My best ole horse buddy we call "Eric the Eliminator".

If he is touting a horse you can safely throw him out/play against.

The classic:

Hm...Anybody knows anything about the meditation? Will it help in games to control feelings?

Having coached numerous people to play poker this statement is completely at odds with what I experience in the real world. The observable difference between people's off-table ability to analyse poker hands and how they actually perform during their sessions is substantial. I would be surprised if there are not studies in psychology demonstrating degradation of judgment and decision making under stress in large portions of the population.

I am of your way of thinking and I've ordered the book out of curiosity. As I've stated on here every now and then, I explain to non playing friends/family (when asked what the 'secret' is) that after gaining some basic knowledge the most important thing is to learn how to control yourself.

I don't want to be unfair to Mason (and will post in the books thread after reading the book) but I suspect that I will be reading the thoughts of a mathematician/logician who can't empathize w/ the work-a-day player. And, tbh, that would make it a very good book, one that I hope nobody reads.

I heavily disagree with this. You do not have to have entitlement issues to tilt big time, nor are all entitlement issues the result of immaturity. It can be as simple as someone's play changing for the worse to the point where they no longer understand what's really happening. I went on a pretty big slide not too long ago and couldn't figure out for the life of me why every single thing seemed to be going wrong. I thought it was just an unreal amount of bad luck, and perhaps at first it was. Thing is, I was tilting all along for at least a month. Without realizing it, I was playing alot of hands too fast in such a way that my best hands could really only get action from the nuts... and so they did. It wasn't so much that this was unusual as it was that I slowly began playing in such a way that only people who had me killed were willing to play. Thus, I was making no value to balance out the coolers and suckouts. This was not something that was obvious in the moment to me!! If it had been, I simply would've stopped doing it!! So tilt can be much much deeper and far more subtle than someone realizes. People can tilt out of fear, anxiety, anger, entitlement, and even winning. Many forms of it do not even closely resemble a tantrum.

I didn't snap out of it or even realize how far off track I'd gotten until I got a coach. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and I don't know how I could've been so blind now. Point is, if most people who tilt were aware of it the games would be nearly unbeatable because people would just stop playing like crap.

You need to read the book and you'll see that there are states that marginal players can and do enter which affect their performance at the table.

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Howard:

I actually don't have much sympathy for those players who perform poorly at the poker table, and the reason for this is that the information to do well is available if you're willing to do some studying.

In my book I use the term "basic strategy" to describe the amount of knowledge a player may have, but to be really good at poker, your basic strategy needs to be substantial. But I make it clear in the "Recent Erroneous Concepts" chapter that poker is not a game of control, but one of knowledge.

Best wishes,
Mason

I will restrict further comments until I've read the book if it ever arrives bec I only ordered it a week ago so of course PP must've sent it by donkey or something. Except for one thought: I think that you misjudge how much the lack of control affects many player's performance. They have the knowledge but the lack of control hurts them terribly. Which is why I think that you may have written an important book in that if you actually manage to demonstrate that there is really NO reason to tilt you will help a lot of players.

I'll come back eventually in the book forum thread.

Hi Mr Shakopee:

Let me point out something here. You're describing tilt because when you say "they no longer understand what's really happening" that's basically the same thing as saying "they have lost the ability to think rationally" which is tilt. But there are other states that marginal players can also enter, and in my book I call these "pseudo tilt" and "searching," where the quality of their play deteriorates.

And it easily could have been. The short term luck factor and exactly how it works is poorly understood by most poker players.

Actually, this is fairly common. In my opinion, and as is explained in Real Poker Psychology, tilt is mainly a processing problem where your brain gets hung up trying to solve certain issues that you are facing, and with some people this inability of your mind to get off what is troubling you can last for a long time.

This sounds like "searching" which is when you begin to look for other strategies to improve your results because you're aware that there are some players out there who have much better long term results than you do.

This is an important point. If you knew you what your mistakes were, you wouldn't make them.

Now you're sounding like one of these poker mental coaches who will tell you something like this for a high fee. As noted above, there's a good chance you weren't even on tilt but in another state which caused your poor play. Also, if tilt is a processing problem where your brain gets caught in something like an infinite programming loop trying to figure out certain issues that seem virtually impossible to be happening to you, it's not a result of the emotions you list. But rather it's the other way around. The tilt will create the emotions.

When you say "coach" is this one of the mental coaches or someone else who helped you improve your understanding of things like strategy, the short term luck factor, and the fact that poker, which is based on probability, can be at times counter intuitive to most people? I suspect it's the latter because once your knowledge improves in these areas, your brain will be able to process more of the difficult things that happen to you at the poker table. And by the way, if you now find yourself chuckling over previous situations which would cause you to tilt, it's an indication that I'm correct -- again see my book.

Best wishes,
Mason

this is a fair analyzing from you guys. I see tilt as nothing more than people, and
more specifically men don't like losing. Add the losing money part, and anyone who
loses at the poker table will have some level of anger. D. Negreanu gets less angry
than Phil H, and I heard chip Reese was maybe the best at staying level headed.

In my experience there is no way to completely eliminate tilt. Not without changing
yourself from human to robot. We lose, we get emotional, no other way around it.
Try to do your best to control it.

What works okay for me when I'm going through a bad patch, is to take breaks
every hour. The optimal study time is approximately 1 hour anyways. I just try
to focus on playing that hour good until the time is up. But if I could completely eliminate tilt, well I would make insane amounts of money. But its just not possible.
We can't turn off are emotions

The part about expert players unlikely to suffer from tilt is definately false.
I'd had solid win rates, & I'm a tilter and massive sore loser. But if I don't
qualify as an expert ( fair enough) than don't really have to look farther
than Phil Hellmuth, MIke Matasow...

Most high high level players probably aren't tilters, because there's no room
for it

shots fired

+ 1

I like to think there's a distinction between the emotions and tilt. A part of tilt is the anger for sure, but also subsequent defunct thinking and making 'choices' to keep playing / play badly against our better judgement which we know we've got if we can later reflect.

Tbh I've found it hard to stop myself tilting even though I literally tell myself at the time 'this is a bad idea this has happened before and you're tilting again, this is - EV behaviour stop now' or some crap like that. Though maybe even that was just a reactive narrative trying to exert control when in fact I had the experience of very little. A bit scary tho tbh, especially in that scenario like dr jekyl is at the speakerphone but mr hyde is at the wheel.

Anyway my two cents is that I think it's ok to get angry and I think some of us get more easily angered than others. What's not ok is tilting and we should learn how to control and understand that to be better poker players and stronger willed in life generally.

It is a good advise that can be practised

Good ideea )