One of the hardest things to deal with when you are playing low stakes cash games is all of the bad beats. When you are playing against people who like to call a lot and chase wild draws, it only makes sense that you are going to face more suckouts on the river.
Whats the best way to recover from a run of bad beats. I'm playing pretty standard 20/18 but cant catch a break. This player has 80% hand play rate, near matching Cbet. I'm dealt pocket aces and raise his Pre flop bet. He call with 5 9 off. Rainbow flop, whole not of nothing, but with a 5. I'm trying hard not to throw my laptop out the window right now. Every time I run deep in a MTT coolers/bad beats happen. Last 3 tournaments I ran deep, Set over set, then Aces vs Kings, now I just got 3 outered on the river with like 30 people left when I had KK and a donk called preflop with A10. And the hand would have put me into the top 3 or 5 of chips with $2000 up top.
As somebody who has played millions of hands at the lowest stakes online, I know the feeling all too well. I sometimes (half) jokingly tell people that I have probably taken more bad beats than anyone in history!
In this article I am going to give you a few tips on how I deal with all of the bad beats and suckouts that you necessarily will encounter in small stakes cash games.
![Poker how to deal with bad beats in poker Poker how to deal with bad beats in poker](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126294405/559197869.jpg)
Embrace the Bad Beats
Once again, it needs to be stated that at the lowest stakes (online or live) you will simply face more bad beats than at any other limits. The reason why is that there are so many more bad players at these stakes calling the whole way with bottom pair or chasing some ridiculous draw.
The key, though, is to understand that this is very much a good thing. The reason why win rates are always so much higher in low stakes games than at higher limits is precisely because you have all of these bad players willing to call you down with anything.
Of course, this means that you are going to face suckouts more often. Higher-stakes players typically fold earlier in the hand than do many of those playing the lower limits. The better players often are never in a position to draw out on you in the first place.
But it is important to understand that there will always be more value in playing against players who chase everything because of this simple fact — most of the time they miss.
We get so angry sometimes when they hit their four-outer on the river against us that we forget the simple math of the game. The vast majority of the time when they play like this, they miss those four outs, one of the other 46 cards comes, and we win the pot with the best hand.
As painful as it is to lose to something ridiculous like a gutshot straight draw, when you look at it from a broader perspective, you can just laugh it off. You should be happy that there are players in your game willing to play this badly. Because most of the time the pot is getting shipped your way.
Suckouts Are a Tax We All Sometimes Need to Pay
Another way of looking at bad beats and suckouts is to consider them a 'tax' we must pay to keep playing against such lesser-skilled opponents.
The reason why bad players keep coming back again and again (and depositing again and again) is because they can blame their lack of success on bad luck. Ego is a very real thing in poker. Much like driving, most people rate their skills higher than they actually are. When a recreational player hits a ridiculous draw on the river against you, this is actually vindication in that player's mind. Finally, luck is on their side!
It is hard to think of any other game which is skill-based in the long run, but has this incredible element of luck in the short term. And it is a very beautiful thing. It allows players to ignore the obvious and delude themselves into thinking that they only lose because of bad luck. This is what fuels the game — delusion.
This is why I prefer to think of bad beats and suckouts from recreational players as a tax that I need to pay sometimes. Indeed, it is a tax that we all need to pay sometimes. This is what keeps the poker economy running. If bad players were not able to get lucky sometimes, they would stop playing and the profitability of the games would plummet.
Everything is Crazier Online
Poker How To Deal With Bad Beats In Poker
The last thing that you need to know about bad beats is that when you play online they are going to come faster and more often than you have ever been used to before. This is indeed one of the main reasons that many live players have a difficult time moving over to play online. (For more on that subject, see 'New to Online Poker? Don't Make These Two Mistakes.')
When you are playing live you might only see 30 hands an hour. But online, a typical six-handed no-limit hold'em table will deal three times that many hands in the same amount of time. And when you are talking about fast fold games like Zoom on PokerStars, you could be seeing 10 times as many hands per hour as you would in a live game.
It only stands to reason, then, that when you are seeing so many more hands, you are going to see way more bad beats and suckouts. Many people mistakenly think that there must be something wrong with the dealing online or the sites are trying to “rig” it somehow, but in truth they are failing to see that the pace of the game online is simply much faster than it is live.
This is especially the case when you consider that most people will play multiple tables online as well. When you are seeing hands so much faster online, you will also see many, many more bad beats. There is no way around this.
Final Thoughts
Many people view bad beats and suckouts as a negative part of the game. In fact they cause a high percentage of players to tilt, especially if several of them happen in succession.
However, when you learn to embrace the madness of small stakes cash games, you can train yourself to look at bad beats in a more positive light. You want bad players to be chasing their crazy draws, because you know that most of the time they actually miss them.
Secondly, you even want them to be able to hit those draws sometimes, because this is what keeps them playing and coming back again and again. If they didn’t get a chance to get lucky now and then, they would all see the truth — that they are actually getting consistently outplayed — and quit.
