Bad hands and Bad Beats

Any poker player can tell you about the bad hands they have played and the bad beats they have taken. I have won a lot of money over the years playing poker, but if you ask me to talk about the hands I remember, about 99% of them are going to be hands that I lost either by a bad beat or by a playing mistake that I made.

I hear people complain about bad beats all the time. Complaining about a bad beat gets you no where. It happens to every player, and for the most part every player has bad beat someone else. An example is Terry just played in the WSOP main event. His final hand, he had AA and got called by QQ and the guy spiked a Q. That is a bad beat. To get to that level, he was all in with AJ against AQ and he spiked a J to stay alive. That is also a bad beat. The point is Terry was upset about the hand, but he didnt complain about it. He took it, like a real poker player does, and he moves on. Yes, he will always think about that hand, but complaining about a bad beat will get you no where and he knows that.

There are ways to avoid bad beats, but at the end of the day, they are always going to happen, and you just have to not only get lucky to avoid them, but you have to play smart. I am not saying that I do not dwell on bad beats, but you cant sit and complain and get mad at someone for calling. Poker is a game that can be played many different ways with many different strategies, and you should never yell or criticize a call someone makes or a play someone makes just because you think they did it wrong.

2 weeks ago up in Elkridge playing a 1/2 game, there was a raise to $7 pre-flop. When it got to me on the button, there had been 4 callers already and I had 77, and I decided just to call. A raise there would probably get re-raised by a monster, and if I smooth call and hit my set I am golden and can win a huge pot. Flop comes out Q74. Guy makes a cbet for 15, it gets raised to 25, I go all in. This is exactly what I want. I know middle set is good, if someone had QQ, they would have raised more pre-flop. I push all in and the guy calls, he shows Q7. I have him dominated, he is down to two outs( only the other 2 queens in the deck will give him a better hand them me). Of course, a Q comes on the river. I can't complain( other guys at the table said he should have never been in the hand with Q7). I said nothing, I was pissed, and we joked about how lucky he got, but all you can do is move on to the next hand.

The point of all of that is that every table I sit at and anytime I am somewhere and people start talking about poker, all you hear are stories of bad beats and what if's and how some loser called you with a crap hand and bad beat you etc. Real poker players know that is part of the game and when you do nothing about complain about bad beats and/or you just criticize every move that someone else makes, you are giving yourself away as someone who truly doesnt get the game of poker.