they take bad beats and get put in tougher situations than everybody else. It's just part of the game though. I take it in stride unless I go on a really, really sick cold stretch. 4-5 buyins in a short amount of time will do it. Then I've learned to just quit instead of chasing losses or spewing off a large # of buyins.

Originally Posted by Lukie

Originally Posted by martindcx1e

Originally Posted by taipan168

2. Good players suffer more bad beats than bad players.

this is a very important concept that beginners def. need to be aware of.

Overall a very good post.

I don't necessarily agree with what's posted above though. If you're talking about the awful player that will call raises with K3o or go a long way with any piece of the flop.. yeah they will probably put a few bad beats on you since they are almost always getting it in bad.

In tough games I sometimes notice the opposite effect though, albeit not to the same extent. Good players are often playing very close to ideally and are picking up small and moderate sized pots left and right. Then when they actually do run into a monster in a big pot, they might be taking slightly the worst of it (e.g. flush draw with big fold equity in a moderate sized pot that happens to run into a set) in big pots. This happens to me frequently.

The statement is probably true if we said "good players suffer more drawing-nearly-dead suckout miracles hitting against them than bad players." How bad a beat is it if you got you're money all-in as a slight dog, especially if there was some dead money + fold equity when you bet? I understood the post to mean that one person was dominated but sucked out - something like 4 to 1 or worse, when the chips went in the middle. And good players won't get it all in that bad that often, imo. That's why they're good players. Bad players get all their money all-in when dominated all the time, quite possibly the main reason I'm a winning NL10 player.

Edit: BTW, i love the tilt equity in the BIG DRAW + fold equity, especially when you know you're read was spot on. You had the range right, and the opponent was likely to fold, but now you're a dog and in it for stacks -- and you're 2 to 1 "long shot" hits. I love it 'cuz it tilts certain players like crazy, gets them attacking you, calling you "bluffer / fish / donk" in chat. That's perfect for me, when everyone at the table gets the idea I'm a total donkey when I know I had the implied odds right when I committed. I like it even better when the tilty villain counts my outs (usually wrong) and claims "You donkey - you only had X outs - how could you make that play?" The more like Howard Lederer they sound, the better for my image at the table. Since I play nitty, having everyone think I'm a maniac/donk is perfect. Of course, the tilt equity may not be as high at the limits you play, Lukie.

This is mostly geared toward the multitabling players. I feel personally that playing around 3-8 tables at lower stakes than i would 1 or 2 table for my br limits nearly eliminates tilt. Seeing the standard deviation of your games right in front of you helps me to understand it better. Do you think that becoming more proficient in multitabling would be a tremendous help to newer players trying to avoid tilting from beats?

In general, yes. But you can suffer bad beats on several tables at once, and tilt harder, if you're not careful. In one remarkable 10 minute session of 9-tabling, I had three sets that missed (a flush, a straight and an overset) plus KK coolered under AA. I had lost a few other largish hands on reasonable plays, so I was down more than 5 buyins in 10 minutes. I don't tilt much, and not very hard, but I still haven't quit tilting over that one . It's rare, but multitabling can mean multiples of whatever tilts you worst.

Great post and definitely something everyone should be aware of.

3. Bad beats reinforce bad players' bad play.

Unlike other games such as, for example, tennis, poker is a game where looking at results and changing your decision often isn't the right course of action. Say you keep on serving the ball into the net when playing tennis - the corrective action is to change your serve such that you (perhaps) toss the ball a bit higher before hitting it or change the angle at which your racquet makes contact. In poker, say you lose 3 times in a row with AA in an all-in preflop situation, the correct action is obviously not then to fold AA preflop!

In this way, bad beats can reinforce bad players' play because the freak time they hit their runner runner backdoor flush, gutshot draw or second pair when their top pair is outkicked on the flop reinforces the fact that they should chase against the odds because they remember that time they got paid off - without realising that the result of a hand does NOT matter - the only thing that matters is whether the decisions that were made were correct.

I came across this last night on William Hill. Now it WAS a freeroll but that's the level where it seems most people get their ideas that the online game is rigged et al. There was this one guy who was convinced that Hill was rigged, calling any PF bet with any two cards. He was open to getting all kinds of freaky hands and like posted above, this just reinforced his beliefs. These types of players are both great and annoying to play against but I'm glad they are around.

A.

Nice article.

HEM is good for this - comparing winnings with $EV adjusted winnings over a large (100k hands++++) sample size. I look at this sometimes when I have a session where I run like 5 buyins below EV, or a fortnight where i run 12 buyins behind (both happened in september)

i should probably run stats on returns filtered by pots where i got it in ahead, vs those where I got it in behind though..

Man I prasies this post lol I like ever concept that you discused becuase you are 100% acturate on this . Bad Beats they happen to good players more often then to bad players becuase bad players are natural gamblers willing to go in on crap shot hands.

I always wonder why when these donks hit there gutshot or backdoor one out draw on the river against my top set . I reveiw my betting and then think wow to I press a gambler that hard to were he made a very bad decsion that he called dominated 95-5 becuase I forced the situation.


Then I luagh and wonder how they make money if they do at all becuase there since of the game is so warped and they just toss in with any two cards playing crap and I wonder if this guy ever won a tournment or ever made a final table at all and luagh.