[ngar23]

in every tourney one gets a bad beat, but if you look back at the tourney itself you wil remember one time that you got lucky. see with poker if you an keep your cool you will see that everything will balance out.

thanks

[Texas72]

That's a great philosophy to have. It's hard to remember it sometimes though, since those bad beats hurt so much!

[pookyman]

I am the first to admit to win any tourney you have to get some luck along the way, hit a big flop, catch some aces, catch a big hand and have a good second best to pay you off. But the concept of balance by getting even on bad beats, I think that requires you to play some really bad hands, and that is something I try not to do.

[beriac]

I think even if you play really well, you will occasionally be beat and need a miracle to win...

For instance, if you've been playing at a table with a loose aggressive player the whole game, he/she raises (as usual), you call to the flop and find yourself with the high two pair but there's a potential straight draw. The loose/aggy player raises again, and you think you've got the guy/gal pegged as bluffing (a call that might have been right any other hand that day). You call, a scare card comes down for that straight draw, and he/she raises again. Against anyone else you would fold, but you've watched this person shoot aimlessly for pot after pot and you decide he/she's got nothing. You call. River comes, and your two pair becomes a full house, which you think doesn't matter because you had the hand won anyway. Bet/call to showdown and you find that your opponent had indeed completed the straight, and you lucked out for the win. You didn't do anything wrong necessarily, but you did need some help from lady luck for the win.

I'm not saying it's all the time, and chaotic loose players probably need more suck outs than nice tight/aggressive players, but I find folks tend to always assume if someone sucks out then they must have been a moron, but it's not always the case and hey, everyone needs a suck out sometimes!

[benjahuna]

ngar23,

that's a nice idea, but it doesn't usually pan out for me. I'm usually getting unlucky to a much greater extent than I'm getting lucky.

I actually conceptualize the whole thing as being happy when I get more money in with the best hand (which is the one most likely to win at showdown) or with proper pot/implied/effective odds. If you're doing that, you might get killed in the short term, but long term, you'll be doing just fine.

[beriac]

>> I'm usually getting unlucky to a much greater extent than I'm getting lucky.

Hmmm... there's a concept in psychology about this perception, I'm no expert but I remember the analogy I learned:

People tend to think that they hit a greater portion of red lights when driving than they actually do. When surveyed about the % of the time that they run into red lights, they always err to the upside. And folks will often complain about running into "all the red lights" while driving somewhere.

Why?

Simple: we notice red lights more. Red lights make us slow down, stop, wait, and then speed up again. Green lights make us do nothing, we just keep going, so they register less in our brains. The person who hits all the reds may have actually driven through several greens and not noticed, whereas you can't not notice a red.

Similarly, you're always going to notice bad luck more than good. Maybe you had a pair of aces after the flop, you're all in, and an ace drops on the turn and you win, with your opponent never showing his hand. Well maybe your opponent had trip 5's on the flop, and you were actually losing at that point without knowing it.

I'm just saying, we're wired to notice bad luck more than good luck, I don't really know if over a long stretch of time it's reasonable to think we could have more bad luck than good.

Of course, it might be possible to have more bad beats against you than for you over time, if you just play optimally and only bet big when you have the nuts (cause you'll never need a bad beat to win)...!

Just some thoughts.

[Texas72]

That's a very good way of looking at it. We tend to think that if we had the best hand at the start, and then also do at the end, that there was no luck involved - that the best hand simply won, like it was supposed to. The reality is that there is a certain amount of luck involved in even that.