This article was written by blackrain79.com contributor Fran Ferlan
So your Pocket Aces got cracked five times in a row, your opponents constantly hit their miracle cards on the river, and your top pair top kicker never seems to hold up.
Sound familiar yet?
Bad beats are the bane of every poker player.
Bad beats are the bane of every poker player.
When we talk about bad beats, we usually think about situations where your hand is a clear favorite to win, but ends up losing nonetheless, usually by getting outdrawn in an unlikely manner.
If you feel like your poker sessions are just a never ending stream of bad beats and getting screwed on the river, I wrote this one for you.
If you feel like your poker sessions are just a never ending stream of bad beats and getting screwed on the river, I wrote this one for you.
This article will explore why there are so many bad beats in poker, and what can you do (if anything) to prevent them.
With that in mind, here’s why you keep getting pummeled at the felt through no particular fault of your own.
1. Variance Plays a Huge Role in Your Short Term Poker Results
The biggest reason you’re suffering a lot of bad beats so often is variance. Variance is built into the very essence of the game of poker. Without it, poker would be an entirely different game.
There have been attempts to make versions of poker with less, or even zero variance, but they have been largely futile.
That’s because variance is what makes poker what it is, and frankly, it wouldn’t be fun without it. In statistics, variance measures how much the data points are spread from the average.
In poker terms, it indicates the difference between how much you expect to earn over a certain period (or a number of hands played) and how much you actually earn.
For example, suppose you bet with your friend on a coinflip 10 times. Heads, you win a dollar, tails, you lose a dollar.
If you’re flipping a coin 10 times, you expect to win five times out of 10, so that’s your expected value (or EV for short).
If you win more than five times, you experienced positive variance, and if you win less than five times, you experienced negative variance.
Now, suppose your friend believes he’s born under a lucky star, or thinks he can predict the outcome of the coinflip through divine providence, and is willing to give you a 2:1 on a coinflip (heads, you win two dollars, tails, you lose one dollar).
Supposing your friend isn’t trying to cheat, and is just gullible, naive, or just plain dumb, you’d be more than happy to take that bet, even if you don’t find yourself particularly lucky otherwise.
After 10 coinflips, your expected value is to win 5 bucks (you expect to win five times and earn ten bucks, and lose five times and lose 5 bucks).
But what if the coin lands tails 8 times? If that happens, it’s hardly a statistical anomaly.
So even though you were expected to win 5 bucks, you end up losing 4 bucks, and what’s worse, your idiot friend tells you this proves his clairvoyance. You obviously know better, but you’re infuriated nonetheless. That’s variance for you.
In a small enough sample size, anything can happen. But deriving any meaningful conclusions from a small sample size can be deceiving at best, and outright dangerous at worst.
In the above example, if you continued to flip the same coin a hundred, or a thousand times, your lucky friend would end up broke, and you’d take all his money, and no luck in the world would be able to save him.
This is an example of the so-called gambler’s ruin.
It’s a statistical concept that states that a gambler playing the game with negative expected value (like your hypothetical friend) will eventually go broke, regardless of his betting system, “strategy” and/or lucky charms.
The roulette is an example of a game with a negative expected value. Keep playing long enough, and you’ll lose all your money.
Poker, on the other hand, is a game that can be beaten over the long run, because you’re not competing against the house that has a statistical edge, you’re playing against other people.
While poker is a zero-sum game (i.e. somebody needs to lose for someone else to win), if you have a skill edge over your competition, you’ll do better than them over the long run.
And the skill edge comes from recognizing the spots that have a positive expected value (i.e. profitable bets), and avoiding spots where you’re likely to lose money over the long run.
For example, all things being equal, playing in position (i.e. being the last to act in the betting rounds) is more profitable than playing out of position. Playing pocket Aces obviously has a better EV than playing J2 offsuit.
Even though there are obviously statistically better and worse ways to play poker, in a small sample size (say, a given poker session), anything can (and will) happen. This includes a number of incredibly unlucky bad beats.
This brings us to another uncomfortable poker truth…
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2. Poker Edges Aren’t as Big as You Think
If you think you’re getting a disproportionate number of bad beats when playing poker, it might be worth taking a step back and defining what you believe to be a bad beat in the first place. A bad beat is a subjective term, after all.
