Poker Articles

I've been playing poker for around one and a half years now. I have the blessing, that after paying the "learning money", I'm now a solid winner, and I'm planning a serious future in poker. One thing, however, that keeps me from becoming even better is bad beats, tilting, and anything related.

Now 99% of poker players would say they hate listening to bad beat stories, but like to tell them, just to get out of their system. Still, after we calm down, we realize how stupid that is, and its all part of the game, it happens the other way around etc.

But what I realized recently, that, specifically in tournament, how much bad beats, or swings can change. I was playing in a Stars 5$ cubed tourney, where i marched into the money easily, with almost twice the avarage stack, and managed to maintain about 1,5 times the average, when we got down to about 60 players. As the money jumps get more and more serious in that period, I started looking my opponents stats on OPR. There were only a few great players left, with a bunch of fishes still left. I felt comfortable, but bluffed away half my stack when a guy made a herocall/fishcall, and then showed lightly on a flop with a NFD/overcard, to see my dreams go away on a coinflip.

Now I played bad in the latter stages, and I only blamed myself, but when I went back to OPR the next day, to check the results, I saw that one of the biggest fishes won the tourney. Before the event, the guy was a $5000 loser in 1,5 years playing a $12 average buy-in. I have no way of knowing how bad he should have played to get there. And then, he donks in $6000 in one day, that turns things around, and makes him a winner. Is that right? I doubt it. Did he deserve it? Definietly not.

I managed to win $1000 in about 6 months, with blood and sweat, grinding and all-night plays, without having a bigger than $215 score. I can get over A8 beating AA, or 2 pair making a boat on the river against my straight...those are not bad beats.

A Bad beat is when you see a fish walking away with your dream...