When you play poker, either online or in person, you must prepare for the possibility of a bad beat poker hand. Bad beat poker hands are random and can happen to anyone, turning a “sure thing” into a loss. Can you manage to overcome poker bad beat hands?
Bad Beat
If you’re a poker enthusiast, you know the feeling that comes when you’re holding a hand that you think that you’re sure to win and then suddenly understand that another player has a hand that beats yours.
Complete “oosh!” That’s what’s known as a bad beat poker hand and it’s the hand that poker players dread the most. You have what appears to be strong cards, prepare yourself mentally for a nice win and then find yourself facing a loss.
What looks to you like a bad beat may seem to another player to be simply a bit of bad luck but if you’ve been smiling to yourself as you hold a full house only to find that your opponent has four-of-a-kind or your straight is beat by someone else’s flush, you aren’t consoled by the exact definition of “bad beat.” You only know that you got – beat!
There are some bad beat scenarios where you can win. Perhaps you called a bet even though you didn’t have the right implied odds or pot odds or even the best hand to call. Maybe you ended up catching cards on the river and the turn to complete the winning hand.
Regardless, if you’re going to continue to play poker, either professionally or on an amateur basis, you need to accept bad beats as a necessary – though unpleasant – drawback, even though you’re playing according to tactics that work the majority of the time.
Online Bad Beats
Bad beat poker occurs in online gaming and it often results in charges that the Random Number Generator is “rigged.” Gamers who worry about rigged RNGs need to check that the gaming developer is licensed since testing RNGs is a central component of the regulatory process in obtaining a license.
Game developers like SpinLogic, which supplies the Grande Vegas online casino and other high-end online casinos with their games, are aware of this issue and maintain strict standards for their RNG games’ testing.
Sometimes, when you’re playing online, you can play at a “bad beat” table where a second win is given to the player who has the second-best hand (this bad beat jackpot is funded by an additional deposit made by all players at the game’s outset.
The bad beat jackpot prize can, at some casinos, be significant, amounting to hundreds, thousands and even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It is true that statistically, online poker players are more likely to experience bad beats since more are hands played per hour online than at a brick-and-mortar poker table – both regular games and tournaments. This issue is frequently noted in freeroll tournaments where average players, not pros, play basic poker where they don’t have the knowledge that an experienced player has in dealing with various hand situations.
If you’re playing at an online casino that features bad beat jackpots, you never know whether your jackpot prize might be on the high or the low end of the scale since these jackpots are usually progressive. That means that the jackpot prize is dependent on the number of players that opted-in to the jackpot. The best losing hand wins the largest share and the rest is split among the other participating players.
Keep an eye out on your casino because collections, payout percentages, rules and amounts vary greatly from one cardroom/casino to the next. The rules might change as well so it’s important to check periodically.
Overcoming Bad Beats
Bad beats are frustrating but there are tips that can help you overcome bad beats. These pieces of advice are mainly psychological insights but they can be of help as you face the frustrations of poker.
- Keep your perspective. You can’t compensate for every deal, for every move of every other player and for every split-second decision that you make. You can, however, keep things in perspective and realize that, at the end of the day, poker is a game and there will always be ups and downs.
- Learn the basic poker strategy, including information about bad beats. Bad beats are common poker issues and every time that you’re favored to win and you put down your bet, you need to face the reality that there are almost always better hands out there. So even if you do everything right, there’s always a percentage that’s lacking and you need to be aware of that. Otherwise, you won’t only lose that hand but your self-confidence will drop and you’ll play badly in the future. If you learn basic strategy and stick to it, what happens in one bad beat hand won’t affect your future play.
- Replay the hand in your mind to see if there were points at which you should have realized that you needed to be playing differently. This is a positive step that you can take, not only to learn from past mistakes but to regain your sense of what you need to do in the future. Then, start focusing on your next hand.
- It’s natural to try to keep moving forward but any good poker player has to know when to fold ‘em. That’s probably the biggest mistake that amateur poker players make – they feel that they HAVE to play on through but in reality, knowing when to fold is the better half of the battle.
Prepare for bad beat poker hands and enjoy a more fulfilling poker experience.