If you think a bad beat is any situation where your hand is a favourite to win, but gets outdrawn, then I have some bad news for you. You are going to suffer A LOT of bad beats throughout your career.
That’s because edges in poker are not nearly as pronounced as you might hope for.
There are rare situations indeed where you or your opponent are drawing completely dead (i.e. spots where there’s no way for a weaker hand to outdraw a stronger hand).
If that were the case, poker wouldn’t be nearly as exciting, and it wouldn’t draw in nearly as many players as it does.
One of the allures of poker is the fact that everyone has a theoretical chance to win, regardless of their skill level, or lack thereof.
It’s often the case that two hands have about the same chances of winning, give or take a few percentage points.
This is what’s known as a coinflip, and these situations are far more common then the spots where you have your opponent completely crushed, no matter how good of a poker player you think you are.
For example, if you have pocket Jacks and your opponent has Ace-Queen suited, your hand equity is 54%.
You are a favourite to win the hand, but not by a huge margin. If you lose a hand in this example, you could hardly call it a bad beat.
But even the situations that could qualify as bad beats aren’t nearly as unbelievable as you might expect.
For example, say you are dealt A♥A♣, and your opponent calls.
The flop comes:
A♠9♣7♦
You bet, your opponent raises, you shove all in. Your opponent calls and flips over J♠8♠.
Your hand is an overwhelming favourite, and you’ve clearly played perfectly. Your chances of winning the hand are about 83%.
The only chance your opponent has is hitting a Ten to complete a straight or catch two spades to complete a flush, AND provided the board doesn’t pair and you complete a full house.
While unlikely, you will still lose 17 percent of the time, or almost 1 out of five times.
If you lose the hand in the previous example, it could constitute a bad beat, but as you can see, it’s hardly an unbelievable occurrence if it does happen.
A better definition of a bad beat is the situation where your hand is an overwhelming favourite to win, but ends up getting outdrawn in a shocking, unpredictable, and unlikely fashion.
These situations, while horrible, don’t happen nearly as often, and when they do, there’s not much to do about them anyway.
This is something that I discussed in much more detail in a recent YouTube video by the way:
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3. You’re Playing in Profitable Poker Games
Even though it might not look like it at first, getting bad beats in poker is actually a good thing. It might not make sense to celebrate bad beats, but that’s precisely what you should be doing.
You can only suffer a bad beat if you put your money in with a mathematical advantage, which is exactly what you should be doing when playing poker.
There’s not really much more to it, you put your money in, and you hope your hand holds out.
If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t bother you (easier said than done, of course), because you did your job and you played correctly.
The fact that your edge didn’t manifest in one particular hand, or a couple of hands, is meaningless. It’s all within the realm of possibility, so you’re bound to suffer through bad beats for your whole poker career. There’s no way around it.
But here’s the silver lining:
The more bad beats you suffer, the better. If you get a bad beat, it means you’re playing in profitable games. It means your opponents are putting money into the pot when they shouldn’t.
A world where there are no bad beats is a world where fish don’t play poker, and there’s no money to be made at the felt.
The more bad beats you get, the better your long-term results will be. Think of it this way: If you put your money in where you are an 80% favourite to win, you will win four out of five times on average.
If you wager 10 bucks a hundred times this way, you will make $800. If you do it a thousand times, you will make $8000 (give or take a few bucks due to statistical error).
The fact that you might lose ten bucks two, four, or even ten times in a row is meaningless, and it doesn’t matter in the long run.
If you’re playing in a game where you have a statistically significant edge, the only way to lose is to stop playing.
So the next time a clueless fish sucks out on you, be grateful. It means you’re playing in a profitable game.
It’s also easier to win your money back from a fish than from regulars that actually know what they’re doing. Remember, good players suffer bad beats, and the bad players inflict them.
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4. Maybe it’s Not a Bad Beat, But a Bad Play
At the end of the day, there’s not much you can do about bad beats but to try to take them in stride.
You can’t prevent them, predict them, or avoid them, and when you think about it, you shouldn’t. That’s because bad beats make poker profitable in the first place.
There’s no way of preventing getting outdrawn from time to time, because that’s just the nature of the game.
