You might be at the peak of your game and running great, until a horrendous suck-out leaves you feeling like you want to break something. The competitive sporting nature of any game is often founded on the assumption that if you are the top player, and if you play a perfect match you are guaranteed a win. A lot of us think of ourselves as the optimal player at the table, and we certainly feel superior to the jester that called your all-in bet with one card to go and hit his four outer, but all of that is actually dependent on a false premise.
Poker is not a competition in the conforming way and you are not always repaid for correct strategy. In fact, you can have a streak of tournament or cash game sessions where you would be hard pressed to find a single error on your part, and still be stuck.
True, bad beats are part of the game and we mostly know this, but the trick with this, is to turn a bad beat experience around and make it lucrative for you long-term. The truth of the matter is, most players take a long time to come to terms with bad beats. Of course bad beats pain everybody, even knowledgeable players, but if you look at bad beats from a mathematical view, you also must accept them as inconsequential to your profitable strategy.
As a result patient players, will literally shrug off a bad beat because they recognize they made a profitable play regardless, and the winner of the pot committed a poor EV play. They also figure that if players did not make negative EV plays, then this profitable game of poker would not survive. They understand that they need players at the table who make mistakes and suck out to win a pot.
Frequently, I am in poker tourneys and look at weak players who just collected a huge pot and think to myself, “great, he will give it away”. You too should want weak players to have money or stacks at the table.
Good players who have come to terms with bad beats have an inherent numbness towards the final result of a hand, and are more interested in how their adversaries actually played the hand, and what was the thinking behind their strategy – if they had one. Profitable players will take notes of the situation, and their opponents, and simply hold for an opportunity to win their money back and more.
