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Tell yourself again (and again) that we’re not supposed to take tough poker losses personally. Losing ten times in a month is hard when you have the nuts or when you feel you’ve made all the correct decisions.

How about ten times consecutively, in less than two weeks?

It happened recently to a close friend I’ll call Kartenspiel (German for card game) who plays at the local cash tables, as well as online and in the Mississippi River casinos around St. Louis. This particular stretch of gut-wrenching action began with a heads-up situation in Hold ‘Em, after our hero worked his way through eight players to find himself against Gene, the elder statesman in the single-table scene.

Kartenspiel was short-stacked and, holding a pair of 8s, he looked at the flop to see an 8 and two diamonds. He put his last 400 chips in and Gene called, showing one diamond in his hand. I’m sure you can guess what the turn and river brought. Yep, running diamonds for a flush. Gene took home the $500. Kartenspiel finished second (no money in the winner-take-all contest.)

To avoid boring you with excruciating detail about the next nine hands that took old K”s breath away, I’ll explain one more hand and then give a simple list. I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

In the local $2/$4 cash game:
Kartenspiel’s hand – 3, 10 in one of the blinds, so he limped in.
Opponent’s hand – 7, 7. He called.

The flop was 3, 3, 10. This gave K a full house and great expectations. The opponent has a pair of 7s, with the 3s on the board, and no other draw worth chasing. He calls with two little pairs when K bets half the pot.

Can you guess what the turn and river revealed?  No, not a 7 for a bigger full house. Worse than that. How about running 7s for four of a kind and “Lucky” is once again, well, not lucky.

In the next eight games our hero lost with pocket Aces twice, once playing them hard by going all in and once slow playing. An opponent called the all-in with pocket 9s and hit a nine on the river! In the next instance, K’s opponent caught K, Q on the turn and river to make two pair and beat the Aces.

Then there is the Ace high straight that beat his set of 10s, with the King falling on the river. Add trip 9s (9 on the river) to bust “Lucky’s” pocket Kings and a handful of other river disasters and you begin to get the idea that our hero is making his way to the stomach medicine on a regular basis.

These instances may not qualify as world-class bad beats. However, to a local player with a small bankroll, the frustration is real and the economic impact is huge.

Larry Phillips writes, in “Zen and the Art of Poker,”1 that we shouldn’t take these tough losses personally. But the experience can cause us to question the ultimate plan for an otherwise promising poker career.

Specifically, Phillips tells us that the poker gods are not out to destroy us alone, though it sometimes seems that way. He adds that everyone “gets his” at one time or another. It’s just so hard to remember this when nearly 50 percent of your bankroll is gone and it just doesn’t seem to be your fault.

In the same vein, Mike Caro writes that poker players don’t get paid to win pots. They get paid to make the right decisions. Caro, writing in Doyle’ Brunson’s “Super System 2”2 notes that you make money even when you make the correct decision to fold a hand. He goes so far as to state that he is happy when an opponent goes against the odds and wins, because the poorer they’re playing, the more money he wins eventually.