Words of Wisdom

I should memorize this:

One thing that you will discover as your game improves is that you will receive way more bad beats than you give out. If it were possible to play perfect poker, a bad beat would be the only way you would ever lose a show-down. Thus as a good player, you mostly get your money in while you are ahead and more and more of your losses will come from bad beats. To make matters worse, because you aren't getting it in behind very often, you almost never get to deliver a bad beat to someone else.

This gives you the impression that the game is somehow unfair to you, but in reality it's just your skill showing through.

This comes courtesy of Loki9 at the Poker Academy hand discussion forums.

To be fair, I should add that I played KK poorly yesterday and caught my 8-outer for a full house and a huge pot, thus bad-beating my opponent something fierce. It was the first bad beat I'd laid on anyone in a long time. And while I was delighted to win the money, I did have a twinge of angst knowing that I'd made a call I shouldn't have on the flop. On the other hand, it was his mistake to call my all-in shove on the river, as there was no way his two pair could have been good at that point (trips, straight, boat... he had so many ways to lose).