The notorious River card gives you a terrible bad beat by making a caller’s inside straight draw against your three Aces. This kind of a bad beat can put many a player on tilt. The problem is very simple, a player on tilt makes stupid decisions and tries to get all of the lost money back to quickly. They will end up taking chances they would not consider if they had won the bad beat hand. They compound the loss by losing even more by playing poor poker. This scene happens everyday in poker games played online or in live games. The player on tilt is steaming over the losing Aces hand and lets the anger cloud the decision making process. This makes the player very vulnerable to bad play and calling with hands that they should fold. Playing through tilt is part of the game and needs to be thought about before it happens to the player. Knowing what to do and how to do it is part of the path to being a good player. Successful poker players lose on bad beats all of the time. They even have a flash of anger at a donkey call that beats them with a miracle draw. But, they then do what is difficult to do, they let it pass. They do not try to get the loss back all at once.
They may even tighten their play for several hands so as to not give another player a chance to make it worse. They may pass several playable hands until they have control of their emotions and are thinking clearly. This part of poker is difficult for even the best players. Watch enough tournaments or cash games and you will see it destroy a good players game. In other instances you see the player regroup and come back and win after a severe beat. Playing when you have gone on tilt is the recipe for losing even more money. Some players even throw away money as a form of self-destruction when they experience this sort of hand. You or they only hurt themselves with this self-destructive behavior.
The only way to get past this situation is to let time take away some of the sting. Play only really good starting hands and gamble only when the odds are strongly in your favor. The bad beat could be the beginning of a short run of bad luck. You never know, but caution is the watchword when this happens. Playing with care is hard to do if you are usually a very aggressive player. However this could work to your advantage as the other players may mistake your play for steam play when it is being very conservative. The secret to getting over tilt play is to win a few hands and start even a small amount of recovery.
Another no-no in this situation is to downgrade the player who made the lucky draw against you. This lack of class and civility at the table does little to improve your mood and makes you look like a crybaby. Online this seems to be the rule rather than the exception and it makes for a lousy environment to play in. The rude ugly language, you see online should be stopped by the site, but it is not so many players turnoff the chat mode for this reason. What passes for table etiquette online would never be permitted in a live poker room. Bite your tongue; you will be a better player for it. Letting a bad beat ruin your entire play is not only stupid, it can be very expensive.
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