Quote:
Originally Posted by ProRailbird
I see a player tilting almost every session I play. 50% of my speechplay is built around putting people on tilt. My most winning sessions have been the result of villains on tilt.
If you don't regularly see someone tilting at the table, find another game. Even most High Stakes Poker sessions had someone going on tilt. For the ones with Hellmuth on the program, it was every single one of them.
While tilt definitely occurs and when someone is on tilt, it's quite clear that's the case, most of the time when an opponent begins to play badly, they're in one of the other three states. Of course, until my book came out, none of these so-called poker psychology coaches, that I know of, were even aware of the other three states.
Let's be specific. In Jared Tendler's book,
The Mental Game of Poker, he gives seven types a tilt. Let's take a quick look at them:
1. Running Bad Tilt: This is almost always either expectation bias or searching. It certainly can lead to real tilt, but most of what you'll see are one of these other two states.
2. Injustice tilt: This can certainly lead to tilt as the particular player doesn't understand and can't figure out why this seems to happen to him. My book,
Real Poker Psychology, has much discussion in this area.
3. Hate losing tilt: This is almost always expectation bias. In my book, I used the term "pseudo tilt" since it's by far the most common form of expectation bias. It occurs when a player decides that leaving the table a winner is more important than maximizing expectation.
4. Mistake tilt: I always find this funny. Poker is a game of knowledge and if you knew a specific play was a mistake why would you make it. Also, to determine if a play is a mistake, in a game as complex as poker, it should require a great deal of thinking away from the table to determine whether a play is an error or not. In addition, if you somehow think that a play or plays you have recently made are mistakes, this should lead to searching as you try to find other plays which are better, and to someone who doesn't understand this stuff, you may think your opponent is on tilt when they're not.
5. Entitlement tilt: This is when you think you should win all the time and it certainly can lead to one of the four losing states with tilt being the least likely because it's the hardest to enter while expectation bias would be the most common. This is when you change your play to increase the probability you'll leave the table a winner (by increasing your standard deviation), but you'll also lower your expectation. This is also one of the tricks that probability theory can play on us.
6. Revenge tilt: This is an obvious example of expectation bias.
7. Desperation tilt: This is another example of expectation bias and again it leads to the idea that leaving the table a winner is more important than maximizing expectation.
There are two reasons that understanding the four losing states of poker is important. The first is that you want to avoid them yourself, and the second is that you want to be able to recognize them in other players and thus play correctly against them to maximize your expectation.
For example, if you think that someone is on tilt when in fact they're suffering from the most common form of expectation bias (which is when they're trying to maximize their chances of leaving the table a winner) they'll tend to play their hands much better on the later streets than a tilted person would.
As for what you should do, and this addresses your "speechplay" comment, when someone else is on tilt (or in one of the other three states), this is actually a much different issue which is also addressed in my book.
Best wishes,
Mason