Two Plus Two Newer Archives - Carpal Tunnel Post: My Take On Tilt

Tilt. If you've played poker for any amount of time you've experienced it.

You flop top set with KK on a board of K58 rainbow. You lead, get raised by an obvious table-monkey, and cheer. You happily 3bet all-in and raise your fist triumphantly in the air as your push gets called. You already picture yourself stacking those chips (or virtual chips) in a huge pyramid.

Turn card: 7

Ha, couldn't have helped the monkey.

River card: 6

SHIP IT!

But wait - why are all the checks being pushed to the monkey???

The table-monkey flips over his K9 for the runner-runner straight.

It is like the 4th of July in your head, and your poor mouse doesn't even know what it's in for. You scream. You yell. "XXXX you, you XXXXing donkey XXXXX" is typed out into the chat box with such anger that the desk shakes with every keystroke.

Steaming. Fuming. Pissed off at how this moron could go all-in with TPBK and a backdoor straight draw.

You rebuy.

Revenge is the only thing on your mind right. You want back the money you rightfully earned and Senior Donk took from you with his insane luck.

Your mouse winces each time you click Fold Fold Fold. You get restless and frustrated by not receiving one playable hand. And then it comes - you get AJs in the cutoff.

RAISE!

Fold, fold. Gets to our friend, Table-Monkey - reraise.

WTF? No way. Not this time, pal. You push - still steaming.

Instacall.

You don't even remember the flop, turn or river. All you see is the AA flipped over and another 100BBs being shipped over to Senior Donk; who now has taken you for 200BBs.

What happened??? One event sparked a total change in momentum of your entire session.

You tilted.

I wanted to make this (obscenely long) post about the two different kinds of tilt: Loser's Tilt and Winner's Tilt, and also briefly talk about ways to cope with and prevent tilting in general.

First, is the most obvious one we've all dealt with - Loser's Tilt.

This happens when an event takes place like listed above. You are an overwhelming favorite in a hand, and the villain catches a miracle card(s). Common reactions, obviously, are anger and disgust - both of which pave the path of you misplaying a future hand. You feel a need to win that money back as soon as possible, and in doing so, you set yourself up for more future losses. We do this by: opening up your preflop standards too much, raising/calling raises with marginal hands, not keeping position/stats/reads in mind during a hand, and becoming way too aggressive.

I think we've all been in those situations are know them pretty well.

The second form of tilt (that I didn't even THINK of until it was brought to my attention) is Winner's Tilt. You may think, "How can you tilt when you're winning??". Picture this - You are on a heater and playing well. You're getting hands and they are hitting hard. Next thing you know you're up 150BBs and life is g00t. You laugh at the meager plebs and look down on them from your mountain of chips. Then winner's tilt comes into play - but the scary thing about winner's tilt is that you don't even realize it! You find yourself playing marginal hands and pushing even the thinnest of edges because in your mind you're thinking, "Hey, I'm up big - I can afford to make this call. I'm running hot anyways, right?". So if you don't hit (don't worry, you were behind the whole time anyways), your stack starts to dwindle. But it doesn't faze you! You're still having a winning session, right? All is good, right???

No, by making these poor decisions and losing these "small" pots you’re basically burning money. Getting a deep stack should allow you some opening up of your game, but not to somehow rationalize making -EV decisions.

Now that we've looked at the two different forms of tilt, let's look at way to cope/deal with tilt and ways to prevent tilting in the first place.

There are infinite ways to cope or deal with tilt. I believe it depends on the person as to what calms them down the best. In almost all cases, it involves doing something OTHER than playing poker. For a lot of people, taking a break from poker altogether for a little while is the only way. Watch some TV, play some video games, read a book, go outside, hang with friends, etc - just get your mind off the game. For others, reviewing their plays for the session, posting/reading on 2p2, or reading their poker books help.

The main goal in dealing with tilt is realizing that in the long run, the bad beats won't matter and that you'll come out on top more times than not. It's a numbers game! You get your money in as the favorite and overall you WILL make money. As SSNL players, we thrive on these people sucking out on us. Otherwise we'd be sitting at tables full of 4_2's, AJs, dbtiels, quarks, etc. - which I personally would hate.

Everyone goes through the swings, as it is the nature of the beast. The sooner you can learn to roll with the punches, the better off your game will be. Your goal should be to be able to shrug off bad beats because you know that the short run is just the battle, not the war.

This brings me to preventing tilt from happening in the first place. This part is more psychological, so I would love if some of the Psych regs could come in and shed some light on how to get in the proper mindset for poker. My practical suggestion for preventing tilt is being properly bankrolled. If you provide yourself a nice cushion to soften out the variance, then hopefully you will not flip out when you drop few buy-ins to bad beats. I've personally found that when I've got a nice BR for the level I'm playing on, my tilting has dropped dramatically.

Well, I hope this wasn't TOO long and it provided something helpful.

If you don't get anything from this thread, I hope that no one follows my lead and blows their entire BR in one night by tilting your face off and jumping into a game that you are severely underrolled for.

<3 for SSNL.