In my opinion, you're irrational. Doyle believed in ESP, but I think largely that superstition. helped him play without fear. Doyle was clearly irrational, and yet a huge winner at poker.

Hey, I'm a math guy myself (my undergrad degree is in computer science and I watch math videos on youtube for fun), but I don't think being a mathematician should be an excuse for being wrong about psychology. What's crazy is that I don't disagree with all of Mason's conclusions, but his arguments are terrible. The fight or flight thing is a great example -- I think his explanation of what causes tilt makes a lot of sense, but he's getting stuck on his incorrect understanding of what fight or flight actually means.

Maybe so, but I have been supporting this A/C game stuff and I don't benefit financially from it at all. I don't even play poker anymore. If you're arguing with one of those mental coaches, you can try to ruin their credibility by bringing up money, but it doesn't play against me at all.

Can you lay out this proof that is supposedly in action a little more formally?

I think there's an interesting thing going on here: I think that there's something of a hang-up bec the word 'psychology' is being used. The forum in titled 'Psychology' and I'd suggest re-naming the sub-forum as 'Mental Game.'

I'm coming at it from this angle: I'd be very surprised if any poker player ever went to an actual psychologist for therapy bec he tilts at poker (excepting that he might go bec he's a compulsive gambler). No, the posters on here, and the tilters, KNOW what their problem is: They get aggravated and they want to know why they get aggravated when they know they shouldn't get aggravated.

It seems to me that we are dealing (generally) w/ people who have no problems requiring an actual psychologist , know it, but seek further and end up w/ mostly a sports centered approach bec has anybody in the field even studied 'poker psychology?'

We aren't talking about psychology in general, we are talking about POKER psychology, a thing that affects perfectly normal people in every other aspect of their lives but a driven screwy in the head by poker, that wonderful game. It's POKER psychology: 'WHY DID I DO THAT? I KNOW BETTER! WHY!'

You don't appreciate poker for what it is, that's why.

^ This. Especially about the "baffled by your posting this over and over." It isn't actually baffling, though. It is pure dogma in the absence of any breadth of knowledge. The same thing a religious fanatic does when "explaining" the origin of earth and life. Well, there are lots of ways of being religious. It is simply a devoted belief of his uninformed by the disciplines that actually study it. One wonders how many other fields he is an authority on having never studied them. I've cleared a stack of volumes of psych books off my desk, and I have time, having offered a few months ago to review this somewhat controversial book. But I can't pull the trigger on paying for "Real Poker Psychology" after the excerpts offered. The copy with a thousand notes in it, by Tindler or whoever, ... I'd pay a pretty penny for that one gladly. There is nothing more interesting than seeing someone's mind in action in black and white. This is admittedly a bias going in about the book. If it turns out different, well I'm not so insecure in myself that I can't just give credit where credit is due because I have to be right. Which is a lesson obviously difficult to learn for many, especially when their ego is massively invested in being the one with the answers.

The theory that players go on tilt because they don't understand variance doesn't explain why people go on tilt when you show them a bluff. Other theories do explain that, maybe Mason do too? I haven't read the book yet.

Hi Aces:

If you read the book you'll see that the cause of tilt is not as you describe.

Best wishes,
Mason

I write a book based on mathematical modeling and statistical theory, something I have a strong background in, and you wonder how many other fields I claim to be an expert.

The following, which I'm sure you'll find disappointing, is from the back cover:

So I'm not claiming to be an expert in lots of different fields, and thius includes psychology.

MM

This is what you wrote a couple of posts above:

"From your post above, it seems clear that your understanding of the short term luck factor needs improvement. I suspect that once this happens, many of the problems you describe will go away."

What good will understanding the short term luck factor do if you go on tilt when someone shows you a bluff?

Maybe Doyle "knew" something that the other people don't, .... can't.

It doesn't. The problem w/ someone who goes on tilt for such a minor thing, something that happens again and again and again, something that players do on purpose to try to tilt other players is different. They should be able to shrug it off and for some reason can't. That really ought to be 'some reason' bec what's happening is that they're taking it personally and falling into the trap. It's silly, really, I always think 'they ought to be immune to that **** after playing so much' but they just can't and I'd say that they simply aren't prepared for the game itself.