But preventing mistakes is something you can do, and it’s important to differentiate between variance (which you can’t control) from your mistakes (which you can).
It’s normal to attribute bad results to bad luck, and good results to your superior skills, but that way of thinking is not conducive to your development as a poker player.
For one, it’s very hard to differentiate between variance and superior skill over a small sample size, even to experienced poker players.
What’s more, being aware of your mistakes is hard to do. After all, if you were aware of the mistakes you were making, you wouldn’t be making them in the first place.
If you have a feeling you are getting an overwhelming amount of bad beats, it’s worth entertaining the idea you’re somehow contributing to your bad results. If that’s the case, at least you can do something about it.
For example, if your opponents always seem to crack your Aces, could it be that you’re not isolation-raising enough preflop and are getting involved in huge multiway pots?
If your opponents constantly hit their miracle backdoor flush draws, are you using the correct bet sizes to deter them from doing so?
Are you charging them a premium for their drawing hands, or are you letting them outdraw you cheaply? Are you slowplaying in situations when you shouldn’t be slowplaying?
These are some hard questions that perhaps you need to be asking yourself.
Advice on Bad Beats From a 10+ Year Professional Poker Player
Now with all of that said, I just want you to know that I feel your pain. Believe me I have been there.
If you are going through a particularly rough time right now at the poker tables, I hope my words below can be a little bit of a comfort for you.
As a 10+ year poker pro I have nearly quit this game so many times because of bad beats.
I have thought the entire game was rigged against me more times that I can recall. But what has always kept my head screwed on straight are my long term results.
When you finally start creating real positive long term results for yourself in this game, you will learn to handle the bad beats better.
I wish there was an easier way to say this, but winning at poker is what fixes this.
And knowing the right strategy is what will cause you to finally start winning at poker consistently.
You can never stop the bad beats from happening to you, but winning is the ultimate antidote, the ultimate "cure" to the problem of some lucky fish screwing you on the river again.
Because when you are literally laughing all the way to the bank year after year in this game, you learn to laugh these off these bad beats and not take your short term results so seriously.
So I know this sounds cliche and trite (and believe me, it is), but the answer to bad beats is to start crushing your poker games.
Learn the right strategy, apply it consistently at the poker tables and you will stop getting so upset next time that lucky fish hits a 2 outer on the river against you.
Winning fixes everything at the poker table.
Why You Get So Many Bad Beats (Final Thoughts)
Poker is not easy. I won't sugarcoat it.
80% of poker players don't win in the long run. And of the 20% who do win, a tiny, tiny fraction of those ever make real significant money in this game.
And the biggest reason why people don't get the results they want in poker?
The mental game. They go on tilt when they get a bunch of bad beats.
Unfortunately though, suffering bad beats is an integral part of the game of poker, and there’s really no way around them. The only way to stop bad beats is to stop playing poker altogether.
Since there’s no way to prevent them, a better approach would be to try to realize why bad beats happen in the first place and why you should actually be happy when they do.
Being happy about losing money does require some mental gymnastics, but it certainly beats going on an insane monkey tilt and losing even more money.
The first thing to do is define a bad beat: it is simply a situation where you lose the hand while being a clear favourite to win. In other words, a bad beat is losing the hand while having a mathematical advantage.
But since putting your money in with a mathematical advantage is what winning poker is all about, suffering a bad beat means you’ve played the hand correctly. The fact that your edge didn’t manifest in one particular hand is meaningless.
Over a long enough sample size, you’ll win far more money than you lose, so a few bad beats shouldn’t bother you.
If anything, it just means you’re playing in profitable games.
But if all this doesn’t comfort you at all, it might be you’re somewhat complicit in your own bad luck. If that’s the case, at least there’s something you can do about it.
At the end of the day, bad beats never stop. The sooner you make peace with it, the more money you’ll make when all is said and done.
If you want to learn the strategies that I have used as a 10+ year pro to consistently crush my poker games, grab a copy of my free poker cheat sheet.
Thank you for reading, I hope this one helped!
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This article was written by Fran Ferlan
Poker player, writer and coach
Specializing in live and online cash games
For coaching enquiries, contact Fran at fran.redline@gmail.com
Or get more info on coaching right here.
