Why do we write about bad beats?

Noel left this comment on a prior entry: "Bad beats have no place in our thoughts. Only poor decisions. We cant control suckouts we can only control our decisions."

He's right, of course, and I think that we all know this. Many of us, including me, have said something along these lines in our blogs at one time or another, and then not too soon afterwards, a bad beat (or a cooler, or whatever...I'll refer to the whole category as beats) creeps in. On the major poker forums, they've created specific forums to bitch about beats because otherwise they fill up the strategy forums. I think that BBV has more traffic than the strategy forums on 2p2!

So, if we all know we're not supposed to worry about them, why do we write about them? It's one thing to steam over them at the table....we're not supposed to do that either, but it's obviously difficult sometimes to shrug off the bad things right as they happen. But for the most part, we don't write blogs as we're playing (well, we shouldn't!). We write them afterwards, when we should have had some time to decompress, at least a little, from the specific hands in the session.

I think there are a number of reasons we write about them, to varying degrees of benefit. Not that there's a complete list below, but here are some reasons.

Therapy. This is probably the "best" reason. We're trying hard to not let beats affect our play, but if they do, we need to minimize the impact to whatever extent we can. Venting about something that happened to you helps you get over it. If writing about a beat somewhere (blog, forum, AIM) helps you put it behind you more quickly, then it's good to do that. In parallel, we should work on not letting beats affect us in the first place...but once they do affect you, it's time to minimize the damage. Sometimes, just writing about them is enough to let them go. Sometimes, it helps to get some empathy back...we've all been there, you're not alone, etc.

Education. Another "good" reason. Obviously when your aces go all in against kings preflop and a king spikes, it's a bad beat. Or if your kings go up against aces and the aces hold, it's a cooler. But some spots are not so clear, and we write about them to get feedback that we really didn't make that bad of a play, because when we lose a few big pots, we question ourselves and lose confidence. We want to make sure that we're not playing incorrectly. I've written before that one of my biggest fears in my own poker development is that I'm not recognizing my own bad play, and just chalking things up as coolers and suckouts. Most of us need to take more accountability for our results, I guess a few here and there need to take less, but in any event resolving confusion about bad play vs. bad beat does help to calibrate the amount of accountability we should take.

Entertainment. Some people like reading about bad beats (for a number of reasons...maybe the subject of a different post?). Others of us like providing content that people like to read. I guess some people feel genuinely amused at what other players are capable of, and so write for their own entertainment, too. Or it could be related to therapy in the sense that you're either going to laugh or cry/scream/break a mouse.

Proof. I wasn't sure what to call this reason, actually. The idea is that the writer wants to prove that he's really not that bad a player...that without these freak occurrences, they'd win more and maybe play at higher stakes by now. The old, "I'm losing, but it's just variance" mentality. We want see ourselves and have others see us as good players, in spite of negative results. I'm sure that's one of the reasons I write about them sometimes (...took a shot at 200NL, but you wont' see me there because I took too many beats...I would still be there if I weren't so unlucky...sound familiar?).

The funny thing here is that I personally don't believe I've ever read anything about a bad beat that made me think more of the writer as a good player. If I thought they were nothing special before, I thought it afterwards. If I thought they were good before, I probably still thought they were good afterwards...although there are a couple guys I've probably downgraded my opinion of them after reading one too many bad beat stories with nothing to counter it. I doubt that I am alone in that regard.

A related funny thing happens when we write about the beats to prove that we're really not that bad, sometimes. We end up getting an education. How many times have you written or read a bad beat post in which someone comes back and says, "OP, you played that hand horribly!"