There was a post earlier this weak about how to avoid Bad Beats. Of course the answer is you really can't. Sometimes you make all the right moves and still get the short end, but I think I've finally come to grips with my own weakness in situations where i'm ahead but end up losing based on some bad play.

I'm at the final table of a 7.5k tourney in about 3rd or 4th place with slightly more than 100k in chips.

On the BB I find myself with TT. One of the shorter stacks (about 40k) adds about 6k raise (2x) to make it about a 6k call for me. Now normally, I love a decent pocket pair vs. a short stack heads up, as for the most part you're facing an Ace and a lot of times a relatively weak Ace.

Here's where it went wrong for me. At that point I'm pretty sure i'm ahead and decide to push him all in. The result of the hand was him holding AK and hitting a K on the river.

Now to my point here, and this is probably anything but an original thought, but at some point in a tournament we find ourselves committing to a hand for whatever reason. Looking back, the proper play here would have been to flat call the bet here on BB and pushing all in on the flop if there's no Ace....

Even on this hand the flop did bring a Q, but if I had pushed all in after a flat call there's a better chance for me to win that hand. He might just call hoping to catch an ace or king, but at least I would have had put him in the spot to make that decision.

So I guess where i'm at in my evolution is to try this out. If I find myself thinking I am in a strong position before the flop make the call vs. the all-in and make a move after...

I dont know, any thoughts or responses would be appreciated... just trying to evolve.

i dont know, i figure it was a decent move, if i have a decent pair like that and have alot of chips where it wont hurt me that bad to put them in on a race i'll take the race all day "only on UB though" other sites i havent played enough to figure out good strategy. because even if you pushed him on the flop w/ low cards, he is short stacked and he would have called or pushed all in on the flop anyway, people cannot fold AK just as they cant fold AA, KK is sometimes folded only if an Ace hits flop.

i think that was unavoidable myself, you woulda lost either way, i like your play because lets say you call and the flop his Q, J, 8 or something, and he moves in on you, you have to fold those 10's when you had the best hand still.

I can think of two ways to avoid bad beats completely. (1) don't play! (2) only play bad hands so you can deliver the bad beats instead. It seems to me that good players will generally get their money in with the best of it, but we can't always flop the complete nuts, so anyone staying with us is going to be behind, sometimes way behind. And sometimes they're going to win. Or deliver a bad beat. Or suck out. Call it what you will, if you're the 98% favourite then over the long run you'll lose 2% of the time. So the better you are, the more you're going to lose with bad beats. It goes with the territory, I'm afraid. Isn't it strange how we remember the hands we lost but "should" have won and the hands we folded that would have won?