Listening to them is a miserable experience so please, poker players everywhere, spare us yours!

What's a Bad Beat?

This blog will aim to write posts about poker to novices as well as advanced players.

I will walk a fine line in trying to educate the newbies without boring the experts. At the same time I will try to bring valuable insights to advanced players without totally flying over the casual readers' heads.

A bad beat is when you are a heavy favorite ( 60%, 88%, more ) in a hand when most of the money or chips went in the middle (pot). The bad beat occurs when the last 5, 2, or 1 cards favor your opponent(s) and you lose the pot.

Statistically and rationally, there is nothing special happening. The 40% or 12% were bound to happen. It just happened now. No big deal.

Psychologically though, it's a whole other story. One feels cheated by bad luck, the poker gods, injustice, or any other irrational causes one might want to cling to. Thus the need to share that experience with anybody willing (or being captive) to listen.

Yes, but ...

... every poker player loves telling their bad beat stories.

While it's hard to escape the poor schmuck when talking face to face it's easy to move on while reading such a story in a post.

If you don't want to be subjected to such a painful experience, I suggest you leave this page right now.

Final Warning! You Can Still Escape

Ha. I knew you'd stay.

This is about my last hand from yesterday's Steem Poker League tournament.

The Hand

Context

We were in the final table. Six players left out of 30 entrants. Only 3 players will receive some SBDs for their trouble.

There were 2 tiny stacks. I had the next bigger stack. Three players had more than double than me.

My stack was only 9 big blinds big which means that I needed to gamble hard because time was fleeting.

The Action

I found myself UTG (Under the Gun), the first position and look at AsTc. A very fine hand. In this situation it's an easy all in.

Another player called and he had one of the big stacks. This means that if he beats me, I will be eliminated from my first SPL tournament.

The Runout

Both players' cards are shown face up. He had Ad3d.

His call was perfectly all right. We both played the hand the way we were supposed to. Now it's up to fate.

The good news is that I have his hand dominated. In order to beat me, the community cards need to bring a 3 and no ten. He could also beat me by a few percent with the odd straight or flush.

I was feeling really good about this situation.

The Board

The ace changes nothing as we both have one, but the flop brought in a 3. :-(

The turn or the river needed to bring a 10. Unfortunately there were only 3 such cards out of 45 unknown cards.

It was not meant to be.