I have studied and played chess for just about my entire life and poker for seven years. I play live here in Hawaii every Tuesday and Thursday at ungodly high raked games and do well. Last week Tuesday I played about thirty games of chess that were full of tilt-rage aggression and miss calculation due to a silly blunder against an inferior opponent around game five. I recognized the tilt and played with that feeling the entire day and fortunately me for me the only thing at risk was my rating and not my bankroll. I decided not to play poker that day.


I'm curious if any of you more mental-game experienced players would think whether my tilty attitude from chess would carry over to the felt or if there's some kind of a mental reset switch because it's a different game?

yes i've found it carries over across games. the punching bag is your friend

I thought that it would! What was super interesting to me was that the type of tilt I've experienced in chess and in poker is nearly mirrored. Over aggression, entitlement, recklessness.

Yes unless you are a master at compartementalising (in which case you will probably not be prone to tilt in the first place), the tilt is more about who you are than about the game. One could argue that poker has more sources for tilt than chess (but I don't know chess enough to be sure about that)
The only difference I can see is that in poker, if and once you integrated the fact that being the best player is far from garanteeing you a win, maybe it's easier to shrug off a mistake and a loss (while in chess I guess a better player should almost always win if he is playing his A-game against a lesser player)

There are ways to work on it though and while I don't know about chess, poker literature and training videos have plenty of content about this.

[QUOTE=scheier;51878032
There are ways to work on it though and while I don't know about chess, poker literature and training videos have plenty of content about this.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the response! Tilt is something I've been actively working on for a year and I've made massive improvements but it's still an issue (especially online). I just bought Jared Tendlers The Mental Game Of Poker, stoked to read it.

I am pretty sure tilt doesn't only travel between games but basically through all aspects of life.

A bad day at work or drive home right before starting to play might make you tilt after the first minor bad beat or cooler. And ending your poker session on tilt might bother you for the rest of the day.

Most people don't know this, but pretty much the sole purpose of all Buddha's lessons was to help us develop concentration. For thousands of years since then, his students have been working out ways to overcome emotional assaults so as to enable them to concentrate better... which is more than a little useful for a poker player! If you want to learn about tilt you might well want to look into that.

The problem is that alllll Buddhism is about this. I've been studying his logic for a while now, and as the subject is so broad I feel I should direct you a little.

There are three study routes that that jump out at me.

- There is the traditional way, learning from guides etc etc. Just research Buddhism and their understanding of emotions etc etc.
- You could also meditate on the feeling or emotion. You simply concentrate on that feeling of tilt. Whenever your mind sways, you just bring your awareness back. The feeling will disappear quick sharp if you do that. Disappear, or intensify lol.
- Or if your more sporty by nature, there is a physical way by just practicing yoga.

Your goal here is to understand the emotions better. Being able to recognise feelings like tilt as they happen is already quite advanced by my understanding. In loads of ways it seems like we poker players are secretly studying buddhist logic. We play a mind game. If those buddhists are correct, we were probably all hardcore monks in our past lives.

I agree that mindfulness is a very important part of being a winning player, at least, it is for me. I listened to, and took to heart, Tommy Angelo's series "The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment"

There's too much to go into in a short post - I recommend finding and listening to it. He also has a book "Elements of Poker" that is worth reading.

I found that practicing mindfulness had a lot of other upsides in my life, also.

Really knowing, understanding and accepting the concepts and possible outcomes goes a long way.

If you understand and accept that heads-up your aces will lose about 20% of the time, you don't go on a rant about bad beats when they get cracked. You will make a different decision, maybe to just accept it, or perhaps putting in more volume to level out the variance.

If someone at the table is obnoxious, I'm not going to let it affect my game. If Drunk and Rude Guy is at my table, that's good for me. Other players might tilt or lose concentration, but I won't, which gives me an edge. If he says my wife is a whore, I know that my job isn't to defend my family's honor. My job is to bring home money and make my wife happy.

I enter a poker room understanding what might go wrong, including getting knocked out by an 18-year-old playing his first tournament, which happened to me two months ago. I just told his mother, who was at the table and had bought her son into the tournament, that he should skip college and turn pro. She was shocked but the table got the joke. Then she laughed along with them.

Know what you're doing and why. Do the work. Put it the volume. Understand that over a small sample size a lot of things can go wrong, accept it and move on.

There are several possible answers to this:

1. If you're generally good at strategy games and you're the kind of person who will practice and study you can probably be a winner at chess and at poker. However . . .

2. To be good at something you have to have talent and aptitude. For poker that could include being good at card games, and having an above average IQ* and an analytical mind.

3. Poker and chess lend themselves to success with different typed of personalities.

Some examples:

1. Chess players for the most part sit quietly at a table and don't talk much. It isn't an action game, and it's very common for a player to take five minutes or more for a difficult decision, and there is no calling the clock. The only clock that matters in a chess tournament is the one that says how much time you have left to make your moves. If you clock runs out first before there is a checkmate or resignation, you lose.

If you like games with a lot of action and you like meeting all the crazy people at poker tournaments, you might not like chess at all.

2. There is no math in chess, but being good at poker requires a lot of math-related study. Vanessa Rousso said that she "fell in love with game theory" in college." A friend said that Andrew Robl "is fanatical about studying the math." Phil Ivey won a high school math competition.
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*David Sklansky has estimated that the average IQ in a Los Angeles card room is 125.