Yeah, I guess you are right here Howard..I just cant overcome my emotions in the poker game...I try it 100 times and I failed 100 times..I never have anything like this in any area of my life.. I just dont get to the right mindset and I just cant understand why...? Why I cant? I am not a idiot or a gambler who put the last money on AK...I am very rational and conservativ but if I come to the game sometimes Its not me who is playing, its another person...The game put me costantly to the absolut psychlogical and mentall limit...I love the game and the tun factor and the thrill but I hatte the downside of the game and cant handle it right...

Just Lol, this is just too funny.

Love it!

If you simply can't eliminate the weakness perhaps you can turn it into a strength. Mason takes a swing by suggesting that if you look at things in a certain way you will find humor. I'm going to relate a 15-30 LHE hand from long ago in SoCal:

I bet the river HU fully confident that I would win bec there was no way that anybody could've drawn to runner-runner gut-shot gut-shot but I got raised, called and was shown just that hand. I was looking at the players cards trying to figure out how he could possibly get there/play that bad when an asian player sitting in the game said 'You ran into a Korean with chips.' I've been laughing at that all of these years. And it's all you can do bec you can't smash them in the head w/ a hammer, they are going to do what they do and that's that, end of story.

So how about trying this: You know that you are helpless, you know that you can't avoid getting tilted, you've spent years fighting it and losing, you've made this thread and you are crying HELP!

From now on don't try not to get tilted and, as a matter of fact, expect it and accept it BUT immediately jump away from the table when it happens, go off into the casino proper or some corner and start laughing at yourself for being a putz. 'I did it again! lol, at me! I'm an ass-hat!' 'I DID IT AGAIN EVEN THOUGH I MADE A THREAD ON 2P2!' And w/e else you care to toss in. Then take a couple of turns, wait until you're re-set and sit back down.

I'm guessing the agony of expected disappointment in your lack of ability to fight this thing is worse than the tilt itself. So get rid of the worse problem and take the lesser. Let yourself get tilted, stop worrying about it, just run away and laugh at yourself and see how that does.

-------------------

If the above works Ima hang out my Mental Game Coach shingle. How much do these ppl make, anyway?

In Real Poker Psychology in the chapter "A Mathematical Model of Tilt-- Cause and Cure" you'll see what tilt is and how to fix it, and you'll also learn that tilt is closely related to humor.

But is your example of a player beginning to play poorly when shown a bluff even tilt? There's a good chance it's not.

It turns out there are other states besides tilt that can make someone play poorly. One of them I call "pseudo tilt. It's defined in my psychology book but in our soon to be released book, Poker and More: Unique Ideas and Concepts I use a more general definition which is:

Pseudo tilt is when the player has decided that something else is more important than maximizing expectation.

There's a good chance that this is what you're observing. It's not tilt since the player in question can still think rationally, something which a tilted player can't do, but his decision to go after the player who shows the bluff is not a good one since it should lower his expectation in most cases.

Also, notice that the poker psychologists that I suspect you want to defend aren't even aware of stuff like this.

MM

There are a number of different theories ("flow", Csikszentmihalyi; Individual zones of optimal functioning, Hanin; Catastrophe Model, Hardy; Multidimensional anxiety theory, Martins), however, they all draw from the original Yerkes & Dodson inverted-U hypothesis describing the relationship between anxiety and performance:



As you can see from the diagram, performance increases with increased "in the moment" anxiety to a point, then begins to drop off.

This has some relevance to poker, however IMO as a poker player i'm sure for everyone who says they perform well with some anxiety, there will also be ones who argue they play their A-game when completely relaxed - they maybe even meditate before playing.

From my own experience, the biggest final table I ever played I was extremely anxious and I felt this was facilitative (I finished second) - however as with most final tables I won my fair share of flips, and had I lost one early doors I could well have attributed this to high anxiety being debilitative leading to a lack of concentration.

Anyway, the general point of all these theories is that as a sport psychologist, you tailor your athletes pre-performance routine to get them "in the zone". This might be raising mental or physical anxiety for some athletes/sports, or lowering it for others.

In conclusion, I think poker is best played when you're completely relaxed, and so all a player needs to know is relaxation techniques - everything else is just padding.

But you are dismissing the work of psychologists in the field of poker, which is setting yourself as more "expert" than them, is it not.

