Worst Poker Beat in the History of Mankind.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was playing in a freeroll tourney on pokerstars… (ok - stop laughing)

I was the victim of what I believe to be was the worst beat in Texas Hold-em, ever.

My mind boggles.

A Freeroll tourney, (so - no money lost ,thank goodness) but it was crunch time, 8 entries paid to another satelite tourney, with only 17 people left out of more than 5,000 entrants.

I was 2nd in total chips. (I could have sat out and coasted to a spot in the top 8. But noooooooooooo. Not me. I was just going to play tight.

Ok - picture this.

I’m dealt Aces and I’m first to bet. Big stack is on the button.

Wanting some action, I check. Next smallstack dude goes all-in with tens.

Next larger stack player raises all-in with J’s.

Fold. Next player (4th in total chips) inexplicably calls with deuces.

Sixth player calls all in with pocket 5’s.

Bigstack raises with nothing, (again). I’m only a couple of thousand chips behind him. He raises about 1/4 our total stacks. Big and small blinds fold. I continue to slow-play my bullets and only call. 4th stack calls as well.

Flop time. Ace of spades, Ace of Diamonds, deuce of diamonds.

I almost pass-out. The flop of my dreams! I have four freakin’ BULLETS!!! On the flop no less.

Having flopped the boat, pocket deuces goes all in. Big stack calls. I raise all-in. Big stack calls!!! I am dancing with joy.

Big stack has a five of diamonds and a four of diamonds. Turn is a ten.

River is the 3 of diamonds. Of course.

A gut-shot straight-flush A-5 on the river- to beat my four aces.

:frowning: Worst beat ever!

2

ouch!

3

I knocked a buddy with pocket aces out of a game last week with the most unlikely of inside straights coming through on the river. I saw his life flash before his eyes.

4

It’s a horrible beat and I totally sympathize. At the same time, if I had pocket aces pre-flop and saw five or six others betting, raising and calling, I’d think about going all-in right there. There are now enough chips on the table that chasing everybody out preflop still makes me a ton of chips, and even if I only chase a couple out, the fewer people see the flop against my aces, the more I like it. And maybe your all-in would have gotten big-stack to think twice about calling with crap-crap suited.

Still, the four of a kind on the flop getting outrivered is just painful and wrong. I really do feel for you.

5

Hands like that make me question online poker. Looks too rigged to me. 5 players with pocket pairs, 3 of which are 10 or better? The big stack and second stack getting straight flush and 4 Aces respectively? Looks like the computer was looking to manufacture some action and a bad beat.

Call me a skeptic, but I’ve seen too many weird outcomes like this playing online to feel comfortable with the theory tha online poker is 100% legit.

6

I agree. The odds of this happening in a fair game are long enough to make you seriously consider another explanation.

And big stack calling the OP’s all-in is a wierd move. Unless previous play has been real strange, BS is up against at least an Aces boat. So there’s just one remaining card that will allow him to stay in the game.

7

I totally agree. If you take for granted that all the players are actually on the up-and-up, the commonality of there being so frequent a bad-beat in online poker lends one to think the game is rigged to be more exciting than the real thing. Not saying it’s necessarily biased to any player in particular, just that i’s rigged to creat action and long-shot outcomes. I don’t like that.

Then when you couple that with your point about the seemingly preceint play of the BS, the whole thing seems really suspect.

8

That’s what makes it even more astonishing. I didn’t think the big stack would call my raise with only a flush draw, but he was calling everything at that point.

He became the big stack just a couple of hands previous, after calling all-in with a 10, 9 os, and hitting his outside straight on the river to take down 4 other players.
The guy was loose all night, and lucky.

I was being greedy and wanted to maximize the chips bigstack put in, so I refrained from raising pre-flop.

But, yeah, what are the odds?

I do notice what seems to be a very large number of A’s, K’s on the flops, and a noticeably higher number of boats and flushes made on the river.

Do you think pokerstars is trying to push as many people through these freeroll tourneys as quickly as possible?

