ask yourself the following questions:
1. is it a bad beat or a cooler?
- a cooler is a situation where neither player made a mistake in the hand. if you aa < kk all-in preflop, well, neither of you made a mistake in the hand. put yourself in the opponents position, are you ever folding kk preflop for your stack? probably not. the same goes for the kk < qq hand.
2. how bad is your 'bad beat' exactly?
- in the situation of ak < 34, how often do you think you're winning in this spot? answer: you're only winning 3/5 times, which means 34 is winning 2/5 times. while you do have a slight +ev advantage and you should be happy getting it in with ak vs 34, know that you're losing quite a few times in this situation as well.
3. when you add money and play loose are you doing it because you think you have an edge and can take advantage of bad players, or are you just trying to make up for your losses?
- i'll go ahead and assume it's the latter and i can 100% tell you that it'll never work in the long run. it might work for you sometimes and you'll feel great about making your money back, maybe even have a sense of justification because you 'got back at the fish!' but you're going to lose a lot more in the long term. in fact, if you think about it, you're going to lose sometimes with big hands like qq+, ak when you have a +ev edge and that's a fact, everyone knows that. so, why do you think by that, by playing looser and with hands that are going to put you in more -ev situations, you think you're going to win more or win you money back? it just doesn't work that way. if you're upset about losing money, don't put yourself in situations to lose even more money.
