Saturday, August 11, 2012

The debasement of poker terminology




"That's not a knife, THAT'S a knife!"

-- Crocodile Dundee


The other day I was on the giving end of a bad beat when I decided that my AKo was good enough to get involved in a preflop raising war between 2 other LAG's. We ended up all-in 3-handed with the following holdings (and preflop equity) :

LAG #1 : As Ah (93.1%)

LAG #2 : Ad Kc (3.6%)

Myself : Ac Ks (3.2%)

Much to the dismay of everyone present, I took down the huge pot with a club flush. THAT is a bad beat.

Matt Matros, a player with a strong math background who I highly respect, talks about his WSOP experiences in Card Player (August 8, 2012). He recounts a hand where his KK was all-in preflop against AKo and an ace came on the river. This is a 70:30 situation and on a bad beat scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 5. Yet he refers to it as a "huge beat" and a "vicious beat". Later on he describes losing a preflop all-in with his A9o vs. QJo as a "bad beat". This is a 57:43 scenario, sometimes loosely referred to as a coinflip, hardly a bad beat.

3 comments:

FlushDraww said...

If those are horrendous bad beats then the amount of bad beat stories on every poker forum I know of is about to increase 100 fold.

Memphis MOJO said...

The hand Matros talks about is a crummy way to lose (especially the ace coming on the river), but it's nowhere near a bad beat. Surprised he is letting his emotions dictate his writing.

grrouchie said...

As the Mighty TBC would say, you have to get that AK all in Pre Flop so you can see all 5 cards, it's the only right way to play it.

In other news, good suck out :)