Defeats in Poker are inevitable – no matter how good you are.

Whether you’re playing cash games or contests, you will experience some devastating losses in your poker career, so you have to train yourself to be ready to take a significant loss. The worst part is that multiple failures come from great plays. While this may sound illogical, it’s entirely true. Since luck has a significant impact on every hand of Poker, you’re going to lose hands that you play from time to time, whether you are a victim of a cooler or a bad beat. To best train you for such situations, we’ll define what bad beats are, how they vary from coolers, and what strategies you can execute to ensure you are perfectly dealing with them.

Bad Beat in Poker

A bad beat is when you fail a hand despite being a more significant hand to win. In every poker hand, there’s a favored and an underdog. If you ever watch Poker on TV, you’ll see that most shows depict the odds of each player beating the hand before the flop, on the flop, and the turn. The percentages vary all the time. Of course, any bad beat is heartbreaking, but you should try not to let anything where the chances were under 80 percent in your favor concern you. After all, a 30% hand will win more often, and you need to understand this if you’re going to play Poker. If you are easily tilted by failing any hand in which you are a favorite, you will not do great at the tables, as these “bad beats” happen every day.

Are Bad Beats Common?

You may be wondering just how you experience a bad beat. Unfortunately, there is no individual answer we can give to this question. You will have nights where you inflict many bad beats on others and run very well, not worrying about bad moments. But there will also be a time when your luck will completely shift, and you will experience one lousy beat after another, which can be highly frustrating. The possibility of bad beats will depend on the game type more than anything else.

What Are Coolers In Poker?

Another type of situation in Poker often and can be highly frustrating is something players like to call a “cold deck” or a “cooler.” Coolers are when you have a massive hand, but your opponent has an even better one, and you lose a monster pot. 

Tips to deal with Bad Beats And Coolers

If you want to be a winner at Poker, you need to learn how to handle these unavoidable circumstances.

1. Take A Break

The easiest way to recover your composure and get back to recreating your A-game is to take a short break. In the long run, bad beats are not a problem, but they may make you play very badly in the short run. However, a brief break from the game can help you forget about the hand you lost and allow you to play well again.

2. Do A Study Session

After having a bad beat or multiple bad beats during a session, one of the things we do during a session is go into the lab and study the hands we lost. During such a session, you may come across some mistakes in how you played the hand that may have led to the wrong beat, or you may conclude that you dealt the hand perfectly. In either case, you will enhance your game for the future or figure that there was nothing that you could do to prevent the wrong beat. However, once you know how the hand went down and that you did nothing inappropriate, you’ll feel better about yourself and even more set to go back into the battleground.

3. Maintaining A Healthy Bankroll

Bad beats harm no matter what, but they break more if you aren’t playing within your norms. Depending on the game type, there are various degrees of conflict you will have to face, and these will also decide how big of a bankroll you should have when you leave. If you are playing a highly explosive game, you should have a considerable bankroll compared to the buy-in to avoid stressing too much about individual bad beats and coolers.

4. Focus On What’s Important

It will assist if you are mentally prepared for bad beats and coolers before entering the casino site or firing up that poker app. You need to go into your sessions knowing that bad beats can and will happen and that they don’t matter in the long run. Your focus should be on playing well, placing yourself into good spots where you are the favorite to win, and avoiding making big mistakes.

5. Play The Hand You Are Dealt

Poker is all about playing every hand you are dealt, and you know how to. However, you’ll be dealt a new poker hand after a bad beat, and you will need to play that hand. Instead of considering the loss you just had, you need to reset your mind and start thinking from scratch. Look at your cards, your stack size about the blinds, and the action in front of you. Then, think back to the preflop charts and positional play and figure out the best way to play this hand.

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Conclusion

Always go back to the essential elements of Poker and try to realistically define everyone’s range based on their actions rather than just randomly trying to outplay a single player at the table. Strategic thinking and saving money in spots like these can be a big thing over the long run, as you will save tons of money by making the right plays despite your emotions.