Pooh Bah Post tl;dr

[Profish2285]

My current downswing is what is inspiring this post from me. This forum talks alot about strategy and when to do this and when to do that. If villain does A then we do B. Of course it also talks about the topic I am going to discuss, but I feel like I should give it a whirl from a personal perspective. Im talking about tilt and what it does to a player.

First lemme give a little background about myself. I have been playing poker for about 5 years or so but never really took it seriously. I thought I did, but I always managed to donk off my money in one way or another. Either it was due to my terrible bankroll management, or it was due to tilt. What is funny is that much more often than not though, the tilt is what lead to the horrible bankroll management.

Fast forward to the last couple of months, I started to really take the game seriously. I put in $300 and started to play NL25. (I could afford more but I wanted to show myself that I could work from the bottom up.) Well obviously I went back to my old ways and I played NL200. Luckily the session went well and I made about 350. This put my roll at 650 and now I forced myself to stick to NL25. No more excuses, just stick to it and work my way up. During NL25, I ran really well but played meh at best. Thankfully to my heater and my willingness to learn, I made about 450 in a few weeks and jumped to NL50.

At NL50, where I currently am, both good and bad things happened. I started out winning over 1k in about 15k hands, not too bad. Then the downswing came and now it feels like I cant win a hand to save my life. Of course came the tilt again, and while I feel like it forces me to make some pretty bad decisions sometimes while playing, I refuse to let it make me put my whole roll at risk. Instead, I do my best to just stop playing if I feel like I am losing control. Then I go over my hands and post some of them here. After that I try to take an hour or so break and then come back here. I look at my own hands and realize that I know what the right moves are about 90% of the time, I just dont think when I get so frustrated. When its all said and done though, I have almost 50 buy ins right now for NL50 and thats with the poor decisions I have made as a result of running bad. This is something I never would have been able to accomplish if I didnt learn to at least control my bankroll.

What Im getting at is that we must learn to have self control. We can read a million posts about strategy and we can learn that we must do this one in spot and that in another. It is all useless if we cant have the control to utilize the information and the control to keep the bankroll sufficient to tough it out. Im not saying by any means that my problem with tilt is over or that it will be over anytime soon. But with enough play time and everyday that passes that I dont take a shot at 5/10 again, I feel like a few more beats roll of my back. If you tilt easily it will kill your roll and your confidence if you let it. Just turn off the game, punch the floor, yell at the screen, who cares, just dont give away all that hard earned cash to the donks because they got lucky. They have to get lucky sometimes or there wouldnt be a game, we all know this. I wish I could contribute more but I feel like I have alot to learn at this point and hope this will suffice for now.

Thanks to everyone at the forum. You guys have definitely increased my poker knowledge a ton so far and I can only imagine how much more I will have. Just gotta learn to utilize it in the right spots.

[ICMoney]

Yeah, I sometimes get life tilted and just want to donk in some HU matches.

Keep it under control and you'll be heading places.

--and try to find the enter key next time.

Thanks and gl

[Profish2285]

Changed it to make it easier to read.

[Profish2285]

I am curious how others handle these problems, or if they have them at all.

[slush420]

I play on pokerstars and play with a pretty big bankroll in comparison to my limits. When I run bad or tilt, I withdraw a little bit of money like $100 or $200 on my little paytrucard and donk it off on drinks and a good time. It allows me to gain a little perspective on life and how it's not all about "I'm good at poker and should never lose" and more on "we're all human and we get lucky/unlucky and make mistakes in life just like poker" and I think that spending money on things other than poker is what works best for me.

[BevillTheDevil]

[ QUOTE ]
punch the floor

[/ QUOTE ]

this is very bad advice...I did this once and broke my hand (not from poker tho).

[gfejs]

The best way too avoid tilt for me is too play with a huge BR and focus on getting as many hands in as possible... After like 50k hands I review my results and then you truely understand that loosing 3-6 BI on bad beats means nothing in the end.

[Profish2285]

Yea my knuckles still hurt lol

[kolotoure]

I never tilt because of variance it is always because I played a hand bad

[ICMoney]

I just tilted so hard.

ack