I do. :dubious:

I still can’t believe he called the initial raises with a 4-5 suited. But it was not a lot to him at that point. But to chase it after my raise was insane.

Like he knew what was coming…

9

Oh goody, an “online poker is rigged” thread (sort of) that’s not actually on a poker site!

It’s all probability. No one ever says, “wow, what are the odds that 72, T8, Q5 and 94 would all come up in the same hand, the site must be rigged!” But that scenario is close to being just as likely as four pocket pairs hitting on the same hand. No one comments on it because no one notices it. It’s not significant in the context of the game where four big pocket pairs on the same hand is.

Poker sites make plent of money on the rake without needing to rig hands. Factor in that this is a freeroll tournament, with no monetary incentive for the site to rig the hand, and the idea that the hand was manufactured is ridiculous.

It’s especially ridiculous given the number of hands dealt on an online poker site. As I type this I’m popping into a random table on my preferred site. Hand 819,615,880 is being dealt. With trials numbering well over three quarters of a billion, can any card combination really be considered that out of the ordinary from a statistical standpoint?

10

Good point.

With billions of online hands, this had to happen at some point.

But why me?

:slight_smile:

11

Or like he’s an idiot who married his suited connector straight flush draw and got lucky.

Or more probably, like it was a freeroll in which he had no financial investment in the form of a buy-in so he just didn’t give a damn.

Players with no stake in the game play like they have no stake in it. I encourage people trying to learn the game to stay away from freerolls because the play is so far off the norm that it’s useless as anything other than an exercise in “play tight and only go in with the nuts.” You see the same thing in play money games. People don’t care because they can always get more play money so they play stupid hands. It persists into real money play too, if the stakes are low enough. I got outdrawn on a number of times last night playing .25/.50 NL by people who, if they put a second of actual thought into their play, wouldn’t have been in the hands at all. I raised big with AKs and got called by A3os and he caught a 3. No way he should have called. I raised with ATs and got called by Q7 and Q4. They both should have folded to the raise, but they didn’t and the flop came Q74. I raised with KQs and got called by K4os. K came on the flop but so did a 4 so he busted me with 2 pair. He should have mucked that garbage. I had AK run into AA multiple times, hit a K on the flop and went broke. It happens. Doesn’t mean the site is rigged; it means that some people are stupid and get lucky.

12

I agree that players with little or no monetary stake in the game play careless…

but after 4 or so hours of playing, and being so close to the final table, I couldn’t fathom why most of these players weren’t sitting out to make the top 8, let alone understand why the BS would call anything at all.

If I was sitting out, I make the top 8 easy.

But my ego wanting to win the tourney, combined with my dislike of the way the BS played, caused me to continue to play.

Lesson learned. Get to the money, THEN try to win the damn thing.


Otto - Are there better sites than others for low-stakes rookies like me to play?

Sign-up bonuses?   Freebies etc?   I have only tried pokerstars.  I like the interface, but I am open to try others.

Thanks.
13

I’m on a Mac so the only sites I’ve found to play are PokerRoom and its skins. If you’re interested in trying PR, email me for a referral and you’ll get some extra starting play money and also a bonus if/when you start playing real money and earn player points. They have right now I think a 20% first deposit bonus separate from the referral bonus.

14

Couple problems I have with the arguement. First, almost 1 billion hands leaves me a bit skeptical. Thats around 4 hands dealt every second for 10 years. Now, online poker certainly hasn’t been popular that long. Though even it it had, I doubt that many hands are dealt every second (knowing that the average hand takes somehwere around a 90 seconds to play). When you consider that most of the poker sites weren’t even in existence 5 years ago, let along pulling the volume they do today, that places the hands per second somewhere around 7-8. That means that at every second or every day for the last 5 years 70 tables were running at full capacity on that site.

Not impossible, but it would be a hell of a track record.

