For the most part it hurts your mindset, but mental game coach Jared Tendler has a guide for productive bad beat venting.

Jared Tendler

Most of the common poker psychology literature warns players not to tell bad beat stories and if you have followed my work, you might assume I would too. It is true that a proclivity to tell bad beat stories is a sign of a mental game leak and a misunderstanding of variance, but believe it or not there is some mental game benefits to venting once in a while.

It’s not that I want my clients to tell bad beat stories, more that there is an inherent problem that comes when you bottle the desire to tell them up. Poker is always going to present you with unjust hands and some of them are particularly cruel, especially when they are in major events like the WSOP.

When you bottle these things up, the negative thoughts swirl around your head, which can actually drive you to despair. When you allow yourself to vent, you get those toxic thoughts out of your head and allow your brain to click back in to thinking rationally again.

Productive venting

Have improvement as a goal when you vent

If you are going to vent, I suggest a more productive way to do it is to get a piece of paper and write out everything that is swirling around your head. Not just details of the hand itself but all the random thoughts and emotions associated with it. You will get much more out of your head this way and my clients have commented that this has a much more cathartic and tangible benefit. (They’ve also found it helps them sleep better.)

This will also provide you with a document which you can review later when you have a clearer head, and you may just uncover some interesting insights into the hand and/or your own mental game. This method is also handy because you can do it while alone, and spare your friends the pain of having to listen. Some of you do this anyway when you post bad beats on a poker forum.

To determine when bad beat stories are a potential problem, look at the intent behind the action. If you open a thread or approach a friend, are you looking for advice or confirmation that you were cursed? As you can imagine, the problems come when you are not trying to improve, and you are just looking for commiserations.

You really don’t want confirmation anyway that you are the unluckiest player in the world, because this will only reinforce every time you believe you ran bad, even when you didn’t. It will stop you working on your game, because what is the point of working hard if you think you are just going to get sucked out on anyway?

Getting defensive

Are you defensive when you get feedback?

One final piece of advice is to try and notice where you get defensive with other people. What feedback do you not like? What do you find yourself cursing under your breath about when somebody replies to your bad beat story? Whatever you get defensive about is probably exactly what you need to work on either mentally or tactically.

If you find yourself arguing back when somebody says you played too loose a range, or bet too small, if you are really fighting against it because you don’t want it to be true, this is likely your weak spot. If you notice that you don’t like opinions that contradict your own, this is evidence of a weakness in confidence. It hurts in the moment, but this is good news, the bad beat has identified an area for you to improve.

For venting to be productive, there has to be a glimmer of hope you can improve, either by getting better as a player, or getting better at handling bad beats. If you are just moaning for the sake of it, or because at some level you quite enjoy it, then it is a problem.

Do you tell too many bad beat stories? Let us know in the comments:

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