Posted by Dr Fro 11:22 AM

If you tried to guess how well I do in poker based on this blog, you'd guess that I do pretty well. This is because I post typically about the winnings and not the losings. There are a few reasons for this (not one of which is an attempt to pretend I am better than I am), one of which is our "no bad beat story" policy. Nobody wants to read a blog full of hand histories and bad beats.

I think that it is ok to tell a bad beat story if there is a point (beyond the "poor me" point).

On Sunday, I bought into a NLHE game. I got 99 preflop and called a moderate raise in a multiway pot. The flop was 982. A bet came from the first raiser, and I put him on, at best, an overpair. I re-raised all-in and only he called. I had top set vs KK. So he had 2 outs twice and was worse than an 11:1 underdog. He caught a King on the river.

Here is my point:

Most bad beat stories lead me to believe that somebody had it coming to them. They could have played the hand differently to avoid the bad beat. In the situation above, I put my opponent on the right hand. There is absolutely no better way to play that hand than exactly what I did, given the circumstances. But could I change the circumstances? The answer is yes.

I was short-stacked and my all-in raise was not enough to scare off my opponent. Had I a monster stack relative to the pot, I could have possibly run him off. I mean, if you have an overpair and I come at you with an all-in bet that is a mutiple of the pot, wouldn't you consider running away? Sure, maybe you call and I lose more, but I think that more often than not, there is more EV in this situation if I have a bigger stack.

So, I still get back to my fundamental belief that many bad beats are the fault of the beatee. In B&M games, I always buy in for the max stack and re-load whenever I can. Online, I usually buy in for cheap. And guess what? My B&M results are quite positive over the past few years and my online results are quite negative. Coincidence? I think not.

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