The Truth About Bad Beats

Tuesday, August 16th., 2005 (By the PokerStrategyKing)

Bad beats. We all know about them. We’ve had them happen to us and we’ve done it to others. As long as poker has existed, so have bad beats. I’m sure more than a handful of them led to shootouts in the old West. They’re just that maddening. So today, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about them. No, not specific bad beat stories. We all hate those, but bad beats in general.

There are two types of bad beats:

#1. When you have a monster hand but lose to a bigger monster hand.

For example, let's say you're holding pocket Aces and the flop hits A-10-10 and you’ve flopped a full house. You go all in and your opponent calls. You think you’ve got the best hand but you don’t as your opponent flips over pocket 10’s for quads.

#2. When you have the best hand and your opponent has the worst hand but your opponent gets lucky and sucks out on you.

For example, let's say you have pocket Aces and go all-in. Your opponent calls with pocket three's. The flop hits 2-4-5, the turn card is a 6, giving your opponent the straight and causing you to lose the hand and maybe go broke.

While neither bad beat is appealing, the second one is by far much worse and it can really upset you. You may go on tilt as a result and the memory of this loss lingers with you and you tell people about it over and over again.

There is something interesting about bad beats. They seem to happen more online than at your brick and mortar game. If you play both online and offline poker, I'm sure you agree with this statement. Why is this so? Well, many people like to believe that online poker is rigged. People also like to reason that since more hands are played per hour online, the frequency of bad beats increases. Which is correct? Well, in my opinion, neither of them is true.

For starters, I really do not believe online poker is rigged. Why would these companies do that? They make their money off of rakes and tournament entry fees. They’re making a boatload of money off this, do you really think they need to take your bankroll and risk litigation? Of course not. I do agree that there are more hands per hour in online poker than offline poker. But I don't think that's a good enough reason for the greater bad beat frequency. The fact that you play more hands just doesn’t explain the higher percentages of bad beats. I think the reason for more bad beats is simply because playing online just causes people to play differently than they do in person. A larger portion of online players play in a loose-aggressive style than in real life. In other words, they play like maniacs. They play hands they shouldn't play, make otherwise unprofitable calls chasing cards and bet too aggressively most of the time.

Why does this happen? Because online poker isn't as "real" as a live game, that’s why. The money isn’t real, its all on a digital screen, the cards, the other players, they are all animations. Because of these reasons, to many people, it feels like a video game without the same repercussions. For example, many people call exorbitant bets on flush draws online but when faced with the same situation in live play, they see the chips in front of them and don’t make that same silly call for all of their “real money”. Do you see where I’m going with this? If you take away this element of chasing from an online game and you wouldn’t see people hit their 2 outers. Plus, it’s a lot more difficult having to go to an ATM to re-buy than it is depositing another buy in online isn’t it?

The fact that players are loose-aggressive is what leads to the situations where bad beats happen because players bet their draws more or call large bets with draws or marginal hands, more players are involved in every pot and the pots tend to be bigger. The big pots inevitably lead to bad beats. When you combine that with the fact that you see more hands per hour, it inevitably leads to seeing a lot more "crazy" hands and bad beats than
in regular poker.

So what do you do about this? Bad beats will happen, its just the nature of the game, regardless of whether you’re playing good or bad poker. By knowing that you’re opponents are hyper-aggressive, you can use this to your advantage. You can combat this by playing tight aggressive even more so than you would in real life. We all know that tight-aggressive is the most effective way to play poker. You play tight with your hand selection and loose with your betting style. It’s that simple. With online poker, there are more players in every hand so you must play even tighter with your hand selection.

You're bound to run into players who are chasing or who just caught an extremely lucky flop so when you do get involved with a hand, you must be overly aggressive. The pot size will be bigger, so you can't go losing many hands or else you'll be out of the game in a hurry. You must be able to risk all of your chips in order to win. To do this, you need to force out all but one or two of your opponents and have the odds stacked in your favor.
When you win lots of big pots, you become chip leader and can take control over a poker table. Let’s look at an example. Let's say for instance you get pocket Aces. One opponent has kings, one was 10-9 suited and one has Q-10 offsuit. In a one on one against any of these, your odds of winning would be over 80%. However, if all three stick around, your odds drop to under 60%. See my point? So when you get your pocket rockets, you need to force out all but one caller and you must do this aggressively. If you go all-in and one of those players makes a call, you'll win four out of five times. So if you get five big hands a game, you only lose once. You will be able to absorb that one loss because of the other 4 you’ve won.

Until next time, may the chips fall your way.

(For more poker strategy and tips, please visit the PokerStrategyKing’s website at www.pokerstrategyking.com )

 

---