They say that all the poker you play is just part of one long session, and that everything evens out over time. It’s just as well, though, that they didn’t pop round to my house last night to tell me that. Needing to transfer some money from my bankroll through to my bank account, I opened up Party Poker, and found $150 that I’d forgotten I’d left there recently. What the heck, I figured – might as well play a few rounds while I’m here…

So, I sat at a .5/1 table for some light entertainment, and a 3/6 Bad Beat Jackpot table to see how the play was like these days in the BBJ games. Before long, I’d cashed into Party the amount I was going to transfer to my account, and I also had a 2/4 Bad beat table going. Just as well I opened that one I thought at first, because after 50 hands or so, it was the only table I’d managed to win a pot at.

But that’s where it all started to go painfully wrong. Over the course of the next 50 hands I managed to lose to 5 flopped sets. Admittedly, two were in one hand, but it was just the evening encapsulated when I hit my flush on the river, only to pair the board in the process. Fortunately, both players had hit low full houses, so neither of them wanted to go too many bets on the river. I had to make the crying call in a 25BB pot really, although I wasn’t sure if I had the 2nd or 3rd best hand… Actually, thinking about it, if one of them had three-bet, I could have saved myself a bet and folded on the river, but anyway. On one other occasion, my full house out of the big blind was no match for rivered quads. With my top pair on the flop, trips on the turn and boat on the river, I was well behind on every street, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about losing some bets.

From 100-150 hands, fortunately the sets weren’t being flopped. The straights were being rivered, however. Add to that a spicy A hitting his kicker on the turn in another sizeable pot, and I was not a happy bunny. Long run my foot! If the long run is made up of lots of short runs, I can only hope they aren’t as bad as this one.

But that’s the way it goes. Sometimes I like to bemoan privately that whenever I take a shot outside my bankroll, or sit down for an occasional foray, I get thoroughly deck-spanked every which way. The reality is that like many poker players, I sometimes suffer from a highly warped sense of perspective. I find it easy to forget the times I get lucky, and the times when no-one gets lucky against me, and the times when I sit down for a short session, and leave the table a crazy number of bets up. My memory is much keener for the rivered miracles my enemies somehow always seem to catch. Similarly, I’m able to become embittered at the slightest recounting of another player’s successes and spectacular ability to somehow not suffer the vagaries of watching their set of aces lose to a runner-runner gutshot, and I find it all too easy to tell myself that a player with a better win-rate than mine is probably just running a little bit good. For a short while. Or even a long while.

But what I don’t see, because they don’t mention it, is that they don’t win every time they get AA, they don’t hit every draw, and when they do they don’t always hold up. But you can bet that when their draws do hold up they mercilessly squeeze the most out of their foes. You can bet that they’re playing well, better than I’ll sometimes give credit for, and when they play badly, they know it, and take steps to avoid it happening again.

Everyone knows poker players love their bad beat stories. But why? The cards don’t have a memory. It’s hard to imagine the three of clubs sitting in the middle of the deck talking to his diamond counterpart about that famous time they put a runner-runner quads move on the really great player who had flopped a set of aces, you know, just to teach him a lesson, and watch his face drain. You somehow doubt that they had a side bet on how long it would take him afterwards to tilt away the rest of his stack. It’s irrational to use past random events as an indicator of future random events, and it can be dangerously counter-productive in poker to look back on only those aspects of the hands you play.

Players in a rut like to look back over a particular category of hands, looking for an explanation for why they are losing instead of winning. Why? Presumably because it makes them feel better about themselves, and their game. If they’re losing, well, it just hasn’t been their day or week or month. It wasn’t their turn to get lucky, or even get just what they deserve. But really there are two problems with this sort of approach. While it’s useful, essential perhaps, to know how often a particular draw should improve to a made hand, in order to play the current hand correctly, if you look back and see your poker history as a series of made or missed draws, you overlook so much of the context of each hand, that you will rarely get the most of your history. What do you want to find, anyway? If you find that your draws aren’t coming in as often as they should, perhaps you want to console yourself with that fact, and explain away your losses as a result. Wrong answer. Perhaps you’ll find that your draws have come in precisely as often as probability predicts. Where do you go from there?

Whether you won or lost x, y, or z big bets in the last week, month, or 5000 hands is not important. What’s important is how much someone would have won or lost if they’d been playing optimally. You might look at all your bad beats and console yourself that you lost 100 big bets on them, so really if wasn’t for them you’d be 100 big bets better off. Go ahead, but think about this. What if a good player looks at the same hands and tells you he would have lost 140 big bets on those hands? If you take pride in losing less than the so-called expert, think again. If you lost less because you played badly (it’s possible), the chances are that you win less when you win, and if you’re a winning player, you’ll expect to win very slightly more than you will lose, over time. It follows that by not putting and getting the bets in when you should be, regardless of the outcome of each hand will put an annoying dent in your win-rate.

I lost a ton of money last night in the end. More than the $150 I’d found in my Party Poker account in fact. I probably should have lost less on some hands, and more on other hands. Overall, I probably should have lost less, because I played some fairly questionable poker. I wouldn’t say I tilted, but there was a definite sense of “I wish I hadn’t bothered now” about some of my play. Bottom line, though – there’s no point crying over rivered gutshots. And below the bottom line there’s some small print, which says something about only playing one table for a while, but that’s another story, for another time…

Tags: Poker, Odds, Luck, Party Poker, Bad beat