No matter whether you’re a mid-stakes $3/$6 regular or grinding bumping into fish at the micro-stakes cash games, you’re always going to run into a few bad beats. It’s impossible to escape from it. Poker is a game rich in luck and built around pot-odds and variance. When you stack off with KK vs AJ pre-flop, you might think that you’re far ahead, but the truth is – you’re going to lose this hand every 1/3 times.
The majority of failed poker players fail because they can’t tolerate variance or come back from losing months. Mentality and psychology has a lot to play in dealing with bad beats, and I think in this case experience can actually sometimes be a good thing. I’m already aware of one of my friends who has successfully grinded over $100,000 per year in the $3/$6 6-max cash games, yet is started to feel pressure and quitting syndrome from a bad month.
Particularly in Heads Up games there can be a hell of a lot of variance. You can get sucked out on the river far too easily, and even against the weakest and most novice opponents you need the volume to turn stable profit. We’ve all been there when we shoved on the flop as an 90% favourite only to be sucked out on the river with a set or a completed gut shot straight draw. Look at Tom Dwan as an example. At 22 years old, Tom “Durrrr” Dwan has suffered downswings of sky high proportions from his favourite $500/$1,000 nosebleed PLO games at Full Tilt Poker. Last month (September), Dwan was down $750,000 – and that could have been significantly worse were it not for his incredible $1.5 million profits on the last Sunday that month. You’re talking about an online pro who regularly suffers downswings of up to $4 million at a time, and yet he still crawls his way back and becomes worshipped in the poker communities. Within just a week inside October, Dwan is now back up over $1.5 million from grinding in high stakes PLO games against Norwegian Paddy Power pro “Ziigmund”.
How to Deal with Bad Beats
When you start to lose upwards of 20% of your poker bankroll things can get very blurry and frustrating. Most players who fail to cope with the stress end up becoming “tilted”. This can lead to some awful decisions, especially in no limit holdem games, such as calling a 4bet shove with mid-pocket pairs, where you can end up losing $200 or $300 worth of buy-ins in a flash.
The best way to deal with a stream of bad beats is to stop playing immediately. Find something better to do and give yourself some time away from the computer and online poker lobbies. The human body is fragile and prone to emotive reactions and chemical in balances. It’s pretty much a fact that is you are stressed and have a heady downswing on your shoulders, than you won’t play as good or optimally as you should. Quitting the cash tables can give you a little more perspective, refresh yourself, and give you time to adjust. If you’re using live tracking software to analyse your game such as Holdem Manager, than you also analyse whether you made any mistakes in your game through the EV/Profit graph. This basically lets you view how “unlucky” or “lucky” you got for that month.
In terms of avoiding bad beats, the simple answer is to play as many games as possible. Whether this involves multi-tabling or spending more time each day playing, the extra volume in games helps you to eliminate the variance of luck and probability in the game. By multi-tabling, you’ll probably find that your daily or weekly variance actually increases, however in terms of monthly variance this will decrease since you can put in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of more hands.
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