Tilter's Annonymous. All tilters welcome. - Page 7

Heisenb3rg · #61 05-18-2007, 04:14 AM

Wow dude great post!

My name is Jordan and I am a tilter.

JavaNut · #62 05-18-2007, 08:19 AM

Why tilt when you can loose your money just as easily playing badly.

I never tilt, nor am I in denial. My shrink has helped me with my golf game, now I don't feel bad when I play badly. He sent me here, because there was nothing he could do about my poker.

Befolder · #63 05-18-2007, 11:09 AM

No offense Guru, but I hope you run bad before our HULA match on Saturday so your confidence is at an all time low. LOL!
[img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Then I hope you run hot as hell after that.

Guruman · #64 05-18-2007, 07:11 PM

If I run bad but play out of my mind I'll still beat you. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Befolder · #65 05-18-2007, 08:19 PM

Then the match shalle be known as "The Battle of Attrition" or the battle of who makes the least mistakes.

Guruman · #66 05-19-2007, 09:21 AM

regressed a bit yesterday, though I can't expect to solve all of my problems immediately and permanently just by thinking about them.

Played probly an A- to B+ type game yesterday. acted just a bit too quick in spots, let my mind wander a little too much, and ran a couple of unsuccessful and probably not profitable bluffs. Tiltblocking continued to be in effect and disturbingly effective.

I maintained my overall discipline though, had a mark at each table, and didnt play super long. 32 mins, one table full ring the other three handed. 95 hands, net loss 15 bb. At that point I recognized my tilt and went to play Zelda instead. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I continue to search for appropriate analogies to my tilt so that I may take analogous corrective actions.

I think the BDD analogy may have been a bit extreme, and the treatments to that disorder don't correlate as exactly as I'd hoped.

Here's another: My tilt is an immaturity in my game. Because I know better, its the petulant child in my game that says 'no' even though it knows it'll be punished.

A little while back, Dr Ray Levy was one of my clients. I recorded several of his seminars dealing with difficult and even abusive children. Over and over his theme was this:

Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practices makes perfect.

His point was that if you punish a child for bad behavior without teaching the child good behavior, the child will continue to misbehave because he does not know what adjustments to make.

An example I remember from him was a child that would curse at his mother every day on the way home from school. He'd call her names and use foul language. She tried punishing him, feeding him, appeasing him, etc but the behavior never stopped. Dr Levy informed her that the best way to resolve bad behavior is to tell the child "when you curse at me on the drive home from school you're telling me that you don't know how to behave appropriately in that situation. So we're going to drive back to school, you'll walk up to the car from the steps, get in and we'll try that again."

The parent does not have control of the child's behaviour. The parent does have control of the car.

I may not have control of my tilt's behaviour.
I do have control of how, when, and against whom I play.

Dr Levy's next step is this:
Once the child has demonstrated that he is capable of getting in the car and driving home, you can't just assume the problem is fixed. Initially, the mother and son went through the machinations of getting in the car, driving a few blocks, going back to school and repeating the process 15 times on the child's next offense. The next day the boy almost made it home before bursting into foul and abusive language. They held up dinner and went through the routine again. He was great for the next several weeks, then another outburst on the way home from school. Again the practiced appropriate behavior and from that point he never acted badly in the car on the way home from school.

The boy's problem was that initially he hadn't developed the social coping mechanisms to deal with stress and hunger at the end of the day. By practicing what he had to do in order to actually get freakin home at the end of the day he developed those mechanisms as well as a much less antagonistic relationship with his mother. Just getting home once without abusive language wasnt enough. He had to get home on good behavior repeatedly after each offense.

There's an obv poker correlary there, but I have to get to work. More later.

marchron · #67 05-19-2007, 01:44 PM

I hit him until he shuts up.

NB: I am not actually a parent.

Guruman · #68 05-19-2007, 08:29 PM

not trying to turn this thread into a blog or anything, but I figured I'd post one more observation:

had another good session today. ran stupid hot, but also played well and felt A gamish throughout. I was making and using notes like crazy. comptetition was a little tougher than i'd like to play against at 1/2, but I kept getting paid off with big hands so it wasnt that tough.

played 38 minutes and won 60 bets in 160 hands. mostly 4-7 handed.

