Monday, October 20, 2008

Embrace the bad beat

If you play enough poker, you will experience the bad beat. Your Aces or Kings will get beat by some low pair or worse suited connectors. You could let yourself get upset or be frustrated about it, or you could choose to not even recognize the bad beat.

I like to embrace them. I look for them to happen whether I am in the hand or not and when they do happen I smile and say, ouch. Phil Helmuth once said if it wasn't for luck I'd win every one. Well, there is luck involved the cards are going to be dealt and we have no control over it.

I amaze myself at how many times I will predict the next card for the bad beat to be completed and be correct. Again, I just smile. Sometimes I will ask my table mates who didn't see that coming? and then laugh, LOL.

I think this is an important part, maybe the most important part of the game. IF we embrace it, we will not be upset when it happens, thus, no tilting, no making bad decisions because we are still mad about that other hand we should have won, but didn't.

If our opponents never sucked out on us, then it would be unrealistic for us to ever think that we will suck out on someone else, and yet, we do, and we really enjoy those ones. By keeping an even keel we will not wear ourselves down by expending needless energy in the form of getting upset and yelling and screaming at our monitors.

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