how to recover from a bad beat

i have KK. raise 6x BB to take out a full table of limpers. I get one caller

Flop: Q45. All different suits

I check. He raises all in. Average stack is about 10k and I have about 60k. He's chip leader and has me covered.

I put him on AQ, AA, or QQ. Figured I might as well pay him off if he has AA or QQ.

I call. He flips over Q9 offsuit.

Turn: 9.

Now after about 3 hours of concentrated playing, I lose to crap like this. Insanely bad preflop call, bad post-flop move, and he ends up pairing his kicker. What was I suppose to do?

Currently, I think the best thing for me is to stay away from the game to avoid steaming. How do you guys recover from these sick bad beats? And what kind of rationalizing/reasoning do you tell yourself whenever you get a bad beat?

Originally Posted by AFchung

How do you guys recover from these sick bad beats? And what kind of rationalizing/reasoning do you tell yourself whenever you get a bad beat?

This is all the rationalizing you need:

Text results appended to pokerstove.txt

53,460 games 0.005 secs 10,692,000 games/sec

Board: Qc 4s 5h
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 18.384% 18.38% 00.00% 9828 0.00 { Q9o }
Hand 1: 81.616% 81.62% 00.00% 43632 0.00 { KK }


80% favorite to win on the flop. So 8 out of 10 times you're winning this hand and more than likely now have an overwhelming chip lead on the rest of the field. And after suffering this beat you can logically assume that this donkey won't last a lot longer playing how he is.

The more you play, the more use to it you get. Then one day single hands like this hardly bothers you anymore. Be happy that a donk like that is playing at your table.

Multiple in a row or a longterm thing still gets to me tho. But I guess time will fix that as well.

thank you both for the replies. i feel like i'm at a therapy or group support session right now xD

after running the cards through a poker odds simulator, i do feel a bit better. 19% dog still can get lucky, similar to guessing correctly on a multiple choice test with 5 choices. its bound to happen i guess

hopefully time does fix things like Seabass said

Originally Posted by Seabass

The more you play, the more use to it you get. Then one day single hands like this hardly bothers you anymore.

Bankroll management and multi-tabling helps also IMO.

When the beat only happened on 1/9 of your tables instead of 1/1 or 1/2, then it seems more minimized. It takes seeing a lot of these before you get used to em'.

What am I talking about, I still wanna put my fist through drywall everytime my aces go in vs queens on a 842 rainbow flop & a q comes on the river, as they did last night vs a fullstack