Cooler
A cooler is a hand where two players both make something strong enough that all the money goes in and neither of them did anything wrong.
It is the opposite of a mistake and often mistaken for one. When a full house runs into four of a kind, no bet in the hand was avoidable in any useful sense, and reviewing it for errors mostly teaches you to play worse in the ordinary version of the spot.
The word is also the most abused one in poker. A hand only qualifies if a reasonable player holding your cards would have lost the same money, which is a much smaller set of hands than the ones people describe this way.
an example
your cards
board
You hold two aces on a board with an ace and two kings, giving you aces full of kings. The only hand that beats you is exactly two kings, and that hand is not folding either. Both stacks go in and one of them was never getting away.
This example is made up. The real one is in your own hand history: find cooler in your own hands and see how often it came up and what it cost you.
related terms
Bad beat
A bad beat is a hand you lose after getting the money in as the clear favourite, which makes it a story about the cards ...
Variance
Variance is the spread of short term results around the long run average, which is why a run of winning or losing sessio ...
Full house
A full house is three cards of one rank together with a pair of another, ranked first by the three and only then by the ...
next
Knowing the word is not the same as seeing it.
All ten hands in order, with how often each one turns up.