Among the best of the bad
Spend a minute with a poker player and there’s a good chance you’ll hear a bad beat story. There’s nothing worse than listening to someone bemoan his or her luck. Most players don’t care about any bad beat stories but their own. I know I don’t.
As a poker player and a tournament reporter for Poker News, I’ve either experienced or witnessed every bad beat under the sun. From three players all flopping sets to quads losing to quads, there’s not a bad beat story you could tell me that I haven’t already seen withmy own eyes.
The key to handling bad beats is keeping them in perspective. They happen to everyone, and there have been bad beats that have cost players hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I recently saw one.
It happened in late March in the European Poker Tour’s Malta Main Event, a tournament that attracted 895 players and had a prize pool of 4,340,750 euros (about $5 million). The winner of the tournament would take home more than 800,000 euros ($866,320), and with 10 players left, Bart Kuiper of the Netherlands still had a shot at it. That is, until one of the worst bad beats I’ve ever documented crushed his hopes and dreams.
In Level 26, with blinds at 20,000-40,000 with an ante of 5,000, a short-stacked Antonin Duda of the Czech Republic moved all in for 535,000 fromthe small blind. Kuiper, who was also short stacked, called off for 490,000 from the big blind. Kuiper was at risk with the A ♦♠9 , which was well in front of Duda’s 8 ♥♠4 .
Granted, Kuiper wasn’t favored by a large margin when the chips went in (he had a 66.19% chance compared with Duda’s 33.38% chance), but when the flop came down5 ♠♣♥A K , giving Kuiper top pair, the Dutchman became a massive 95.25%t favorite. All Duda could do to win the pot was catch either running eights, fours, an eight and a four for two pair, or a six and a seven for a straight. There was a mere 4.75% chance of that happening.
The 6 ♥ turn kept the improbable draw alive, but still there was still only a 9.09% chance of a seven appearing on the river. Of course, you know where this is going— it is a bad beat story, after all.
Duda caught the “seven from heaven” when the 7 ♣ spiked on the river.
Kuiper was devastated, and rightfully so. Onesecond he was essentially ensured a double-up, and two cards later he was out of the tournament in 10th place for 49,700 euros— a nice payday but a far cry from 800,000 euros. Duda went on to finish seventh, good for108,200 euros.
So tell me: Can you top that bad beat story?