Have you come across threads, advice, books that you found helpful when it came to helping your mental game at the tables? (Apart from Jared Tendler and Tommy Angelo's books which I already plan on reading)

Looking for literature that will help me understand/deal with tilt at the tables and letting tilt affect my decisions e.g. making bad calls with marginal hands etc

Positive Poker: A Modern Psychological Approach To Mastering Your Mental Game
by Jonathan Little and Patricia Cardner

Peak Poker Performance: How to bring your 'A' game to every session
by Dr. Patricia Cardner and Jonathan Little

never read either, but i know they exist.


this also has a 3 chapters about mental game, one by Tendler, one by Cardner and one by Elliot Roe:

Jonathan Little's Excelling at No-Limit Hold'em: Leading Poker Experts Discuss How to Study, Play and Master NLHE

i read this book. the tendler stuff is a rehash of his book. the other 2 chapters seemed ok, but i've never read anything by either of those authors

There is peak performance poker by Travis Stefan, as well...Which has some health/fitness into mixed with mental game.

By far, Tommy Angelo's book is my favorite (and the dueces cracked series that closely follows the book).

You're going about it the wrong way. You do not defeat tilt by reading a bunch of books. It comes down to not reacting to events that can occasionally happen. If you tilt at the table, you almost certainly "tilt" in other areas of your life. You have to get rid of it in all of your life to be effective. You can't just turn it off at the table.

At most, pick one book. Then spend the time working on how they treat it. Each of them come from it from different angles. Tommy Angelo looks at it from a Buddhist point of view and provides solutions from that perspective. Tendler works on acclimatization while you work on reducing your reaction to these events. The owner of this website looks at tilt is simply not understanding that they can happen. Once you understand that, you won't tilt.

This is not a "spend an hour or two working on it and it is fixed" problem. For most, it is a lifetime journey. Good luck.

Venice nailed it.

I would add though that mental game stuff is probably very person dependent. What works for one might not work for another. Reading different authors perspectives might help determine which path to take, then the actual work begins.

While this is true, a book can help put someone on the right track. It's easy to say 'don't react' but that is certainly a learned skill. A lot of books about tilt apply basic psychology to events that occur at the table. The tools and tactics to manage tilt absolutely translate to other areas of life. I also recommend reading a samples from a few books. Pick one that works best for you and really take a deep dive.

I personally found Jared Tendler's book extremely valuable.

I suppose. My favorite line on tilt is from Tommy Angelo ... "This activity is not fun. I am going to stop this Un Fun activity now."

That has probably helped me tilt less than any other book I've read.

IMO, if you don't fully grasp the underlying mathematical elements of poker, you can never truly remove certain tilts.

Take for example, if you don't really understand how variance works, you can never really embrace losing.

Teaching you how to deal with losing by suppressing or looking for silver lining in other aspects of losing is not treating the root of the problem.

As good of advice as I've seen on this site. Driving in traffic can be a good starting place.

Listen to Alan Watts on youtube.

Here's a good one fairly applicable to poker

True, but you can work on both poker math and tilt at the same time. I would argue that understanding/treating tilt promotes a better understanding of how and why you lost. That naturally leads to better knowledge of variance, poker math, etc.

I agree players gain nothing by solely focusing on tilt and ignoring basic concepts. However, focusing on concepts and ignoring tilt could be just as futile.

Thank you

I like the concept of ranges to your game from Tendler's books. This is not anything to do with hand ranges. Instead, you can look at your poker game as something that has a performance range. When you are playing your best you make close to all the right decisions for what you currently know about poker. Other times you might be distracted by life's problems, tired, bored, etc. You might start playing junk from oop, making bad calls, etc. This too is part of your range.

What I really love about this concept is that it can be applied to work, relationships, etc.

GL w/your journey OP.

I'm not sure that the brain really works like that. It's an approach that works for eg parents that wake up one day and find out their kid has a drug problem, but isn't really right for tilt/freaking over losses/variance.