Posted in wrong area so re-posting here:

I had to post this to get some thoughts from others.

Playing 1/2 NL on Bovada. How to cope with this sort of stuff.

Have KK and opponent has 88 after back and forth raise, everything goes in pre-flop. Of course he spikes an 8 on the flop. Brush it off and move on.

Have AA and two others pushing and everything goes in pre-flop. One has JJ, so you can at least justify to a degree his call. Other has JTs. What?? Of course JTs draws out a flush. If he had seen the flop and there were two clubs already, maybe I could understand but this was all in pre-flop.

Next one, I have KK, back and forth ends up all in pre-flop. Dude has 88 and spikes an 8 on the flop??? WTF?? That's twice in one day that my KK gets outdrawn by pocket 8s.

I understand the math and that most of you will say, I'll take that all day. They can't always suck out. But for real, it's like I get dealt KK or even AA and my shoulders just slump and I think, "Here comes the bull**** again".

Position and such wouldn't seem to matter in these instances as everything is in pre-flop.

How do you deal with this stuff? Part of me thinks just avoid going all in pre-flop and fold the big pairs if you have to, but the math wouldn't support that...

Let go of the idea that you can control the results and only focus on the decisions. Every time you lose a big hand (and in some cases win) you should think "did I play that alright and is there any way I could play it better?".

Poker is going to give you a beating from time to time. It's not just you, although some people have smaller downswings purely because of chance and aren't used to it. Play with a bankroll that can sustain a severe beating and try not to let all in results influence your decisions.

I had a day like this on Bovada last week, too. Got my money all-in on 80/20 and still lost 3 times. The best way I can deal with it is 1) imagine how much money you would actually win if this setup happened 100 times, for example, and 2) if the players are this bad, there is absolutely money to be printed here. Remind yourself that you didn't do anything wrong. Resist the impulse to nit up and not GII preflop with AA and KK. The worst thing you could do is to add playing poorly to a downswing. Sometimes I will picture what a graph of 1 million hands (or even 100k hands) would look like, and the 3 buyin downswing over a few hundred hands will just be microscopic.

+1
This
Amen
/thread



...play overrolled for the stakes. Online, if you can manage to have a 100+BI roll, you are doing it correctly. 2+2 and others suggest a 20-40BI (some people say as low as 10) even if it is simple for you to reload. I think the psychology of reloading is a negative. Play with a bigger bankroll and it really is easier to play through the bumps in the road.

Good stuff here ... these are the stories of the 'days of our lives' as you would see in soap TV.

Last week I was having a great week of poker and promptly rolled into 3 of the exact same hands. I Flop 2 pair and my opponents had sets with my bottom pair!! Now certainly they could've Flopped a set with the 3rd card on the board and I wouldn't have thought as much about it. But as stated here ... and a lot of other places .. in poker you need to look at your decisions and not the results. Would you be happy playing these hands giving your opponent 1 out, so to speak?

Don't turn KK into a set mine just because you have lost the last 3 KK hands. That is where you need to worry about your poker game.

There are 3 kinds of players in poker IMO ... Card Players, Poker Players and Gamblers and you need to navigate through them all while just accepting that some of the clashes are unavoidable. GL

Do you mean 200nl???

If so ffs move down!!! If you are asking questions like this in BQ, you should be playing 2nl - 10nl tops.

Hopefully you do mean 2nl.

lol

^ this

One day of beatings is not that bad. A swing of two or three weeks ever day starts to take its toll, which is why, as previously mentioned that you should play over rolled.

GL

When you play with proper BR management, these bad beats are simply "dirt on your shoulders".

One of the best things I've learned about poker is this: You will get sucked out on!

You combat that by having a sh*tload of BIs on the backburner.

Whenever I feel like this I remember Ryan Fee had a brutal downswing of 61 buyins and he's a top winning player. Upswing youtube channel has a video on it.

I deal with bad beats by spending no time thinking about them. Id recommend reading Tendler's book 'The Mental Game of Poker'. An opponent hitting an 8 when you get it in AA v 88 isn't a bad beat. Its poker.

+1

OP: This, of course, is the challenge for new players. It's very difficult at first to get past the notion that we SHOULD win a hand, and come to accept that the outcome of the hand doesn't matter, what matters is, did we make the right decisions.

I mean, think about it - you wake up with AA. You're an 80% favorite heads up. You're virtually guaranteed a win! Except that that's only 4 out of 5, and it's a lot easier to hit that last 1 out of 5 than it is to hit snake-eyes, but snake-eyes do happen. Sometimes, back to back. To back. To back. To back.

You'll have days where AA is cracked, and the very next hand, you'll get AA again, and it'll be cracked even worse.

AND you'll have days where you completely misread your opponent, and jam your two pair into his flopped middle set and hit the case remaining card to give you top boat.

You'll have days where your flopped flush runs into quads, your flopped straight rivers the villain a boat, and your flopped set of aces gets flushed by 45o, and you'll have days where it seems like you win the hand even when you fold because the deck isn't just smacking you in the face, it's grabbing you by the hair and sticking it's tongue down your throat while dry humping you.

All of this is poker. None of this matters.

What matters is the hand in play, the decision you face, and making the best decision you can with the information you have. When you burn that understanding into your soul, the beats won't matter anymore.

(No, I haven't got there, quite yet. Back to back aces cracked still gets me a bit tilted...)

So when I first started reading about poker theory, there was ALWAYS a section about bankroll management. I always found this section to be kinda naggy, and I'd always think "yeah yeah, I'll do that, let's get to the interesting stuff."

My first time or two of actually depositing and playing, I'd ignored the BRM that I said I'd practice, played at stakes for which I was not rolled, and I noticed something very important.

The results of hands bothered me we way more. I'd be livid if I got it in good and got drawn out on. I once threw a mouse against the wall (which represents another $15 lost in that hand.)

It dawned on me that if I had 100+ BI for the game, losing one this way would not piss me off so much. Since then I've found that proper BRM has insulated me not only against variance, but tilt as well.