Coping with the Bad Beats

As my game develops, I find that I am able to consistently build decent to deep sized stacks in the micro tourneys I am playing. This has greatly increased my confidence level tremendously. But for the past few weeks, I am now faced with the emotional effects of taking bad beats in the mid to late stages of tournaments and how it affects my concentration and my ability to play solid poker in tourneys I am running simultaneously. Early game beats don’t bother anymore, but it’s when you’re in the money having invested about 3 to 4 hours, built a top 15 stack and take that awful bad beat from a table chip leader to knock you out. At first this was really difficult to handle, but I am slowly adjusting.

I have been watching an awesome video series that was recently posted on Poker X Factor. Doubledave22 did a live recording while grinding a bunch of tourneys. I watched as he played excellent poker and still took some ridiculous bad beats. This just reinforces that fact that I cannot be results oriented and by playing solid poker, skill will outlast luck in the long run. The online pros are a testament to this ideology.

I was at home yesterday and took the opportunity to play some tourneys. I played maybe 12 tourneys between PokerStars and Absolute Poker. I took bad beats to get knocked out of the tourneys near the bubble in 7 of the 12 tourneys. The other 5 I just never picked up any playable hands to help me build a stack which is pretty standard. I am happy to say though, that through all the beats yesterday, I continued to play solid poker.

Last night I grinded the 6-max NL cash game on both Stars and AP to win back my tourney buy-ins for the day. I am happy to say that my 6-max game is still strong enough to pull off a nice little profit. You have to keep in mind that I play .02/.05 NL on Stars and did a little .05/.10 NL on AP. I am actually rolled for a much bigger game on AP but I feel like playing lower is just easy money. After all was said and done last night, I ended up +$29 on Stars and +$33 on AP. I was curious and wanted to see what my stats looked like after a short cash session. I remembered to reset the stats on Stars and this is what it looked like after one hour of play:

(2 tabling)
Hands dealt: 122
Hands played (saw the flop): 35
Hands won: 24
Hands won at showdown: 10
Hand won without showdown: 14

Hopefully things go better the rest of the week. I am really focusing on building my roll as the UBOC is coming and I plan on playing a few of the “mini” events.

As for live poker, I have the monthly South Side Players tourney this weekend and I have the Viejas Poker Classic II satellite in two weeks. I also heard that Oceans 11, a card room about 50 miles from me, spreads some great tourneys that I may have to check out. Apparently they run deep stack tourneys with 30 minute level for about $100-$120.

That all for now, good luck at the tables!