by Barbara Connors
Poker players put up with a lot. Obnoxious opponents, unhealthful food, and the ever present threat of bad luck. No matter how skilled you are or how hard you work at making the correct decisions, you’re always at the mercy of cold cards and cruel suckouts. You can play your heart out and still go broke. But for all the slings and arrows we endure at the poker table, perhaps no single blow is more crushing than the cooler. In a way, a cooler is like a bad beat on steroids. The victim of a bad beat loses a large chunk of chips but the victim of a cooler will often lose everything. A cooler hand is powerful—often it’s the second or third nuts—making it virtually impossible for most players to get away from. As a result, the only players who are likely to worry about being behind when holding a cooler are either the weak-tight kind who are always seeing monsters under the bed, or players who have a phenomenal ability to read their opponents.
Another distinction between a cooler and a bad beat is the sense of injustice—or lack thereof. If you raise before the flop with pocket kings and are called by a moron in the big blind who wants to see a flop with Q-4 suited, and then the flop comes down 4-4-Q, that’s a bad beat. But if you raise with pocket kings and the moron in the big blind wakes up with a pair of aces, and his aces hold up, that’s a cooler. In both cases you got very unlucky. In the first case, your bad luck arrived when the moron hit his dream flop. In the second case, you were doomed before you even looked at your cards.
Set-over-set is another typical scenario for a cooler. Flopping a set is one of the best feelings in poker, one that conjures up visions of slowplays and checkraises and huge pots just waiting to be dragged our way. Unless the board is coordinated to support a straight or a flush, even bottom set is considered to be a powerhouse. And it usually is. Barring a draw-happy board, any player who holds second or third set has every right to expect that he’s going to win and every reason to get his money in the pot. That’s why coolers are so devastating. Whether it’s setover- set, boat-over-boat, or a premium pocket pair that’s ever-so-slightly out-pipped by an opponent’s—one way or the other your chips are going into the middle. If not all of them, then at least a significant portion. And when it’s over and those chips are gone and you’re left with the knowledge you didn’t do anything wrong.
You didn’t fail to adequately protect your hand. You just lost. And while the player who suffers a bad beat can vent his frustration by moaning about luckboxes who call when they should fold, the player who has been coolered has no such recourse. Only the reassurance that he played the hand as well as could reasonably be expected and s**t just happens sometimes. That’s poker.
Coolers are an unfortunate but inevitable part of the game, so the real issue is damage control—as in, don’t let a cooler put you on tilt. Because they lack the suck-out factor, coolers aren’t quite as tilt-inducing as a regular bad beat—but losing a large amount of money on one single hand is naturally upsetting no matter what the circumstance. Assuming that you haven’t lost all of your chips, or can rebuy, it’s critical that you move onto the next hand with calm emotions and a clear head. If you’re not sure you can do that, a break is in order. Five minutes, five hours, five days—however long it takes to banish the bad feelings. There’s no use in getting heated over a cooler.
Barbara Connors is a sucker for classic old movies, science fiction, and the St. Louis Cardinals. Her life’s ambition is to figure out the unusual behavior patterns of that unique breed of humans who call themselves poker players. Contact her at fyreflye222@yahoo.com.
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