Have you ever pushed all in before the flop with aces and had some guy call you with Q 9 off and end up with a full house? Ever have an opponent call off all his chips after the turn on a gut straight draw and hit it on the river? Well guess what….I have too. Stuff like that happens to me almost every day, and sometimes, particularly on days when it’s happened a lot, I just want to hop in my car and go find the guy who did it and strangle him.

It’s easy to get angry over bad beats—it happens to all of us. But this anger is something we should be able to control so that it doesn’t affect our actions, at or away from the table.

The explosion of online poker, in my opinion, has largely increased the number of instances of poker players saying things like, “What are you thinking? Do you know how bad of a call that was?” to their opponents. One explanation for this is that we don’t see our online opponents as real people. I doubt that most people who regularly call opponents names such as “moron” or “idiot” online would dare to say such slander to a person’s face. They might get upset or annoyed about a bad beat, but they would be much more careful about how they responded to it.

We say these things because we’re angry we lost, but do we really want our opponents to fold these hands? Occasionally we do want them to fold their draws, but most of the time we just want the best hand to hold up. Don’t be angry at your opponent for making a bad call, because the only thing that hurt you was him getting lucky, not his horrible call. If your opponents only made good calls, you would be the one needing to get lucky.

Beyond that, when you criticize another player’s play at the table, you alert the rest of the table that you may be tilting a bit, in which case they may try to take further advantage of you. They may try to trap you, thinking that you’re going to make an effort to quickly regain the chips you just lost. Generally it’s better for the rest of the table not to have any information about how you are feeling or what you’re thinking at the table, and this is just another reason to keep your feelings about your opponents’ play to yourself.

Think twice about berating your opponents—it’s rude, it’s unnecessary, and worst of all, it can be harmful to your winning potential.