The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In the $2 million, winner-take-all Tournament of Champions, Johnny Chan and Phil Hellmuth were all-in before the flop, Hellmuth holding a pair of tens, Chan a pair of kings. The flop came 2-2-A, the turn a jack, and now Hellmuth had two cards left in the deck to stay live.
Hellmuth appeared tortured as the dealer prepared to flip over the river card. And that card was the ten of diamonds.
"What a card!" Hellmuth cried, clapping his hands with joy. Chan was obviously crushed, but he regrouped and played on valiantly until Hellmuth finally knocked him out with a pocket pair of sixes.
Bad beat stories are like childhood scars, everybody has a few. Visit any card club and you're bound to hear countless tales of woe, times when a player was primed to win the tourney or take down the monster pot, but the Poker Hand of Fate came crushing down to destroy the dream.
I like to classify bad beats in three simple categories:
The good: Someone always gets hurt, so maybe there are no good beats. But when I lay a bad beat on an opponent, I somehow feel I've earned it, a reward for all the times the right play turned out wrong, And I can't help but feel good about it.
The bad: You go all-in pre-flop with A-K suited, and your opponent turns over a weak A-6 off-suit. Or your pocket kings are up against 9-9. You are better than a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 favorite, respectively. Then the flop hits his hand, not yours, and you lose a big pot. He smiles smugly and shrugs, as if he were in control all along.
The ugly: When the River of Death brings a miracle card to snatch away certain victory, you have suffered an ugly beat or worse, two miracle cards, the dreaded runner-runner-hit, back-to-back to kill your hand.
Can we avoid bad beats? Frankly, no, unless we give up poker, or never get our money in with the best hand. We're talking about a deck of playing cards, and just about anything can pop out at any given time.
More important is how we react to the tough loss. To loosely quote former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get hit. A bad beat is tantamount to a crushing overhand right to the button of the nose, and it can knock you right off your game.
What do you do? I try to retrace my steps. Should I have been in the hand in the first place? Did I play it correctly? Would I do anything differently next time?
If I'm satisfied that I made no mistakes, I remind myself that I'm playing well and just got unlucky. As a tournament player, I reevaluate my position and take stock of where I'm at now, not where I was a few minutes ago.
Sometimes, of course, there is nothing to do but say, "Nice hand," get up from the table and go home.
Once, with 4 tables remaining in a 20-table club tournament, I made a minimum raise under the gun with a pair of red tens. I had a mountain of chips and chose not to jeopardize too many of them in poor position.
I got one caller, a fairly wild player whose mountain was roughly equal to mine. The flop came A-10-3 rainbow, and my heart leaped as I realized I had a stranglehold on the hand with my set of tens.
Naturally, I checked to the wild player, hoping to coax a bet. He then said the magic words, "All-in."
I beat him into the pot with my call, and when I rolled over my pocket tens, his face nearly hit the felt. Devastated, he turned over the A-J of spades. With only one spade on the board, my third ten, he now had exactly a 6.8% chance of winning the hand. I was busy estimating his chip count when the dealer turned over the five of spades.
No, not runner-runner spades at this point in the tournament, not against this crazy opponent, with all my chips in the middle!
Bang! The deuce of spades hit the river like a sledgehammer, and all I could do was laugh. That or cry, but there is no crying in poker. I told him "nice hand" and stood up from the table. He had me slightly out-chipped, so all I had left was a good bad beat story.
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