Bad Beats: What Do They Cause?

I feel your pain. You're at a poker holdem table, with a pair of aces in the hole. You FLOP an ace, so you figure you're in excellent shape. Somebody else at the table has drawn a two and a four. A five comes out on the flop alongside your ace, then it's the three and the six on the river and Fifth Street respectively, and all of a sudden you're losing to the straight.

There goes you money.

It can get worse after that.

Suffering a "bad beat" can have devastating residual effects. You know that there is no way in the world you should have lost, for one thing. So you are angry beyond measure. You feel as if you are at the mercy of the poker gods, who are undoubtedly against you. To top it off, the player who beat you is probably ecstatic, and showing it. That would piss anybody off.

It's like having the air sucked out of you, and beyond that, it represents a significant swing in your bankroll. If you had $200 invested in a pot, for example, and there is five times that in the middle, you have a negative swing of $1200. There is no underestimating the potential psychological effects of something like this. Experiencing a bad beat can rattle you to an extent that you are still thinking about it many hands, or many hours, down the road. That invariably affects your play.

You're not a freak. It's human nature. But is there anything you can do about it? The answer is "yes." And we're going to explore that in our next "bad beat" installment.