Next time a bad player hits a miracle card on the river against you, challenge yourself to react to it in a better way. Bad beats and suckouts are a necessary part of the game and they are very much a good thing. Have a laugh about it, pay your tax, and move on to the next hand.
Nathan “BlackRain79” Williams is the author of the popular micro stakes strategy books, Crushing the Microstakes and Modern Small Stakes. He also blogs regularly about all things related to the micros over at www.blackrain79.com.
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Full Tilt
In poker, bad beat is a subjective term for a hand in which a player with what appear to be strong cards nevertheless loses. It most often occurs where one player bets the clearly stronger hand and their opponent makes a poor call that eventually wins with the turn or the river card being dealt in their favor, for example.
There is no consensus however among poker players as to what exactly constitutes a bad beat and often players will disagree about whether a particular hand was a bad beat. A few examples are: quads over full house, quads over quads, straight flush over quads, small full house vs. bigger full house or better.
Types of bad beats[edit]
Any hand that looked like a favorite to win can end up losing as more cards are dealt (with the nuts being the exception), but bad beats usually involve one of two not mutually exclusive scenarios:
- The player who wins on a bad beat is rewarded for mathematically unsound play. Calling a bet despite having neither the best hand nor the right pot odds or implied odds to call, then winning anyway, is characteristic of this type of bad beat. It can also involve the inferior hand catching running cards when it requires two cards in a row to come from behind to win the pot. For example, catching cards on both the turn and the river in Texas hold 'em that complete a straight or flush.
- A very strong hand loses to an even stronger one, better known as 'cooler'. This type of beat occurs with some frequency in movies. In the films The Cincinnati Kid and Casino Royale, The Kid and Le Chiffre each lose with a full house to a straight flush. In this situation, it is possible that both players have played their cards well, and avoiding the bad beat could not have been achieved without committing a mistake.
Reacting to bad beats[edit]
A bad beat can be a profound psychological blow, and can easily lead to a player going on tilt. Professional player Phil Hellmuth, among others, is notorious for his pronounced reactions to bad beats. However, suffering a bad beat means that the losing player was 'getting the money in good' and in most instances would win by playing the same hand the same way. Thus, the more stoic poker players accept bad beats as an unpleasant but necessary drawback to a tactic that works the vast majority of the time.
Bad beats online[edit]
In online poker rooms, bad beats often lead to accusations that the random number generator is 'rigged', even though such beats also occur in offline games. Many online poker rooms post statistical data to demonstrate the randomness of the hands generated.[1] In online poker games players have an opportunity to play in 'bad beat' tables where the player who has the best losing hand receives an accumulated prize pool. An additional amount of rake is taken from each hand to fund the jackpot. The largest online jackpot to date was €1.25 million, hit in July 2011 with €443,000 going to the loser of the hand.[2]
Players are statistically more likely to experience bad beats online, since playing using a computer allows for more hands played per hour. Also, online players may play multiple cash game tables and/or tournaments at the same time, also increasing the frequency of hands dealt.Also, tells are rendered moot, so players are incapable of reading clues such as body language in aid of deriving the strength of an opponent's hand.Finally, online poker games (especially freeroll tournaments) are far more accessible to the average player who, being average, is less likely to be knowledgeable regarding the techniques of the game, in turn making it more likely they will bet from the gut or intuition rather than experience.
Bad beat jackpot[edit]
A bad beat jackpot is a prize that is paid when a sufficiently strong hand is shown down and loses to an even stronger hand held by another player.[3] Not all poker games offer bad beat jackpots, and those that do have specific requirements for how strong a losing hand must be to qualify for the jackpot. For example, the losing hand may be required to be four-of-a-kind or better. There may be additional requirements as well. For example, in Texas hold 'em there is usually a requirement that both hole cards play in both the losing and winning hands, or that where a full house is the minimum (usually aces full of jacks or higher), both hole cards must be used to make the three-of-a-kind in the full house.
Bad beat jackpots are usually progressive, often with a small rake being taken out of each pot to fund the jackpot (in addition to the regular rake). When a jackpot is won, it is usually split among all players sitting at the table at the time of the bad beat with the losing hand getting the largest share, followed by the winning hand, and all the other players dividing the remainder. Generally, only the best losing hand is eligible to win the largest share, even if another hand would also qualify.
Specific rules, collections, payout percentages, and amounts vary greatly from one casino or cardroom to the next, and are sometimes changed.
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
Poker How To Deal With Bad Beats For Kids
- ^PokerStars: Random Number Generator Audits
- ^Boss Media's Bad Beat Jackpot is Finally Hit
- ^'Commerce Casino: Jackpots'. Archived from the original on 2006-08-20. Retrieved 2006-08-20.
Books[edit]
- Bad Beats and Lucky Draws by Phil Hellmuth ISBN0-06-074083-3
- Poker: Bets, Bluffs, And Bad Beats by A. Alvarez ISBN0-8118-4627-X
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