Bad Beats Pt. 5: Gain Some Perspective

Watching Phil Hellmuth play at the World Series of Poker is a guilty pleasure for some. His “Poker Brat” personality is famous for complaining about bad beats. He, of all people, has so many WSOP bracelets that he really has no complaint, but somehow we watch another season of WSOP broadcasts seeing him walk to the rail muttering about some bad call that a lesser poker player had the nerve to make. (Insert clever one-liner from Norman Chad here.)

None of us really know Phil. It can certainly all be an act. After all, he does have enough lifetime tournament success to make us believe that he's at least good. If he really tilts as bad as he appears to on television, he needs to gain some perspective.

First of all, in tournaments, the short stacks relative to the size of the blinds means that players are mathematically correct to make calls even though they might be behind. If I correctly assign a range of hands to your all in raise, and my current hand is 40% to win against that range, then I am making a correct call if the pot is offering me 3-2 odds or better. If you happen to have AA (obviously the top of the range I assign to you would include pocket aces), and I win anyway, it is not a bad beat if the range I put you on was realistic, given that all the money was in the pot.

Second of all, if you go into a hand as an 80/20 favorite, you are going to lose 20 out of every 100 times. An 80/20 advantage does not entitle you to the pot.

As poker players, we seek to gain equity advantages. If we risk (and are able to get our opponents to risk) large amounts of money with large equity edges, we will win a lot. If we keep our risk smaller with only slight advantages, we can keep our variance down.

In preflop situations, one of the best equity edges you can have is 14-1, AA versus A7 offsuit (the seven is the same suit as one of the opponent's aces, eliminating the possibility of drawing to a flush with the seven). If you play that situation all in before the flop, you will win outright almost 93%, will lose 5.6%, and tie the rest.

Even in the best imaginable preflop scenario, you still have a significant chance of losing (and sometimes the tie is more frustrating!). Those 14-1 odds don't mean “ship it!”

If you get the money in three times with a flopped flush versus top set (you are a 2-1 favorite), you will win twice and lose once out of three standard trials, but short-term luck might mean you only win zero or once out of three. If you play that situation 100 times, your results will be much closer to the expected 65 wins. If you play that situation 10 thousand times, you would expect 6500 wins.

It is these equity edges that give good poker players their wins over the long term. Getting upset that some donk sucked out on you with two cards to come is likely to induce tilt. Instead, if you accept the perspective that when by repeatedly getting the money in good, you will win the war, even if you don't win the battle.