Dear Speedkills,

Although I have suffered some awful bad beats (there is no way they will be balanced out with lucky wins in my life no matter how long I live), I think it is pointless to argue about which is worse, horseracing bad beats or poker bad beats. The columnist in the racing form argued that poker bad beats were worse than horseracing bad beats. I will repeat myself -- that is a grotesque joke.

The examples of absurd big dollar bad beats in horseracing are endless. In horseracing, you have to deal with Jockeys, stewards, placing judges, grounds crew, crazy fans who run out into the track (remember Preakness day a few years back), deer, geese, electricity, it goes on and on. If these situations arise when you're in the middle of your once in a lifetime exotic, what do you do? You suffer a legendary bad beat. The bad beats in poker are just not as unusual -- even if they occur at the final table of the WSOP and you are chip leader. Lets say there is only one possible river card to help a person out of the 44 cards left (you have 2; he has 2; and the board has 4), that is a 43-1 shot coming in. Basically, a roulette ball landing on the right number -- it has to land somwhere, they are all roughly the same chance. Things like that are normal course. They are not 1,000,000-1 occurences coming from nowhere to wreck everything. Even if the river beat happens twice in a row to wipe you out, that is less than 2,000-1.

More importantly, the person who catches you on the river is catching a card that by design is supposed to be there. The deck has a certain number of cards, and they are all equally possible of coming out. If the card comes out, you can curse fortuna for bringing it out at that time, but you cannot say it was collosally unusual that the 6 of spades was dealt. That card was a part of the game.

Remember, the columnist in the racing form said that bad beats in poker were worse than in horseracing because the bad beat in poker is caused by a bad player playing hands that should not have been played. If you are at the WSOP final table, chances are that none of the other guys at the table is a complete idiot, and they are playing chasing hands for a reason. Maybe they played the 9-10 suited against your AA because there were two other all ins and he had to go all in on SOME hand or else bleed to death and the pot odds made it worth it. Just because the guy pulled any of a straight, a flush, two pair, treys, etc. does not mean you lost a strikingly unusual bad bead. I have seen AA lose a ton of times to chasing hands. Maybe the very next hand you went all in with AA again, but this time another player thought you were blind/ante stealing (in response to your bad beat) and he went all in with 10-10. 10-10 is not a bad hand, if he pulls a third 10 on the river on the very hand after somebody else beat your pocket rockets on the river; this is bad luck, but not exceedingly worse luck than some of the things that have caused guys to lose in the horseracing.

Remember in Saratoga when the placing judges misread the saddlecloth and put the wrong number up? Now, if you are at the final table of the World Series of Poker and only the 6 of spades can beat you and the river is the 6 of clubs but the officials irreversibly declare that the 6 of clubs is actually the 6 of spades, then you just start to get a taste of what horseplayers have to deal with. How can losing a big winning pick six ticket because there is a revolution and they invalidate racing results not be worse than being beaten a few times in a row on the river at the final table of the WSOP?

In the end, I think this is a pointless discussion topic, but, remember, it was the "professional" columnist at the racing form that started this when he wrote that poker bad beats are worse than horseracing bad beats.

Let's all just hope that the DRF poker columns either get better or disappear. Hopefully, the next one will not be the fourth in the series of "Do not go on tilt after a bad beat."

SCM2