Page 20 - September 2003 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
What Are Bad Beats and How You Can
Avoid Them by Andrew N.S. Glazer
If you’ve spent any time at all around Southern California card games, you’ve heard players talking about “bad beats,” which are hands they lost when leading by a wide margin.
lucky against you, because they get into positions where they can get lucky much more often.
The single best way to avoid bad beats, then, is to always play against great players. They won’t draw out on you. For obvious reasons, that’s also the single best way to lose a lot of money.
Bad beats still bother us when they happen, though, so you can do a couple of things to minimize the damage. First, if you really have an excellent hand, don’t get too tricky and check so you can collect more money. If you invite enough players into the hand, someone may catch up.
Perhaps the best thing you can do about bad beats is not to let them destroy your emotional control and put you on tilt. If you suffer a bad beat, try—I do not say this is easy, but try—to recognize that bad beats are part of a long-term process. Most of the time weak players donate extra chips to your pots. Occasionally a bad player will get lucky. Be thankful. If you didn’t have bad players in there chasing you, you’d be losing, quickly and often.
Andrew N.S. Glazer is the poker tournament editor for Card Player magazine, and is widely considered the world’s foremost poker tournament reporter. He writes a gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, and has authored Casino Gambling the Smart Way, which is available in bookstores or at his web site, www.casinoselfdefense.com. His new book with Phil Hellmuth is tentatively titled Practical Tournament Poker: A Guide to Learning Tournament Poker Skills Through Analyzing Actual Plays of the World’s Best Players.
Although you could probably nd people who would de ne a bad beat differently, I consider a bad beat to occur anytime you get most of the money into a pot when you have the best hand and then someone catches an unlikely and unlucky (for you) card to beat you.
For example, suppose you’re playing seven-card stud, and start out with (Q-Q) Q (trips, which in stud is usually called being “rolled up”). You play it a little passively at rst, so you don’t lose all your customers, and then, even though you haven’t improved, the big bets start ying on fth street, and still more y in on sixth street. A huge pot develops, and you wind up losing when your trips never improve and someone else wins with (K-10) J-8-K-4 (K).
That’s a “bad beat,” because not only did your opponent put in a lot of money when his hand was inferior to yours; there were only two cards in the deck that could save him on the river—the two kings, and he hit one of them.
Now, as far as bad beats go, I have some good news, and some bad news, and confusingly enough, it’s the same news: If you are a good player, you will suffer many more bad beats than your opponents do.
It’s not because there is a mysterious Force in the universe that favor bad players. It’s much simpler. A good player gets his money in when he has the best of it—when he is leading. When he has an inferior hand, the good player will get out (unless the pot is so big that he is being offered good odds to draw to a hand), and so won’t hang around long enough to put a bad beat on someone else. His cards will already be in the muck.
The weak player, on the other hand, will be hanging around, hoping that his miracle card will hit. Weak players frequently put their money in with the worst of it.
What this means is that if you are playing well, you will very rarely get lucky against your opponents on the river, because you won’t be in there on a wing and a prayer. Your opponents will fairly often get
Page 20 September 2003
Column: The Poker Pundit