Hi Everyone:

I’ve written a two-part paper on “The Four Psychological States of Losing Poker.” Part I appears in our August Magazine and can be found here:

https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/...ker-part-1.php

All comments welcome.

Best wishes,
Mason

Could we get the title of this thread fixed?

I know they are typos, I have full understanding of typos, but they still put me on a form of tilt.

The title is accurate. The four psychological stakes of losing poker are high, medium, low and micro.

Actually, when I asked for a typo fix the title was The Four Psychological Stakes if Losing Poker.

Now it has been slightly fixed to be of instead of if.

This forum is dead

Cool article! I look forward to reading the next part of it.

I don't agree and I struggled for a long time as to if I would say something, but as you think it is a "cool article" I am motivated to say something.

Frankly, Mason is wrong. I could list a number of ways he is wrong when it comes to poker psychology, but I will deal solely with his view on psychologists and fight or flight.

Mason is saying fight or flight has nothing to do with tilt and people who say it does are wrong because fights don't break out in poker rooms.

Fights don't break out, not because they are wrong, but because we are civilized. Also, fight doesn't have to mean an actual fight.

Fight or flight, and the physiological change it induces, is a well documented phenomenon.

The fifth psychological state is not having spent one's life in the discipline of math and therefrom, not receiving a mental state of cold calculation unencumbered by the impact of the vagaries of life which so afflict rest of the human race.

I feel like a cop from The Usual Suspects.

In other words, in English, please.

I've read a few of Mason's posts over the years and it seems like he doesn't appreciate just how much and how often a players decision-making is influenced by fear and greed and hope and ego, etc. I suspect that his training has driven much of this from him. Some people may be "cold" by nature but most are not imo.

That is more understandable.

Not saying you are right about Mason, but all people are influenced by upbringing and experiences. Some more than others.

Hi Doc:

You don't see people grabbing their chips and running out of the poker room either. In fact, I've never seen this.

What's also interesting is that I believe that people actually on tilt, which is where they lose the ability to think rationally, is actually quite rare. But two of the three other states, expectation bias and searching (which will be be addressed in Part Two) are much more common and will cause people to play poorly. (For completeness, the last state is apathy.)

Another thing that's interesting, and is something that the better known poker-psychology people have little knowledge of (but that doesn't stop them for charging lots of money for their services) is that many of the things which they call tilt are actually either expectation bias or searching. An example of this, from memory, is that Jared Tendler has something called "revenge tilt." But it's not tilt at all, it's simply expectation bias where a player has decided that getting revenge on another player is more important than maximizing expectation.

Another example of expectation bias is when someone has decided that winning a tournament is more important than maximizing their expected return. And the most common example is when a player decides that finishing a session a winner is more important than playing well. (And for those of you who have read my psychology book, I call this very common form of expectation bias "pseudo tilt" since it can look like tilt to other players but it isn't tilt at all.)

Best wishes,
Mason

Of course I understand this. It's what leads to the four states which will cause people to play poorly. However, since my decision making processes are hardly influenced by these things at all, it means that my observations can be very accurate.

By the way, expert players are hardly influenced by fear and greed. There are reasons for this and it all goes back to their knowledge of "all things poker." For example, once you have a top notch understanding of the short term luck factor that's present in poker (and which statisticians measure by the standard deviation) your fear of downswings should go away. That doesn't mean they won't happen, but it's hard to be fearful of something that you understand well.

And one final thought. All of this stuff is based on probability theory, and unless you have a strong background in this area, or begin to learn a lot about it, probability theory can be very counter intuitive. I have some examples of this in my book Real Poker Psychology, and for many readers, understanding this can easily be worth the price of the book since it will aid in stopping them from going into one of the four states of losing poker.

Best wishes,
Mason

A lot of the losing people go through is because of collusion. Its very rampant and people don't know how to spot it so they cleaned out. THey think people are playing a fair game. And its pretty bad. I played a lot of live after black friday not realizing what was going on until i saw the same 3 or 4 guys doing the same thing at another casino. Acting as fish, soft playing each other unless someone else was on in the pot. At times i would even 10x raise over their limps and they all would call together. It looks like oh these fish. But no its a team guys seeing flops and turns together to push out your one pair hands. And after the session they split up the money. Back in the day when mafia ran vegas he had teams of guys that cheated players out of their money. They were good players they would bust from their collusion teams and they would stake them and put them in with their stable of collusion teams. Its why berry greenstein left vegas back then. I wont name the players but poker players know who they are. I don't even sit a live game until I watched for about an hr to see if anything fishy is going on with the players. Its really that rampant live that you have watch for about an hr before you sit. Think of all the people being caught online cheating its 10x worse at casino cause they cant' track hand history like online. Even dealers have been arrested for rigging the deck for certain players. There was one a few years ago in florida I forgot the guys name got arrested for cheating for a friend that came and played. so even dealers cheat. You gotta watch the dealers, the players, and you gotta to know what to look for before you sit a table. If you see the same 3 or 4 guys seeing flops together for an hr straight you got no shot at winning. We hear about the people being caught cheating but you think about all the people that aren't that cheat other poker players out of money every day. So thats a big reason why a lot of people lose at poker. They have no clue they are playing against a lot of collusion teams and think they are just running bad.

