Dealing with bad beats in tournaments

[Tosh]

Yesterday I lost 3 pots with other $600 dollars in them to river 2 outers in less than 10 minutes, I shrugged my shoulders and moved on.

Later I played in the 25k guaranteed on Empire. I lost KK to AT with an ace on the river and queens to JJ with a jack on turn after we put the rest of our money in on the flop. I went spare. I really wanted to break something and I don't get why these tournaments have this effect on me.

Maybe its the extra competition of tournaments but does anyone have any good ways of dealing with these. I hate losing my cool and its only tournaments that I do this in.

[SossMan]

I'm not sure there is a good way to deal w/ bad beats in Tourneys. I do my best to not let it affect me, but I'm sure it does.
As much as we like to think that these things are all skill, any individual tourney is probably 80% luck. That's just the way it goes. Good players are gonna get outdrawn more than bad players because we usually have the best of it when the money goes in. It's unfortunate, but it's the nature of the beast.
I usually go have a nice long workout after a barrage of bad beats, but that's just me. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[fnurt]

No question it's hard to absorb a bad beat. I think a lot of it has to do with the hours you invest in a tournament to get to a certain point, only to see them all wasted because of one unlucky hand. In a ring game you might lose a lot of money to a bad beat, but still it's just one hand out of many.

If the bad beat doesn't knock you out of the tournament, it's very important to keep your cool and avoid going on tilt. So many times I've watched someone take a bad beat and then immediately go all-in on the next hand with a mediocre hand, hoping to get it all back at once, and more often than not busting out altogether. You can and will rebuild that stack if you stick to playing good poker.

If the beat does knock you out of the tournament, I don't think you should feel like something is wrong because it affects you emotionally, you're only human after all. One thing that may help you is a thought process I went through a couple weeks ago after I went through a long streak of getting eliminated on bad beats. I had been wondering, what is wrong with the world that my KK keeps losing to 88 every time, that my AQ keeps losing to AJ, why does god hate me? But then it occurred to me... if every time I bust out of a tournament, it's on a bad beat, then I must be playing well to get into those double-up situations in the first place, and the results will come if I just stick with it. I think that's the attitude you have to maintain.

[nolanfan34]

I would agree that tournaments seem to drive me nuts this way more than anything. I think it's the incredible amount of variance - just hard to handle sometimes. That, and the fact that you may invest one, two, three hours in a tournament and then bust out with nothing.

Personally, if I put my money in the middle with the best hand, there's nothing more I can do and if someone makes a hand to beat me, so be it. I tend to beat myself up far more when I make a bad read or raise myself into a trap.

In the end there is a certain amount of luck involved. I played in the Stars $200+15 last night, and noticed that two of the players who finished in the top-5 the week before, were among the first 150 eliminated out of 1200+.

[LivingLegend58]

Yesterday in a multi at party had my K [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] K [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] taken by K [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] K [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]. I was a pretty big stack and the only person at the table that could call me, did.