Don’t get mad, get even. The importance of keeping control when playing poker.

Want a simple piece of advice to help your poker playing a more profitable past time? It really can be as simple as this – keep control of your play. How do you that? Well, we’ve got the perfect answer!

No matter what level you play poker at keeping control is one of the game’s essential skills. Whether you’re your home game hotshot, or simply enjoy the odd low limit game on Victor Chandler Poker, keeping your cool at the table will boost your bankroll. Losing it – known as going on tilt or steaming - can be disastrous.

We’ve all seen a player go on tilt. It’s like a snowball effect. They start playing badly, get involved in too many hands, and call when they should fold hoping to hit miracle cards.

As their stacks dwindle they chase their losses by bluffing. They raise too much with weak cards and then attempt to push callers out of the pot by continuing the bluff. It gets messy and expensive. Hours of diligent play building a bankroll can be wiped out in 20 minutes of madness.

The best way to avoid going on tilt is to understand why players do it and recognise the warning signs when you’re at risk of steaming yourself.

There are many reasons why a player goes on tilt. These can range from something as simple as sitting down at a game in a bad mood to being wound up by others players’ comments and actions.

But the biggest reason is suffering a bad beat. You out play an opponent, build a big pot, are working out how to maximise your winnings – and then they hit two running cards at ridiculous odds to scoop the chips.

The red mist descends, you want to get even, start chasing those losses and in doing so lose even more.

But there is an alternative – there is a way to stay calm and controlled after suffering a bad beat! Our intrepid Big Slick reporter was chatting with a player recently after watching him get knocked out of a tournament following a bad beat that was so savage you had to wonder what he’d done to offend Lady Luck.

Why was he so calm we asked? The answer was surprisingly simple – he’ll never suffer a bad beat as bad as the worst he’d heard of. And while bad beats can be soul-destroying luck evens itself out in the long run so why fret? Just take a deep breath and accept it.

What a refreshing attitude thought our man on the spot! But what about this bad beat? Enquiring further our man heard possibly the worst bad beat story of all time. Forget your calculators to work out the odds – this is so improbable we’re still scratching our heads trying to figure out how you could work them out even if you had one!

The story involves poker legend TJ Cloutier and is actually recounted in his excellent book, written with Tom McEvoy, Championship No-Limit & Pot Limit Hold’em.

And refreshingly for a bad beat story, the person telling the story wasn’t the one that fell foul of it – Cloutier was actually the beneficiary of possibly the most outrageous good fortune in the history of poker!

Cloutier was playing in a no-limit Hold’em cash game at the famous Bicycle Club with Al Krux, a great player himself, who’s made several final tables at the World Series of Poker.

Krux was running bad and, picking up pocket kings, put all his remaining chips - $435 – into the pot. The player to Krux’s left was having a massage and, with his cards held high, the player to his left saw them. It mattered not. Both players mucked their cards.

Play got round to Cloutier who, holding pocket 10s and seeing what other players had done, figured he was probably ahead and the most he could lose anyway was $435 so he called.

But the dealer hadn’t noticed the call and dropped the deck on the muck. A ruling was made and the dealer reshuffled all the cards, except Cloutier’s and Krux’s, before dealing out the five community cards.

The flop came K-10-4 giving both players trips. But the turn card was the case 10 giving Cloutier quads and winning the hand for him.

Unlucky for Krux yes. But now for the real part of the story…

The guy who had been having a massage announced that he had thrown pocket 10s – as the player to his left had seen. So the only way Cloutier could win that pot was for the dealer to make a mistake that lead to a ruling which meant the other two tens were shuffled back into the pack only to be dealt again as community cards!

So next time you suffer a bad beat remember this - Al Krux had it worse than you will ever have! Just have a laugh at his expense, keep control and keep your chips.