Bad beats. AA-KK KK-QQ QQ-KK

Hey guys I'm new to the forum, I had a question about tilt. I play on pokerstars mainly and party poker sometimes. In the last week my aces kings and queens have been getting cracked or someone picks up up the next best pair. So if I have kings someone will pick up aces my miracle. But it started off with my aces and kings getting cracked by smaller pocket pairs like 5's and up. I think I am doing to right thing and getting all the money in preflop and am pretty good in doing this but have now been completely demorilized in watching them get cracked every time or now watching my kings or queens be a huge dog preflop. I actually have over 10 pictures in the last week, I'm not kidding when I say every time I get a monster preflop they get cracked. I thought it was just online until yesterday I played a home game and got my only premium hand of the night AA and again made the guy think I was on a bluff and called my preflop shove with KJs(diamonds) and flop came out x-Qd-x looking good right? Well turn and river were K-K. So mostly I came to vent and ask has anyone else been through something like this and if yes what have you done to get through something like this. I've thought about folding big pocket pair for about a week, but that's kind of insane and not easily done, and I've also thought about trying to slow play them and and get a better read through the flop turn and river but I play in the micro stakes mtt's so usually a 3bet turns to a shove from the villain. Or do I continue to get it all in and play through the downswing knowing eventually the cards will turn. Any advice will be much appreciated.

Don't play those slow, these things happens. Stay focus, and motivated, faster than you think this situation will improve

ya shake it off that's my advice,if you got yer money in good and took a bad beat that just poker it happens to everyone who plays ,it also happens more online because of the amount of hands played per hour

When people are deep stacked they tend to overplay AA and KK. Play them aggressively but be careful.

you should not slow play monsters. AA,KK,QQ are called big hands because they have good preflop showdown value. Do not let drawing hands see the flop cheap with those hands cause you'll likely get beat. so always play aggressively except for some situational games like perhaps HU. That's my opinion.

But bat beats do happen. But in the long run if you do the right thing, at least 51% of the time you'll be successful.

I get going all in preflop with AA and KK and most of the time QQ. But with QQ and JJ I've been thinking about playing big preflop but not for stacks most of the time players calling my x3.5 3bet will have something like AK or AQ witch my QQ JJ is only a 51% favourite. At least this is my thinking about it through my downswing. I get it if I'm playing cash games but in tourney it's more about survival. I also get that you do have to win flips to win a tourney but I don't believe I need to be flipping in the early and early mid stages when I know my play is superior to most of players at the tables.

I may be wrong tho, because at that point why not play 88 99 and 1010 the same way? Maybe someone can explain there way of thinking because my mind may not be thinking straight :S

my strategy is very simple when I have monsters and two players are acting or chasing I go allins and against a single player I do act to make the flop dearer..

dainius.ramanauskas said:

I may be wrong tho, because at that point why not play 88 99 and 1010 the same way? Maybe someone can explain there way of thinking because my mind may not be thinking straight :S

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Because each time your pocket pair goes down a number, you lose some equity. And at some point it's not worth making some bets. That's why you should play AA differently from TT and that differently from 44.

For example: if you have KK. The flop comes and you don't see an A. That makes you having the top pair more likely. If you have 88, how high is the chance of you having top pair on an average full ring or even 6 handed table post flop? Way lower.
And the same goes for 44.

The QQ and especially JJ are at this kind of cutoff points where you have to change playstyle. There's no "best" way to play JJ. That's why there are so many threads and videos about this topic.

That's where reading your opponents comes into play. If you know what hand ranges they have when you do certain things, you can (semi) confidently go into the flop and further, see what the cards give you, and win or fold if it doesn't go your way.

Ps: I havent checked the numbers but I'd estimate QQ to win over AQ around 75-80% of the time. You made it seem like it was around 51%.

dainius.ramanauskas, well this is what we call "a variance" and you obviously finding yourself at the down curve of it. You simply have to get through this. I know how unpleasant is this, loosing with a better hand or facing AA while holding KK. I had pretty often such situations too. Well my recommendation is to develop following point of view, which can be covered by these words, which i have read once in one old Harrington's book: It's ONLY MATTER, if you do a right decision AT THIS CURRENT SITUATION in a hand. And NO MATTER what comes after. Because AT POKER CAN HAPPEN ANYTHING!
That's said all about it. So the thing is, you have to stop suffering yourself with such thoughts, that you are the biggest looser, loosing every time big hands against weak one. But start to think like that: "Okay, fine... my Aces been cracked again, and it's a variance, it's a part of poker game. But i don't worry about, cause i played that hand perfectly, although i was pretty unlucky." That's the point, you should be more worried about hands you played not good, as about those, where you played good, but was unlucky. And you must analyze those hands, where you havn't played good and find a solutions how you could play it better. To become a better player, you have to work on your game constantly. If you keep doing right decisions and not blow your bankroll away in tilt, your unlucky stripe will end soon and you will be winning again. Because this is the only what matters in poker, making a right decision, when an action on you, right? And it's the same story about folding QTo from UTG, and then seeing AKJ on a flop. Many people gets annoyed and crying loud "What a fool i am, why did i fold it!", but a good player would not worry about this. Because on pre-flop it was a right decision to fold that weak hand. And how often you get nuts with that? And how often you just waste money/chips? You should never thinking like "if i would call that hand, i could take my few opponents out and building such a big stack, becoming a table captain! What a fool i was folding it?!" It's much better to think: "I know that my fold was right with those information and this situation i had. And i don't give a thing what comes on a flop. Cause it can come anything. But the chance of making nuts were too small to pay it."