Tiltblocker again kept me focused on the game and not the roll. I'm kind of sickened by how much difference it's making.

After I knew I had been running hot for a while I peeked at the roll, widened my eyes, put the tiltblocker back over

..and proceeded to completely check out mentally.

fortunately it was less than one orbit before i realized what had happened and I pulled the plug on the session.

Geez.

Sessions are staying short for now, but really it seems like about 30 mins is all I can sustain. kinda crappy but I should have expected this to be the case. I refuse to play at any lower level than A- if I can help it. This means that I don't play a lot. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Guruman · #69 05-19-2007, 08:52 PM

more thoughts over IM with bbushu:

[19:33] guruman: here's what i've been thinking:
[19:33] guruman: i kind of alluded to it at the end of my tilter's thread
[19:33] guruman: in order to play our A game, we have to continually practice being in that mode
[19:33] guruman: focused, observant, patient
[19:34] guruman: when we play any other game but our A game - even for fun, our A game may suffer
[19:34] bbushu: i see
[19:34] guruman: because we're conditioning our minds to think that this crappy version of poker is still poker
[19:34] guruman: and we should be conditioning ourselves to think that the excellent version of poker is poker
[19:34] guruman: the thing is that great poker is hard to play
[19:34] guruman: and boring.
[19:34] guruman: [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
[19:35] bbushu: heh
[19:35] bbushu: sometimes
[19:35] bbushu: HU makes one apprecaite the subtle, tho
[19:35] guruman: true, great hu poker is tremendously interesting.
[19:35] guruman: although, the more interesting it gets the less likely it is that you should be in the game.
[19:35] bbushu: lol
[19:35] bbushu: well sometimes it can be really fun to just passively outplay a really aggro villain
[19:36] guruman: agreed, though that's less interesting than re-bluffing him [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
[19:36] guruman: I think the key for me will be to continually try to practice the A game.
[19:36] guruman: to REALLY ingrain what that game is in my mind.
[19:36] guruman: I think i haven't played to my potential in a while.
[19:37] guruman: after reviewing my play across the downswing I got kind of upset at the number and level of mistakes i was making.
[19:37] guruman: and not obscure marginal stuff, but stuff that I clearly know better than to do.
[19:37] bbushu: i see
[19:37] bbushu: yeah its hard to look at that stuff, huh?
[19:38] guruman: Because I was in denial about whether I was playing well, I deluded myself into thinking that some of those decisions were actually good poker.
[19:38] bbushu: hell yeah i do that too
[19:38] guruman: I had conditioned myself to think that bad poker was good poker.
[19:38] guruman: I need to condition myself to think that good poker is good poker.
[19:39] guruman: the hard part is actually practising good poker.
[19:39] bbushu: its hard to do at smaller limits
[19:39] bbushu: bc people like you and i are so frustrated to play small
[19:39] guruman: becuause it involves a lot more folding than I like to do. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
[19:40] bbushu: im same way
[19:40] guruman: if I have a solid reason for every action i'm on my game.
[19:40] guruman: i've played for far too long without having a reason for every single action that isn't 'initiative'
[19:41] guruman: i know where my potential is, and over the last severl months i was probably playing at 60%
[19:41] guruman: which is losing poker frankly - especially vs wpex competition.
[19:42] guruman: i say F that man. I can beat these guys if I just tilt less.
[19:42] bbushu: yeah the games there are tough dude
[19:42] guruman: its not rocket science.
[19:42] guruman: if eric lindauer can just cruise up through those ranks on a whim, then i can do it with good play.
[19:42] guruman: its all about tilt control.
[19:43] guruman: the other thing that tilt control brings is the ability to better identify leaks.
[19:43] guruman: when you tilt, you know better.
[19:43] guruman: when you leak, you don't.
[19:43] guruman: so when things are hard and you're not tilting, you're probably leaking and can then address it.

bbbushu · #70 05-19-2007, 08:54 PM

oh how the wyoming middle school spelling bee champ has fallen