Handling Beats

Don't miss one article! Subscribe to the Full Feed RSS or get NPA in your inbox.

Beats are part of poker. There’s no way around it. No matter how well you play, you will take plenty of beats. You can’t prevent them. But how you react to them matters. It’s easy to react in a negative way that will cost you money on future hands. In this article I’ll talk about two different kinds of beats you can take and offer tips for handling them in a positive way.

The “Ahead In A Big Pot” Beat

You open for $25 in a loose $2-$5 game with K K . Four players call, and everyone has about $500 remaining. The flop comes K T 2 . Everyone checks to you, and you bet $100. The loose small blind calls, and then the aggressive young player in the big blind moves all-in for $400 more. You call, and the small blind calls. There’s a pause as the dealer makes the pot right. Then he deals the J on the turn. The big blind player slams his hand face-up on the table: A Q . The river is the 4 , and the big blind player screams, “Ship it!” and hi-fives his friend. How should you handle this beat?

Know the percentages. Obviously getting it all-in with top set on the flop is the best you could play the hand. After that, the percentages take over. Even assuming the big blind player had no chance to win whatsoever, top set is only a 67-33 favorite on the flop. Getting 2-to-1 advantages will make you rich over the long run, but on any given hand you have a good chance to get beaten. It’s easy to view losing a hand like this one as an injustice. The pot was enormous, you played the hand perfectly, and you had by far the best chance to win. But it’s no injustice. You’re supposed to lose 33 percent of the time.

Bring a lot of buyins. Not only are you supposed to lose this pot 33 percent of the time, you are also occasionally supposed to have brutal sessions where you lose three or four big pots like this one. In fact, every once in a while you are supposed to have a string of two or three brutal sessions in a row. Such a run could leave you down 10 to 15 buyins with your confidence in the gutter. If you play enough poker, it will happen to you, and therefore you have a responsibility to prepare for it.

In my experience the best way to prepare for a terrible run is to have plenty of buyins in reserve. Don’t bring three buyins with you to the cardroom, bring six or eight. Don’t play on a five buyin bankroll. Try to have thirty or fifty buyins instead. Say you have $5,000 to play poker with. You will feel absolutely terrible if you are playing $5-$10 and you lose a $3,000 pot with top set. If you are playing $1-$2 and lose a $600 pot, it won’t sting nearly as badly, especially if you have four or five more buyins with you. In other words, I think playing on a short bankroll not only increases your risk of going broke, but it also makes you tilt harder and causes you to play less than your best.

 Print :: Trackback :: Respond ::