More Bad Beats In Online Poker?

I'd like to share my personal experience with the, all to often heard statement, "this is crap (being nice here), you'd never see that in a live game". The player is referring to some wacky combinations of cards delivering bad beat after bad beat at the online PokerStars.

Well, I started out playing poker online, so I didn't know any better. I was always curious if there was any truth to this thinking.

I must admit that having had some outrageous losing steaks, due primarily to some crazy bad beats, I was beginning to get the feeling that there might be something to what these people were talking about. I was used to betting no limit and I was successfully beating the 100 full table Sit N Go games, and having some luck in the MTT's, but sometimes the most incredible strings of bad beats were happening on Poker Stars.

When you find yourself losing to long shot after long shot (I mean the 80/20 and better situations) when you're all in on the bubble, you start to wonder. Of course my first thought was, these guys are just crying because they aren't winning.

However, I did notice some of the guys making these statements were in fact good, solid, winning players. So, now that I thought I knew how to play, I went to Las Vegas to see what live holdem was all about. I had been playing more MTT tournaments online, and felt that this was what I wanted to try in live games. My MTT game was fairly solid, and I had started to switch over from the Sit N Go games anyway that I played on Poker Stars.

With little cash game experience, this would be my last resort. The things that happened convinced me that all of this talk about "this just doesn't happen live" is just that, just as bunch of talk. The first tournament I played was simply amazing to watch. After cutting the field from around 90 players down to three tables, I saw a good stack become huge chip leader winning three amazing hands in about 2 orbits.

In all three of these hands, the new chip leader was a huge underdog. He had a pocket pair, but was up against a bigger pair in each case, and they were all in pre flop. He proceeded to win in all the insane ways that you see online. Once he hit his set, then he went, runner runner, to make straights on the other two hands. So, he wins three straight 20/80 hands, what are the odds of that?

This is when you would start seeing, "pokerstars is rigged", or "he works for Poker Stars" light up the chat area if this happened online. The live players referred to what they saw as "intenet hands". Oh well, so much for the crap about live hold'em versus online I was hearing. After a few more tournaments, I was convinced for good.

In my next tournament, I found myself in a minimum raised pot. I'm in the big blind, with 97, and the flop comes 8 10 J. After a series of bets, we are all in on the turn. Of course a J on the river completes a full house for my opponent, he held J 10. When two players at the table said they had a J or a 10, I see that he had hit a two outer on the river to beat me.

I had the bigger stack, so I wasn't out. After fighting back to a reasonable position, this same player raised 3x the big blind. I am in the big blind, and decide to go all in. He thinks for a long time and decides to call. He flips over 66 hoping for a race. My 10 10 has me an 80/20 favorite. 10 We all know what happens next. He hits his 6 and I'm a goner. My next tournament saw me go out near the money when my Ad Ah lost to 10d 7d, with a flop of Ac 3d 4d.

I went all in after the flop, only to see him call me. This might look like a 2/1 type situation. But, I'm actually more like a 3/1 favorite here. With only a few days of live poker under my belt, I had seen enough to know that there is no smoking gun here compared to pokerstars. The same, seemingly unbelievable, things happen. Maybe this was a lucky thing for me to see. I now have no delusions about the internet game and play with complete confidence in the system.