How to help someone with Tilt Control (long)

[Chancery]

My best buddy has a serious problem with going on Tilt, particularly after suffering a bad beat. He will sit down and play out of his league and blow significant chunks of his bankroll in ordinately short periods of time.

He's a really good player, and we've both helped each other's game immensely, and I hate to see him annihilate his profits in the matter of a couple of hours.

There's been three concrete examples of him doing this so far this year: First, he won a tournament for $1700, then took some more money to sit his bankroll at $2500 after an original $20 deposit. The next day, he sat down with $500 in a $1/2 NL ring game and flopped the nuts with AK on a Q 10 J board. His opponent put him all in on the flop, and he merrily called the opponents Q9 suited, only to have the turn and river come running 10s to bust his broadway. He then proceeded to blow the remaining $2000 in under a day.

Next, I loan him $10 off my account, and within about 2-3 weeks, he's gotten the $10 up to $5,000, A feat I find impressive. So, he sits down at a $5/10 NL ring game with $2,500 and his rockets are busted on the river against AK suited who sucks out the flush. Wisely, he cashes out his remaining $2,500 in a kind of panicky move.

Finally, last night/this morning we were playing some SnGs, single tables and heads up and doing mediocrely-- I was up about $50, he was down a couple dollars. It's 8am, so I fall asleep, while he keeps playing on my account. When I wake up, he's managed to lose my whole $1k + bankroll, claiming he went on tilt after losing an all in with AK against 10-3.

I've tried to tell him to limit what he sits down with at a table to just 10%, and to never play stakes you're uncomfortable in-- but all this seems to fly out the window, especially after taking a bad beat.

I know he's a good player, and has some serious skills-- but this is such a major flaw in his game that he needs to address it if he ever expects to be a decent player. Anyone have any advice out there?

[Dane S]

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He's a really good player

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First thing's first: this statement is false. If he has a tilt problem, your friend is NOT a good poker player no matter how well he plays when he's off tilt. I see statements like this as a way of ignoring reality and denying the problem. The goal of poker is to win money and your friend doesn't do that. He's a BAD poker player because he loses money. Acknowledging his glaring leak in this way instead of isolating it from the rest of his game is helpful I think in that it makes it harder to sweep discipline under the rug when tilt comes on. Correcting tilt is a difficult feat of cognitive reprogramming and it is probably quite a bit tougher than learning good poker strategy in the first place. The chronic tilter usually wishes to solve the problem without serving the necessary time in the trenches painstakingly changing his habitual thought processes, but I haven't seen this attitude find any success. You correct tilt by not submitting to the seductive call of abandoning responsibility for your actions WHEN it calls to you. Eventually, by refusing over and over and over to submit, your discipline becomes stronger than these childish emotional urges, and after a long time you barely feel them anymore.