Well said.

It's funny you mention how often on PokerStars when you have a monster hand almost always someone else has one also and the number of times your AA KK gets cracked with a much weaker preflop hand.

My experience has been identical to yours except that this never happened to me on such a regular basis in live/in-person games. It could be that in online poker I get to play many more hands per hour compared to a live game or the fact that since in online poker I strictly play in either freerolls or micro stakes, it's more likely for people to call my all-in for dirt cheap or simply for sh!ts and giggles! I sure am guilty of this myself.

It could also be something more sinister like the poker software being setup in a way to create "action" hands which in turn increases the rake which is the company's profit. I am not a conspiracy theorist but I am also not blind to the greedy nature of most humans. Even a few cents added up over multiple tables in thousands of pots daily will add up to a good chunk of money.

And now to what I (used to) do to get my anger and frustrations out when this happened to me. I, like you, started to track and take screen captures of all these hands but then decided to start posting them in the forum along with all the win/loss percentages at preflop, flop, turn.

One of those threads is https://www.cardschat.com/forum/pok...wins-losses-kk-pokerstars-336147/#post3745839

And the other is https://www.cardschat.com/forum/pok...ou-got-rivered-325437/index2.html#post3742001

But since a few days ago I haven't been able to post anymore of my screen capture images because an error message pops up saying that my posts need to be reviewed by a moderator before being posted but they never do. I reported that issue in this thread https://www.cardschat.com/forum/sug...derator-needs-review-your-337189/#post3754019 but unfortunately it still has not been resolved.

So my frustration outlet has been taken away from me but if you have the time, I suggest you post some of your bad beats in the forum to confirm with evidence that it's not a false perception (we naturally remember the bad beats more often) and that you are actually losing more of those monster hands than winning with them. Once you have the evidence based on a reasonable number of hands, only then can you make an informative decision.

Supmargy said:

Because each time your pocket pair goes down a number, you lose some equity. And at some point it's not worth making some bets. That's why you should play AA differently from TT and that differently from 44.

For example: if you have KK. The flop comes and you don't see an A. That makes you having the top pair more likely. If you have 88, how high is the chance of you having top pair on an average full ring or even 6 handed table post flop? Way lower.
And the same goes for 44.

The QQ and especially JJ are at this kind of cutoff points where you have to change playstyle. There's no "best" way to play JJ. That's why there are so many threads and videos about this topic.

That's where reading your opponents comes into play. If you know what hand ranges they have when you do certain things, you can (semi) confidently go into the flop and further, see what the cards give you, and win or fold if it doesn't go your way.

Ps: I havent checked the numbers but I'd estimate QQ to win over AQ around 75-80% of the time. You made it seem like it was around 51%.

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Hey thanks for the reply, sorry if I made it seem like AQ was a coin flip with QQ, that was not my intention. I do know the value of having QQ going against AQ and it is a bet you should make every time. It seems like my luck is changing as of today I cashed 2 of 6 tourneys one where I was the final table bubble. My aces held up 5/6 times in that tourney. Which is a huge turnaround from the past week. I could still complain because my AK was busting by a K10 when all the money was in preflop but that again I still had just under average after I lost that hand. But I know these things happen in tourneys it just the nature of them I ran good most of the tourney and only had to do a couple of coin flips, which is ideal tournement play.

Hey guys thanks for all the insight, I was really down on myself the last couple days because I had never gone through a downswing that was the long before. I'm not the best player there is but I certainly not the worst. There was on quote that I read from blackrain79(I think that's it). It's was something along the lines of this "poker doesn't owe you anything, you get out of it what you put into it". This quote hit home with me, so instead of crying about my losses I played some of the best poker I have in my life I join a $5.50 deep stack tourney and cruised through the whole thing always in the top 20% of the leaderboard. I told myself if I was going to have a bad beat it wasn't going to end my tourney. I think these bad beats were a blessing in disguise for me, it made me realize how much harder you need to work to become one of the best. It was either that or this stupid brass bracelet I was wearing because the second I took it off everything turned around , I wouldn't be a poker player if I wasn't superstitious