Online-poker forums have turned the gambler’s time-honored “bad beat” story — a tale of a seemingly surefire victory gone wrong — into a literary art. A timely literary art. When it comes to online poker, bad-beat stories entertain an inevitable, if unspeakable, contemporary worry: the Internet is rigged. And who doesn’t brood on that from time to time? Facebook is taking our data; our surfing patterns are being tracked; the bill for all this free info is bound to come due someday.

Someone on Wikipedia defines it with uncommon eloquence: “ ‘Bad beat’ is a subjective term for a hand in which a player, who had what appeared to be strong cards, nevertheless loses.” In a bad beat, four aces are always losing to a fluke straight flush, and some idiot opponent is always lucking into great cards at a statistically improbable time. An exemplary bad-beat narrative sounds like this: “I went all-in on the flop with aces, the board was AKQ rainbow, got called by 57 suited who also called my huge raise preflop, and lost to runner runner flush.” (Thank you, Doron Singer at Part Time Poker.)

Whether or not poker interests you, the bad-beat story is a form to study; everyone needs to know how to tell one. It’s an especially useful genre during a recession. With its combination of numbers, magic, hunches and statistics, the bad-beat story furnishes a nice range of narrative devices to frame a lament about losing, while making it crystal clear that the loss wasn’t your fault.

Bad-beat stories might be considered the manly answer to a more feminine narrative: the “vanishing date” story. This is the one that bemoans how, in spite of how good you looked, how little you talked and how carefully you refrained from texting him afterward, your date still (unaccountably) didn’t ask you out a second time: It’s not painful; it’s just really weird. And if the honest, jerky reply to a vanishing-date story is “He’s just not that into you,” then the equally honest, equally jerky response to a bad-beat story is “Face it: you lost.”