Poker & Life: Bad Beats

For those of you who aren't poker players, I'll define a "bad beat."  A bad beat is when you do everything the right way but you get unlucky and lose anyway.  Like when there are only two cards left in the deck that can beat you, and one of them gets dealt.

This kind of thing happens pretty regularly.  After all, even if there's only a 1% chance of you losing in this situation, that's still going to happen 1 in every 100 times you're in this situation.  And in poker, when you're playing several hundred hands each time you play, every situation is going to come around eventually.

A lot of players get really mad about the bad beats.  Most of them blame their opponents for being so stupid as to get lucky and beat them.  I was listening to a series about poker and they were talking about bad beats and I realized that this isn't one of the problems I suffer from.  Yes, I don't like losing when I was ahead.  Heck, I don't like losing when I'm behind either.  Yes, I dislike having put so much money into something *and being right to do so* and then losing it all over something unlikely.  The common reaction seems to be "That's not fair!"  But I realized that isn't my reaction.  And I've been trying to figure out why.

One of the professionals (Phil Gordon, maybe?) said that most of his losses are to bad beats.  His reasoning is that it's only a bad beat if you started out ahead and then lost to bad luck.  And since he is usually only in a hand when he's ahead, it makes sense that when he loses it's usually because of a bad beat.  If he were in there with bad hands more often, he'd be losing a lot more often in "normal" ways, rather than mostly to bad luck.  That makes perfect sense to me.  So he simply accepts that he can't win every hand, and a lot of the ones he loses will be because he got unlucky.

I think that the people who think it isn't fair are the ones who don't really understand that the same unlikely loss happens to absolutely everyone who plays. Every single player. It doesn't all happen at the same time, but it does happen to everyone. Isn't that the definition of fair?  I think that's why it doesn't bother me.  It's simply a part of the game that I accept as a recurring random loss.  Bummer when it happens, but totally predictible.  NOT as in "Well I should have *known* I'd lose - it was a big pot and I should just expect to lose those."  Rather as in "That's going to happen every x hands or so, and it's a shame it coincided with this nice pot this time."

What does this have to do with regular life?

Because regular life deals out some bad beats also.  Things happen that set us back when we were doing everything right.  Someone rear ends us, or the fridge breaks, or the cat gets sick and the vet bill is big, or we trip and break an arm, or something.  And those are the littler things.  Then there are the really bad ones: serious illness, natural disasters, death, unemployment, etc.  None of them are fair... and yet, statistically speaking they're each going to hit x percent of the population and it's a BIG population.  And, again, I'm not saying I'd be happy about any of the big ones, and I'm never happy about the small ones.  But the anger, the blinding rage, the bitterness, don't change it.  They don't make it go away.  You can't get a re-deal.  All you can do is accept that it was your misfortune to get the bad beat this time, and do your best to play it out from here.

I don't mean to trivialize anyone's misfortunes.  And this isn't written about anyone except myself.  But I think it's important to find ways to absorb life's sometimes crappy deals without spending all of your future replaying a bad beat and stoking your anger over it.

I'm usually good at that in poker.  I'm even good at it in life *most* of the time.  Periodically I find myself dwelling on a bad beat and getting worked up about it.  But I'm hoping that by writing this down and thinking it through I'll be better able to remember in the future that it's just a bad beat.  They happen to everyone.  I can't change the way it played out.  I can't go back and undo anything at all.  I can't even necessarily learn what to do differently in the future, since a bad beat by definition means you weren't wrong you were just unlucky.

In fact, the only thing you CAN do, is not allow the unproductive emotions caused by the bad beat to take away your full concentration and effort from the CURRENT hand.  That one is over.  Play this one the best you can.