Like tonight online of the 9 6 max tables I sat on 3 of them collusion teams on them. The other 6 were fine that i kept playing on. The other 3 I know those player have collusion teams. So by avoiding these situations I make money just about every day online. I know when people are cheating from what I went through live it heightened my spidey senses of paying close attention to what also happens online as well. If you can avoid collusion teams even if your an average player that knows just the basics you will make a lot of money at poker if you put in the volume and hrs. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be world class you just need to be solid and be better then the average field. And never sit on lag players right.

Do you acknowledge that words can have different meanings? If you don't, a discussion is pointless.

The thought a discussion would be pointless and a waste of my time is why I had been silent, but I was struggling with that as I believe you to be wrong. I was moved into action by the poster who thinks your article is "cool."

Have you ever seen a verbal fight take place? I have.

You have never seen someone grab their chips and run out of the poker room? I have seen people take bad beats, see them stewing about it, and then rack up hurriedly, and leave at a faster than normal pace.

Now, if by run, you mean someone leaving the poker room at the average running speed of ten to fifteen miles an hour, then no, I have never seen that.

A discussion is also pointless if the people in the discussion don't admit they could be wrong. Not that they are wrong, but that they could be wrong.

I don't think I am wrong in you being wrong, but I admit that possibility.

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

In response, all I can say is see my edit comment on post #15.

Hi Doc:

I disagree with your edit. While technically it's correct, in poker, where you're trying to maximize your expectation, disagreeing on definitions can lead to strategies that can lower your expectation.

You need to understand that this poker psychology stuff is something that I worked on (and sometimes off) for many years. It wasn't until I had enough material to publish a book that I did so. But one of the things I found so interesting, as is shown in my post above, is that (at least) some of these poker-psychology people weren't even aware (at the time of the publication of Real Poker Psychology almost four years ago) of many of the things that I talk about

If you choose to define tilt as "starting to play poorly" or just "the process of playing poorly" you'll be using an inaccurate definition of what tilt is, and this poor definition can certainly lead to strategies that won't have the highest expectation even though playing poorly certainly happens when on tilt.

Also, one of the things that I did very differently from some of these psychology book authors, and both Cardner and Tendler come to mind, is that my book includes advice on how to take advantage of opponents who are, for various reasons, not playing at their best. This differs from those books, etc. which only seem to focus, and in my opinion often quite inaccurately, on just you and not your opponents.

Best wishes,
Mason

With regard to the fifth state of apathy, this is a serious problem when coupled with the prevalence of many poker players and their essential ignorance of the math of the game.

What are we to do about ignorance and apathy?

I don't know, and I don't care.

My edit isn’t about poker. It’s about discussions.

I think I am backing out of this thread as my being here seems to be pointless.

1) There has been no comment from Mason on if he believes words can have multiple meanings.

2) There has been no comment from Mason that people need to admit that they could be wrong in order to have a discussion.

3) There has been no comment from Mason on my personal observation about how some people have left the poker room.

I think your No. 1 has been answered.

As for No. 2, the purpose of this website is to have vigorous debate. If you can show where I have things wrong with the four states, please do.

As for your personal observation, the only strong disagreements I've ever seen in a poker room between players who are in a poker game usually occurs when one player takes a "shot" or it's perceived that the player has taken a shot. I have also seen similar upset players where they think they may have been cheated (and it's almost never the case). As for someone losing several hands in a short period of time, I've seen players clearly go on tilt, but they don't get into fights and don't grab their chips and run out.

And as for grabbing their chips and running out, I've occasionally seen the opposite. A player goes broke but won't leave the game and the floor has to tell him that if he can't ante or post a blind (or buy more chips) he can't hold the seat. (Sometimes in these cases they'll get up but hang around the table.)

Mason

Evidently, I don't think you responded to #1 or I wouldn't have said something.

As to #3, just because you haven't seen it occur doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I have never seen a tree fall in the forest, but it happens all the time.

As to #2, I think I have shown where you are wrong in this first state, but you don't seem willing to admit to even the possibility that you could be wrong.

I really am done with this thread so feel free to have the last word.

How much time have you spent in forests compared to how much time Mason has spent in poker rooms? If not much, then your point seems invalid