As I pointed out before, there’s a huge difference between these two phenoms in poker. I switched from the sit and go’s to the microstakes cashgames the other day, and what I experienced over there is exactly what you can call a cold deck. Let’s have a look:

You see, I flop a flush but my opponent flops a higher flush. This is called ‘flush over flush’. We can’t do much about it: the stakes are not high enough and the stacks not deep enough to get away from such a hand. Other situations that are known as cold decks occur when it’s dealt KK vs AA preflop or when two players flop a ’set over set’.

Every poker player knows a bad beat is not the same as a cold deck situation. In a bad beat there’s always a donkey involved who played a hand bad and happened to be lucky in the end. In a cold deck situation, there’s not much both players could have done otherwise to avoid the situation they ended up with. I’ve got some good examples today.

I was playing some NLHE at Full Tilt and we were down to three players in sixhanded sit and go. This is what happened:

So after the flop I’m a huge favorite as you can deduct from the percentages of the calculator. My opponent flops his Aces, but that’s isn’t very dangerous at the first sight as I flop a set of eights.  Two cards will have to drop down in my disadvantage to lose the land. Yup… I had to blow off some steam at the spiderman slots for a moment after that hand. After a couple of hours I returned to playing poker, but I decided to play some Pot Limit Omaha at Everest Poker. But there I ended up with the following hand:

So this isn’t really a bad beat but we can call this a cold deck: this is a sick flop but there’s not much to do about it, it simply is the nuts against the second nuts. I flop Kings full of sixes while my opponent is lucky to hold the two remaning sixes in his hand. There’s a very small chance you won’t see all the chips in the middle in this kind of situations. More hands next time, Hold’em, Omaha, whatever: cruelty is everywhere!

I was grinding the $.10/.25 cashgames on PokerStars yesterday and I lost a pot of about 120 BB’s thanks to what you can call a bad beat. Although there are a lot of situations which are worse, it felt like a real classic one.

Maybe it was because the player on my left was already irritating me quite a while. Here’s the hand I’m talking about:

This guy minraises again and I logically call the reraise, considering the pot and implied odds. The flop is very nice, as it’s very likely that I flopped the best hand here. I lead out and when he minraises me again I decide to not fool around any longer. I happen to have outflopped his pair but have to dodge an OESD: I’m a 67% favorite here. River kills me.