What do you say about Stuey, who was a tournament genius yet still had mega-tilt built into his psyche? According to you, seemingly, there is only one factor and it is: the more expert I am at poker the less I will tilt.

That one case (and there are too many others to count) seems enough to contradict such a theory.

As Dostoevsky said, consciousness is not as simple as twice two makes four.

As I say, there are many tracks operating in consciousness ... only one of which at the poker table is "how expert I am at the game, how much knowledge and perception I have, etc." Also operating are emotions (such as critically, frustration), impulse control issues, character issues, so-called "demons," self-esteem issues (as in self-loathing, wholly unrelated to poker skills) ... etc. All these are wider than "poker expertise" and never cease operating in consciousness ... including when one is at the poker table.

Also, I find the idea that execution isn't a part of poker as it is other games quite strange. With the exact same knowledge from one session to the next, we can play stellar one time and badly the next, or anything in between. Just as with tennis, golf, etc. There is an execution factor it seems, just not related to speed and physical coordination. I"m quite sure a neurologist would argue that every human behavior, physical and mental, doing and thinking, is a function of neurological performance and coordination and is thus subject to the same variance.

My compliments on not cutting me off, but you've demonstrated more reserve than most of the mods so I shouldn't be surprised. Now to your field (definitely not mine). When you model something mathematically, what is that telling you about the causes of the distributions? The fact that you can model tilt, what does or can it say about which of the aforementioned factors is driving the behavior? I don't know. I'm very skeptical that it has any ability to do that.

I haven't really thought that much about my definition of tilt, which is a clear blunder from a former philosophy major But it is something along the lines of:

When a player makes a play he thinks is bad out of frustration or anger

So according to that definition it would be tilt.

Some authors have taken the concept of tilt to far. They call playing bad out of fear a form of tilt, but it really doesen't make any sense to say "I didn't call his all in preflop bet when I had aces because I was on tilt since I was playing with my rent money"


I am not so much out to defend or attack anyone. I just don't think more knowledge about poker is the solution to tilt. The same way that I don't think overweight people are in need of diet or exercise tips. They know what to do, but they lack the emotional control to actually do it.

In my book, tilt is defined as the lost of ability to think rationally. However, there are also two other states I define, pseudo tilt and searching, where players begin to play poorly but they still think rationally. (My definition of pseudo tilt is given in a previous post but you can also think of it as "expectation bias.")

This is one of the errors of the current poker psychology coaches. They don't know enough about poker to even recognize a difference.

Best wishes,
Mason

Great post.
Not sure why they say 'Optimal Performance' on the curve there.

Someone asked him about it on here. They said that there was incongruity/overlap when they delineated A B C game as he requested in his book. Tendler's reply was to correct him and explain that by 'A game' he meant those parts of your game that are new.
This is consistent with what I saw him say elsewhere about C game being Unconscious Competence and A game being Conscious Competence.

He states that the Zone and A game come when your emotions are balanced, neither too high not too low. This comes from the Yerkes-Dodson curve which shows ,he says, that performance is at its peak when emotions are neither too high not too low.
Would welcome people's appraisal of this.

According to his website it's now 450 players that he coaches. What does this mean?
How is an Ms in Counseling Psychology a qualification to understand and coach on poker thinking/poker problems/tilt etc?

I have no idea but that'd be a good question for him. My opinion is that he took fairly well-known concepts, had a friend who was a poker player who suggested he writes a poker book about it, and that's just what he did. I'm sure he interviewed his friend first to at least get a grasp of what the game is about. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of his poker credentials but the concepts he explains are credible though not his own.

To be fair a Master's degree is a starting point to knowledge, not an endpoint. The quality of his coaching now will be much more a reflection of what he's learned since his degree.

As for this, it doesn't really make much sense to me, but i can't really comment on what he's trying to get across without reading the context in which it is written.

hi guys,
thank you for your answers!
Have to realize that mastering the poker mindset is something beyond my abilities.
Better to give up, than try it over and over again and never make it...
I have no bankroll descipline, have no mental abilities mastering the swings at PLO and I get crushed everytime I to move up and play at PLO100
I will quit pokerfor a long time maybe for ever and enjoy my life and peace of mind!
Bye guys.