Next, you say they make enough money to not rig it. I don’t agree with this. Yes, if the volume they claim is close to accurate they are making a hell of alot of money, but I think they have a hell of an incentive to make the game as viral and addictive as possible. People would get bored playing hold-em the way it is actually played in casinos. Its a slow, plodding game. Online it’s faster, but it could still be a cavacade of folded hands. By rigging it (and I’m not saying in any one players favor) so that there are more good hands dealt in a given game you increase the excitement level, number of bets, the activity and ultimately the number of re-buys. There’s a huge advantage to making the game faster and more exciting for them.

Finally, I know the odds on having a straight flush are long, and teh odds on having 4 Aces are long. I don’t know the probablility equation to solve it, but I’m thinking 1 in 800 million might not be that unlikely when you calculate the likelyhood of having both in the same hand.

15

Wow. I’m THAT unlucky.

Depressing.

Well - at least it was a freeroll. :slight_smile:

16

Worst beat, as told from the point of view of my friend.

Dealt, 8 spade, Ace hearts

Flop: Queen, 10, 9 spades.

Raise 50. Everyone by Wearia folds.

Turn: 3 diamond. Raise 100

Wearia calls.

River: Jack of spades.

Straight flush, 8-Q. First one that has ever come up in one of our games. There was a conversation earlier about that fact.

Raise, All in.

Wearia calls all in.

Lays down. Everyone looks in awe at the straight flush.

Except Wearia.

He lays down a Jack diamonds. Then,

The King spade.

I killed his straight flush with my higher straight flush. Ended up winning the game too.

17

A fundamental rule: when the holder of a single card can beat you, be real wary.

18

It’s hard to count active tables on the site because the tables are listed in order of number of players and as people join and leave the tables jump around on the list, but currently there are more than 70 active cash tables in real money NL hold 'em alone. Add to that limit and PL HE tables, Ohama and OH8 tables at L, PL an NL, the stud tables (which are all limit, oddly), the private tables and there are hundreds, if not a thousand, cash tables running at various levels of capacity. That doesn’t take into account the play money ring tables, public and private, and all the multi tournament tables (including tourneys with 2400 players to start so that’s 240 right there for one tourney, times three per day and that’s just the freerolls) and single table tourney tables, real and play, and I don’t have any problem at all with the idea of there being that number of hands dealt.

Popping into a random table, hand 821,008,824 is being dealt. That’s 1,392,944 hands in the last 9 hours and 40 minutes, or roughly 2400 hands per minute. Obviously that level of traffic hasn’t been consistent since PR opened its virtual doors but it wouldn’t take all that long relatively speaking to deal a billion hands even at half that pace.

Players won’t play a crooked game. If it were demonstrated that a particular site were rigged, whether in favor of a certain player or players or just to create action, players would abandon it. Further, even if a site were rigged to create action there’s no way to guarantee that the players holding the cards set to generate the action are going to play them. Yeah, AA vs KK is going to get played, but is AA vs 22, consistently? Or KK vs T7s-which-will-hit-a-straight? Seems like a lot of bother for a site that’s pulling in money hand over fist to go through just to generate a little more of what they’re already getting plenty of. Not to mention that in a tournament situation there is no financial incentive to rig. Once the entry fee is paid and the rake is taken from it, the site isn’t going to make any more off that tourney no matter how the cards fall.

And having dealt 870+ million hands, at one chance in 800 million the quads vs straight flush was overdue.

(yes I know that’s not how probability works and it happened on a different site, just trying to make a humorous point)

19

I’ve been playing for quite some time and I haven’t seen very many bad beats as opposed to real life poker. I’m on PokerStars, too.

The incredible VOLUME of poker being played online guarantees you will hear many more stories of awful beats than you ever did before, because more people are playing poker than ever before, and they’re playing it in the same venue - cyberworld - where they can bitch about the bad beats.

I am playing right now, and I’m in Game # 1,525,445,873. That’s a lot of poker. On one site.

20

It’s not so weird that 4 of a kind and straight flushes show up so often, what is weird is a guy would push tons of money in the pot betting on hitting that single card. I guess we don’t keep track of the times a single card fisher loses, but it just SEEMS like he never does when he’s betting big.