I was ghosting a student last week in a $5 NLHE tourney on Stars. She had built up about double the average stack; her chipcount was about 45k as we approached the bubble. She and I are at the stage of our teacher/student relationship where instead of me taking the lead, she makes the decisions and explains her reasoning to me. In this way, I can judge how well she will do on her own when our tutelage is over. She was still chatting about a previous play when the following hand came up:
Under the gun she picks up the two red queens, and she decides to gamble with them and flat call. Of course, the worst possible thing happens (OK, second worst – worst would be if she pushes all in and gets called by kings or aces), and everyone at the table flat calls. The flop comes 842 rainbow, and the big blind pushes all in for 12k. Well, she starts mumbling a lot on the phone and then calls the all in. Of course the big blind has an 82 and the two pair holds.
Three hands later, she is still going on about how she played the queens wrong, and, despite my attempts to calm her down, she is verging on tilt. The guy who beat her in that hand meanwhile has doubled up again and now has more than 50k. All 50k goes into the pot in a very oversized raise, and suddenly the phone gets really quiet. All I can hear is soft breathing and then a whisper, “I have aces.”
She calls fast, as the time clock has already started ticking, and then even the breathing noises stop. I ask her if she’s ok, but I get no answer, and I know she is holding her breath, waiting for everyone else to act. One short stack gets his 4k in the pot also, and she finally takes a deep breath as she sees the short stack’s AK and the big stack’s snowmen. The flop comes K22 rainbow. More silence. The turn is an offsuit 4. Not a sound. The river brings the 8 hearts, and I am glad I have the phone on speaker, as the scream that came next would at least have hurt my ears if not melted my brain.
***
This was a bad bubble beat to be sure, but let’s look at the events that led up to it. We started off at the same table as Mr. River the Eight. Early on he limped with aces, and we called with pocket treys. The button pushed all in on a 100 chip pot, and when the limper called it, we correctly folded. The three hit right on the flop, and the brilliant play of the all in guy there saved the limper’s life <flip save and a beauty>.
Later at a different table, our villain was getting aggressive, and it was paying off as his stack had grown quite a bit. He was on the button with AQ offsuit and ready to make a nice raise until the cutoff raised in front of him. He paused and considered making a move, but he ultimately decided to let that one go. Good thing too, as the big stack at the table in the small blind pushed back with pocket jacks and hit quads on the flop <lucky bounce off the bumper and up the side ramp>!
And then at the end, when he was at our table and getting short stacked, we had to fold an AJ spades to an all in push. The guy who ended up winning that monster pot is the same one who doubled up our villain after he hit 2 pair with his 82 <light jackpot for skill shot>.
In this way, a poker tournament is like a pinball game. The outcome of one bounce of the ball affects the next shot and whether or not you can complete the sequence of targets. In a poker tournament, the actions of one player affect the decisions of the next player, and so on and so on. The flow of chips is also affected in the same way. One lucky break for a completely random player can decide your fate later on.
A universal lament of poker players is how to deal with bad beats. Some folks wail at the heavens, crying “Why me?” Some are more physical and spring into action, punching a wall or worse as they let out their frustrations. Some even decide that they somehow deserved the bad luck as payback for what they perceive as bad play. This last group will usually post a hand history asking if they could have avoided going broke there.
Of course the best way to be is calm and philosophical. I often say to my students, “You make the best play you can and then you have to say ‘f results.'” The truth is that this attitude is hard to come by, and even the best of us lose it sometimes. When I find myself unable to see the big picture, I think back almost 20 years to a scene I witnessed at Binion’s Horseshoe in Vegas.
I had just busted out near the bubble of a small daily poker tournament, and I was pissed. I went to find my grandfather watching the big money blackjack table, and he let me blow off some steam by moaning about how unfair it all was. When I exhausted myself crying about my bad luck, he motioned for me to watch the table. There was one man playing blackjack, and he had less than two stacks of black in front of him. He pushed it all on the circle and quickly lost to the dealer’s blackjack. He tossed the lone green he had left to the dealer, who said kindly, “Bad luck today Charlie.”
“It certainly was,” said the loser as he put on his sport coat and walked slowly away, head held high with a smile on his face.
My grandfather held my elbow and whispered, “He sat down with 100 grand and lost it all. Now, you were saying?”
I put my arm around the old man and hugged him. “I was saying, let’s go drag Nana away from that slot machine and get some dinner.”