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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

May 20, 2006

Falling in Love with Bad Beat Stories

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. -- Bill Gates

If you hang around poker players much and you probably do you know the bad beat story is an inevitable part of conversation. Like traffic jams on the freeway at rush hour, like dandelions on your neighbor's lawn, bad beat stories are a predictable part of the game of poker.

I can't remember the first time I heard someone crying the blues over a losing hand. I do know, however, that if I've heard just one sorrowful lament, I've heard hundreds, maybe thousand, all punctuated with something like "Can you believe that?" or with "How could he do that?" or with some other exasperated statement of disbelief.

Being a polite person, I listened to these stories, but not with rapt attention. No, I sympathized and consoled and commiserated but my heart wasn't in it. My goal was to excel at the game, to go forward with as little risk as possible and come back with as much profit as the game allowed and to enjoy doing it. Bad beat stories just weren't part of the plan, being so negative.

But not long ago, I was listening to someone talk about his recent streak of bad beats and I began to see that I'd been making a mistake all this time. Instead of providing a semi-bored listening post, I should have been drawing insight from the stories.

Don had been playing in a profitable hold'em game at one of the major Strip casinos. For five months he'd been doing quite well, scoring handsome wins against young newbies in ring games as well as splitting three-ways in several tournaments.

But suddenly his game seemed to deteriorate. He hadn't changed his style; he was still tightly aggressive in live action and still following the basic tenets of good tournament poker. One particular hand set me wondering. "I flopped the nut straight and decided to slow play because, except for one guy who liked to raise with anything, I was at a table full of calling stations. Nobody wanted to play action hold'em for sure." he explained. "When the raise lover did exactly what he had been doing, I just called and continued. I was counting my score right to the river when the board paired. To make a long story short, after the raising war ended he flipped over his hand and I felt like he punched me in the stomach. He filled up!"

Don's a nice guy, a serious student of the game, and I felt bad for him. Now I wasn't at the table, but I wonder if perhaps he wasn't so enthralled with his straight that he forgot that even bad players can suck out on the river.

The next night I was in a one-table tournament and wouldn't you know, I flopped the nut straight. If coincidence really exists, this hand could have been a replay of Don's. I let the hand go to fourth street but I wasn't about to allow my two opponents get that last card on the cheap. I went all in, a move that would have crippled both players. As I hoped, they folded and one of them showed his cards. He had two pair!

My mother, at 91 years of age, while still mobile and in possession of all her senses, suffers from crippling arthritis. She awakens each morning with all eight fingers and two thumbs knotted in odd angles that look like something out of a Boris Karloff movie. At any gathering, she will play a mean game of euchre (and she cheats) despite those gnarled paws. I'm constantly amazed that she doesn't complain about the pain and I ask her why.

"Doesn't do any good," she says. "Complaining doesn't make it feel better. But if I thought you could do something about it, you'd be hearing me loud and clear."

So it is with those bad beat stories. Telling them doesn't do any good. It doesn't make you feel any better. And I can't do anything about your bad beats. However, I can learn from them and so from today forward, I'm going to listen to those tales with a new perspective. If just one of them makes a light bulb go off over my head in the future, as it did in the case of Don's story, then it will be worth the effort.