Dealing with bad beats in poker is hard and there are no easy answers. It is probably the most difficult part of this game in fact. You outwit your opponent and then get rewarded by shipping your stack to them. It is absurd, ridiculous and almost feels downright insulting. Tilt is bad for the player involved, he is not playing good poker and not making informed decisions, all tilt will do is turn a bad beat, into an even worse beat. If you suffer a bad beat and find yourself fuming and doing things you normally wouldn’t do then click the sit out button and walk away from the computer for 5 minutes, go make a. Every poker player experiences very bad runs and bad beats, so just try your best to play through it until you are back on the up. You never know, the biggest upswing of your life might be just around the corner Related articles. Objectivity In Poker; Go back to the awesome Texas Hold'em Strategy. If you associate losing with playing bad, you are committing a mistake, because almost everyone loses in poker at times due to bad beats or bad run of cards. So, try to learn the game and improve your skills. In case you lose a few times, take it positively. Go with a positive attitude into the next game and give your best to make money. Good Question Actually. Cant explain within quora. I have added a detailed article here. You can check it out if you have some time:) When I first started playing online poker I remember whenever I got it all-in ahead and someone would suck out o.

One of the tougher things that we will have to go through as poker players is dealing with a downswing that lasts. In many cases, the issue is not just about the money we lose. It’s about the loss of future profitability at the tables. It’s about the loss of all the money we could have made, if we were still a winning player.

A huge dark cloud can begin to appear over our future. Are we really still a winning player or are we just deceiving ourselves? Has poker finally got to the stage where it’s a rake trap and essentially unbeatable? What will we do if it turns out that we can no longer make money at the tables?

Self Propogating

An important concept to understand is the idea that downswings are “self propagating”. This is the same as saying that they can have a “downward spiral effect”.

The idea is that assuming we are initially winning players, we are playing a good game, and our downswing is caused purely by variance. That causes us to maybe get a little tilted, or a little doubtful about our abilities. The negative impact on our mindset causes us to play slightly worse than usual. The swing continues as a result. Perhaps we would have even been out of the swing by now, but since we allowed it to affect our mindset, it is turning into a much bigger swing than it needed to be. We may reach the stage where we are logging on to our poker client expecting to lose.

While it’s important to acknowledge that our state of mind cannot have any bearing on the cards we are dealt, thinking that we will lose can cause it to become a reality. We might face a decision where folding is correct but we decide to shove thinking “It doesn’t really matter what I do. I’m destined to lose anyway, so what value is there in thinking deeply about the correct decision?”

Downswings are Useful

Out of all of the terms we might use to describe a downswing, useful is probably the last thing that comes to mind. It is important as poker players to develop a relationship with failure that is healthy and allows us to grow. The truth is that many players will forget to work on their game when they are running good. It’s common to stop questioning why we make certain plays and whether they have the highest expectation. Losing a decent chunk of money can present us with a unique opportunity to grow. Rather than allow a downswing to result in negative emotions, it should spur us to work even harder on our game. By the time we navigate our way out of the swing we’ll be a much better player for it.

The most successful companies in today’s world are in part successful because they understand the importance of this. A commonly cited quote by businessman Thomas J. Watson, chairman and CEO of IBM -

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? Its quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all….you can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far side.

Causes of a Downswing

We mustn’t assume for a minute that all downswings are caused by a failure in our application of poker strategy at the tables. An important idea when facing a downswing is to break down our losses into three categories.

Variance
Bad Play
Bad Mindset

It makes sense to try and assign a probability to each of these factors. For example “I think my swing was cause 60% by variance, 30% by mindset, and 10% by strategic adjustments that I need to make in general.

1. Variance – Assuming we are playing well and have a great mindset, then there is nothing that we can do about negative variance. Rather than attempting to control the variance which is somewhat impossible, our approach should be to make peace with the fact that poker is a game that entails huge variance.

Most of the reasons why players struggle to cope with downswings is a result of unrealistic expectations about the game. If we’ve ever played around with a variance simulator we’ll know that the potential swings we might go on even as a winning player are huge. So when that swing happens, we should typically accept it as part of the game. Most players underestimate variance and will assume that they are cursed, or the site is rigged, or that they must be doing something terribly wrong.

If we are expecting swings as large as 20bi then we won’t necessarily be as disturbed when it finally happens. Education is the key to helping us regulate our mental state. When we find ourselves in a swing caused primarily by variance we have no choice but to ride it out, maybe even moving down stakes if our bankroll dictates.

There are other pieces of logic we must keep in mind to help us retain our sanity. For example, we should know that one of the primary reasons why poker is a profitable endeavor is because of the variance. There is not a good chance that recreational players would keep hitting the tables to donate their money if they didn’t occasionally go on lucky streaks where they win!

2. Bad Play – The truth is that many downswings involve some level of bad play. It’s not always the case, but as we mentioned earlier, running bad can have a downward spiral effect. So even if we are making good plays initially, the pressure our downswing exerts on us may cause us to make some questionable plays. Downswings themselves are unavoidable, but sometimes not prolonging our downswing as a result of bad play is something that we actually have control over.

In this case, we are not talking about mental issues as such, but specific strategic errors. We need to retrace our recent database looking for problems in our strategic thinking. It may be that we are swinging down because a certain situation where we make a bad play has been cropping up more frequently than usual and hence having a larger impact on our overall results than it does normally.

Poker How To Deal With Bad Beats Bad

The best thing we can do in any downswing situation is to assume that it is a result of our bad play and not a result of variance until proven otherwise.

It’s true that many swings are caused primarily by variance but we want to be careful of using variance as an excuse. There are some players out there who are consistent losing players, but rather than make the needed strategic adjustments to their game, they blame variance and assume things will take a turn for the better in the future.

If we are struggling to isolate specific strategic areas in our game then it might be a good idea to enlist some outside help. Strategy videos,poker books,forum posts, and hiring a coach are a