View (download?) this post as a .pdf here, if you find it easier to read:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/7/...g%20tiltar.pdf
Yeah, so... Countless posts and threads have been made on tilt on 2+2, and I decided to make another one. I had a revelation during this Christmas, and I came back – refreshed and as close to tilt-proof as I've ever been. Given this revelation of sorts, I have decided to give something back to the community for all the hours I have spent reading here. I have come to realize that the some of the greatest players struggle with serious tilt issues. Stu Ungar (did drugs), Mike Matusow (did drugs), TJ Cloutier (enjoys a gamble at craps - I consider this some kind of life-tilt), Ziigmund (plays while hungover or drunk or whatever). These are players who can be/could've been even more profitable players than they are/were if they just didn't tilt as much.
So, let's roll. First off, what is tilt? According to Alan Schoonmaker, "tilt" means someone is making plays for emotional reasons that he would not normally make. We all have to learn to play poker the right way, because poker rewards those who play less rather than those who play more. It's counter-intuitive, and poker is a counter-intuitive game. Therefore, once we act upon our emotions, we're on tilt.
Here's an example. There's a monkey on the button who steals a whole fkn heap. He hates to fold, and will do all sorts of crazy stuff both preflop and postflop. You're in the big blind. He raises preflop. If you choose to 3-bet him with some hand because he has been raising your big blind a lot and you are getting annoyed, you shouldn't do it. Why not? Because you're on tilt. However, if you 3-bet while applying a thought process that includes ranges, pot equity, fold equity, different types of odds and all the other basic poker concepts that apply to a preflop decision, you should do whatever you think will make you the most money in the long term (+EV, yo).
Sounds simple, right? I agree. It is really simple. However, most people aren't capable of doing it! Very few people are able to play poker with very little emotion involved. Obviously, you need some emotion in order to keep the game exciting or else we'd all be robots. Whether you play to challenge your intellect, for the risk related to gambling or whatever it is that motivates you, you need the emotion to keep you sane. However, you don't want your emotions to take control - they just need to be there. Once emotion takes control, you're on tilt. Once emotion influences a decision, you're on tilt. Being overly happy and having it influence your decisions is also a type of tilt.
This is going to be longer than I expected, but please, stick with me here. As a disclaimer to this next paragraph, I want to say that I don't believe in win rates. I might write about this disbelief some other time, but for illustrative purposes, let's assume win rates are static for now and that they exist.
Envision this scenario; You are allowed to clone yourself in poker. You are completely human, but your clone has been modified such that he isn't receptive to strong emotion at the poker table. He'll do a little fistpump when he wins a flip, but he won't really react when he loses a pot where he's a 10-1 favorite. Now, let's say you make 4.3 PTBB/100 at NL200. That's a pretty good winrate, right? Your clone, however, makes 7.8 PTBB/100. Your games are identical, except for one little fact. Your clone doesn't tilt. His ability to control his tilt, makes him earn 3.5 PTBB/100 more than you. While you make $17,2 per 100 hands, your clone makes $31,2 per 100 hands. Now, do the math for the hourly. Let's say you both play 500 hands per hour and you both average 3 hours a day. The result is that you make $86 per hour, and $258 each day. Your tiltless clone makes $156 an hour, or $468 each day. Tilt has made you miss out on $210 each and every day. Now you have to put in more work in order to get to NL400. This is a brutal example, but tilt (and poker) is brutal, so you better face it. If you are able to remove tilt from your game, your win rate will improve. Pretty basic stuff.
Some players, myself included, go from being huge winners when they're off tilt, to massive losers when they're on tilt. My last downswing was extended by huge massive monkey tilt, and I was somewhere around -20 PTBB/100 over 5000 hands. At some point earlier in my «career», I broke even over ~30k hands because I was tilting for 2 months straight! It's easier to lose than to win at poker, so every time you play somewhere below your A-game, you're doing it wrong.
Most of you guys know what «triggers» are. For those who don't, a trigger is an event that triggers tilt. I like to separate these triggers into two parts. The first type of trigger is one that I like to call a «block». A block is an event that will just add up under your skin without you noticing it. You start laying the foundation upon which you can build a house, and once you have enough blocks (a house), you're on tilt. It's the worst type of tilt to discover, and in order to discover it, you need to be absolutely, completely, funkin' honest with yourself. No bullsh-t. Examples of blocks can be getting check-raised on the flop as the pre-flop raiser 5 hands in a row. Another block could be if your roommate/mom/girlfriend/whatever is nagging while you're playing. Different people have different blocks.
These are all blocks built up through negative associations, but let's say you're playing NL50 and you're up $550. You don't want to lose that kind of money, so you go on passive tilt, giving up on spots that have some serious positive expectation just to maintain your epic winnings. What just happened? You built up a bunch of blocks, and albeit something good happened, you still went on tilt!
The second type of tilt is what I call a «bomb». You may guess what that is. You get AA in preflop vs. KK for a 600 BB pot. Ship the money, do a little dance, think about Vegas and the fkn Mirage, watch the king hit the turn and scream in agony. After that, you explode and you go on whatever type of tilt you're more prone to go into. A friend of mine, who is a losing player, is very prone to going on the steaming tilt. He'll starting breathing heavily and aggressively, and he'll start raising every other hand just to get back even when his kings get cracked by AK in an all-in preflop. As with blocks, different people have different bombs.
That same friend of mine once stated, while I was railing him playing online, «I don't think he has the balls to call here». That comment in itself, was proof of tilt. Even though he hadn't lost any big pots or whatever, I could tell that he was on tilt because he mixed in emotions (courage) with poker. He hasn't even learned how to play fundamentally correct because of his tendency to tilt.
So, how do you combat tilt? It's pretty simple. Find out what makes you tilt and try to kill it at its roots. You need to figure out what your blocks and bombs are. How you kill it at its roots really depends on what makes you tilt, and what kind of person you are. Maybe you can post in this thread, and we'll come up with some suggestions for exercises or solutions together?
I used to tilt when variance didn't go my way, but then I read «The Poker Mindset». There was an exercise in there that suddenly made me realize how everything worked in poker, it demonstrated how poker is a game of small edges and that it's a high variance game. All you need is a coin, a pen and some paper (or a coin and a computer). Whenever you flip heads, you get 10 points. Whenever you flip tails, you get 9 points. Start with 200 points and start flipping while you record the results. To me, this was all it took to not be affected by getting 2-outered or whatever. I started realizing that I made money, and whether or not I recieved the money in this exact hand or later didn't really matter.
Before you finish skimming through this post, read this part very carefully. It's excellent advice, given by anyone who is a «rehabilitated tilter». It is mentioned in any book that contains the subject of tilt.
The most important thing to do once you're on tilt, is to quit. No game is too good to quit if you're on tilt.
Cliffnotes;
Don't tilt. It's -EV.
Two Plus Two
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