AA losing to JJ or 1010 is pretty universally considered a bad beat, when you are 80% favourite.
What about when all in preflop AK losing to A7, or KQ losing to 10 9, or QQ losing to AJ
Are these hands when you are 70% favourite bad beats when you lose, or are the odds not high enough for it to be considered a bad beat.
IMO none of these things are in themselves bad beats. To me a bad beat needs to meet certain requirements.
1) You are ahead in the hand and lose. That one is obvious.
2) You're opponent should have reasonably assumed that you were ahead but either through inexperience or indifference continues in the hand.
You must remember that
bluffing and situation reading are part of the game. If an opponent has good reason to believe that you'll fold to a rr or a shove and he just happens to run into the high end of your range but sucks out anyway, that is not a bad beat.
3) Your opponent does not have the odds, implied or direct, to continue with the hand and again should have understood this.
4) Your opponent must have no other reasonable considerations for continuing with the hand but does so anyway. This applies mostly to tournament situations where sometimes
pot odds are less important than say Utility Odds (
Arnold Schneider). Your opponent may feel that just barely making the money is an unnacceptable use of his time and taking seemingly ill-advised risks will give him a better shot at a meaningfull cash or that the blinds are so high and they are so short stacked that they are basically pot committed before the hand even starts.
5)Anything that occurs after the last relevant action by either party is meaningless. If your all-in with T9 and called by AK, you may flop a T and be way ahead but lose to a K on the river despite the fact that you held a 75% advantage with 2 cards to come. Again, not a Bad Beat.
Long and short. You're opponent needs to be a complete bonehead. By the definitions above it would be nearly immpossible for any good poker player to ever dish out a bad beat. There are always good reasons behind the actions they take. Whenever I suffer a particularly painfull loss I always think back and try to put myself in my opponents shoes. What was my table image? Have I played this person before? What was his chip stack? What were his options? Did the benefits of winning the hand outweigh the harm?
When you take all this into account instances of genuinely honest bad beats is really quite small. Poker is a complicated game, it's rarely ever as simple as My Aces lost to his Deuces.