Bad Beats Are Good For Poker
Thursday, March 25th, 2010Place yourself in a large poker tournament. You have made it down to the money, with a large payout available for the top finishers. You are staring a life changing win straight in the face and you are playing fantastic poker. Life is good. Then you take a vicious bad beat with your opponent hitting the only card on the river that can knock you out. You instantly go from potential chip leader to just another bad beat story on the rail. Life is suddenly not so good. The player you lost to is a well known professional who has made millions playing poker. This hurts. This would hardly be the time to tell you that bad beats is actually a positive part of poker in the longer term. Unfortunately this does little to stop you hating lady luck as taking a bad beat never gets easier.
The example above is an extreme bad beat poker story, but one that has been felt many times over by many poker players. If you ever get the opportunity to play Tiger Woods at a round of golf unless you are either very good or very delusional you will probably not expect to win. This is because the skill in golf massively outweighs the luck factor that exists in the game. The better you are at a sport, the less luck will hurt you. In poker, however, the turn of the card means that even the best players can fall foul to a bad beat. Weak players can win and this is why there are so many bad players in each tournament you participate in.
It is considered that over half of the field of any tournament is dead money. This begs the question, why do they play? This is because bad play does sometimes get rewarded in poker because there is usually a chance, albeit small, that players win hands that they should lose. A run of lucky hands can see a terrible player ride the chip lead and even win the tournament if their lucky streak carries on long enough. Fortunately for skilled players luck never lasts forever and good play wins most of the time. But as one tournament progresses, there will be moments of despair where your skill edge is cruelly dashed by a bad beat.
When you are going back through hands it is important that you analyse each play on its merits. A bad player will make terrible plays but get lucky and this validates that for them. I know a player who plays A 2 in any position because once they flopped a full house! This may never happen again but they play A 2 time and again even though it was only luck that won the hand that time. Without bad beats it would only be skill that mattered and unless you had a skill level matching Tiger Woods golf game you would find yourself outgunned by the professional players! Bad players also make bad plays and say they suffered a bad beat, in this instance bad beats (or the perception of a bad beat) keeps the fish playing.
There will be times where you dish out a few beats to other players, it is part of the game and it may contribute to a big win for you. Very few players have ever won a tournament and never got lucky, I would hazard a guess this has never happened in all of pokers history! So the next time lady luck deals you a bad card, smile to yourself that this keeps the weaker players participating and when it requires skill to decide the winner of a hand, there will only be one winner – you.