It turns out that in most public poker rooms there are a large number of poker players who know how to play reasonably well. Yet, many of them have long term results that are negative. This seems to almost be a contradiction. If you play poker at least reasonably well, shouldn’t your long-term results be on the plus side?

At first, the answer seems to be yes. But there is an assumption being made here, and that assumption is that if you’re capable of playing poker reasonably well, you’ll always do so. But since many of these players are in fact long-term losers, it has to mean that this assumption is not correct and that something happens which at least at times will make these people play poorly.

The answer to this is that there are four states which poker players can enter into where their overall strategy will deteriorate. The first is known as “tilt” and this state is widely known and understood to some degree by even the non-poker playing public. However, the other three states, expectation bias, searching, and apathy (which can be classified under the heading of searching) are not well known. This paper will address all four of these states and what a serious poker player can do to avoid them.

State No. 1: Tilt. Tilt occurs when the player in question loses the ability to think rationally at the poker table, and when a player goes on tilt, it’s easy for other players to see that he’s on tilt. As an example, back in the 1980s when I first moved to Las Vegas, there was a particular poker player who I would occasionally play against who was a clear tilter. One of the things that this person would do when on tilt was to turn around in his seat so that his back was facing the dealer. Of course, he now wouldn’t know when the cards were dealt and would refuse to turn around to play his hands, and when he did finally turn around, his play was completely irrational and insanely aggressive. But when he wasn’t on tilt, he was actually a winning player.

So what causes tilt. Many so called poker psychologists, most of whom my opinion towards is negative, claim that tilt has something to do with the “fight of flight” mechanism that we all have. But if this was true, fights would be common in the poker rooms, and they only rarely happen, and occasionally we would see someone grab their chips and run out of the poker room, and I’ve never seen this.

In 2013, at the Fifteenth Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking, I gave a paper titled “A Mathematical Model of Tilt — Cause and Cure” which also appears in my book Real Poker Psychology. In this paper, using simple mathematical modeling based on discontinuous functions, I show that tilt is nothing more than a processing problem that is closely related to humor.

For instance, when Groucho Marx (as Captain Spaulding) said, “I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas I don’t know,” our brain is able to figure out that the elephant wasn’t really in Groucho’s pajamas, and this process of figuring out the mathematical discontinuity that occurs here produces humor and we laugh.

But what if our brain can’t figure something like this out? And using a poker example, what if our aces keep getting beat and our brain can’t understand why that happens since aces are clearly the best hand in hold ’em. Then it’s my contention that our thinking process gets stuck and our brain in a sense gets locked up trying to solve a problem that it has no answer to. Thus we lose the ability to not only think but to think rationally, and tilt occurs.

So what’s the solution? Well, the solution is easy to describe but for many players difficult to do. And all it encompasses is to improve your understanding of the game of poker so that in the future your brain is able to solve problems that are presented to you at the poker table which you currently can’t solve. This includes a better understanding of strategy, how your opponents behave, and the amount of short-term luck, both good and bad, that is present in a poker game and which statisticians like myself measure by the relationship between the mean, which would be the win (or loss) rate, relative to the standard deviation that is present in all forms of poker (and all forms of gambling).

State No. 2: Expectation Bias. Most poker players want to leave the table a winner when their session is over, and many of them will change their playing style to help achieve this, and this desire to leave a winner I called “pseudo tilt” in my book Real Poker Psychology. But pseudo tilt is actually a specific case of something that can be defined more generally as “expectation bias” which is simply the idea of deciding that something else is more important than maximizing your expectation at the poker player.

When playing poker, most experts will tell you that their purpose is to win as much as they can, and that’s certainly a good reason to play poker. But this is the way experts think. But other players at times will decide that something else is more important than maximizing your expectation, and while this is certainly not the way that an expert wants to play, it’s not necessarily wrong if that is the way you want to play.

In addition to always trying to finish a winner, another common example of expectation bias is to get revenge on a player who for some reason you don’t like. Perhaps they bluffed you out of a pot and then showed their hand which humiliated you, or perhaps they said a few things at the table that you didn’t like. So, as a response to this, you altered your play by raising them more than you normally would in an attempt to get back at them.

An obvious result of expectation bias is that to achieve this other goal, you’ll often lower your expectation in the game and sometimes play in a way that will appear you’re on tilt (and this is why I used the term “pseudo tilt” in my book).

But expectation bias is sort of a personal thing. If maximizing your expectation is not that important to you, then playing in this alternate manner can certainly be fine. However, be aware that expectation bias can cause a winning player to turn into a losing player. Furthermore, if your standard deviation goes up by a lot, even though your expectation has gone down, it can be easy to deceive yourself as to how much damage you’re actually doing to your long-run poker results.

So the cure for expectation bias is similar to tilt. That is, if your long term goal is to maximize your expectation, do everything you can to understand the relation between it and the standard deviation, and to realize that when this relationship deteriorates, expectation bias can deceive you into thinking that you’re playing much better than you are.

By the way, another common example of expectation bias occurs in tournaments when someone decides that winning the trophy is more important than maximizing your expectation. I won’t give any specific examples here, but due to the percentage payback nature of the poker tournament prize pool, the strategy that maximizes your probability of winning the tournament may also be a strategy that lowers your expectation. This is why you’ll sometimes hear tournament players, especially late in a tournament where there are large differences in the payoffs depending on what place you finish, talk about how it’s better to “ladder up” than to try to win the tournament.

State No. 3: Searching. Poker has a cruel side. Specifically, suppose you and I were both tennis players, and since this is my paper, let’s assume that I play tennis a little better than you do. What does that mean in terms of our results. And the answer is, while we might enjoy playing against each other, I’ll win almost every time. That’s because the short-term luck factor in tennis is small. So if my expectation is a little higher than yours, that small difference will determine our results almost every time we play. But what about poker?

Well, in poker, the standard deviation, which is the statistical measure of the amount of short-term luck in a poker game is large when compared to the expectation. Typical numbers for a good player who doesn’t play too large would be something like a $30 per hour win rate and a standard deviation of $400. For practical purposes, this means that we’ll occasionally have an hour where our results can differ by as much as $1,200 (3 standard deviations) from our expectation.

Now in poker there is a type of player who when he’s playing at his best is around a break even player for the games that he plays, or perhaps a small winner. And when he sits down to play, if he happens to be on the right side of the standard deviation, which means that he’s winning, everything will be fine. He’ll play his normal best game, which still may be much weaker than that of an expert, but he’ll have no reason to make any adjustments in his strategy. But what happens when he gets on the wrong side of the standard deviation?

Specifically, when some players start losing, they’ll enter an interesting psychological state. In this state, they won’t be so focused on how they play, but they’ll begin to focus on how some of their opponents play, and these are players whose long term results are significantly better than our breakeven to small winner.

Now when this happens, we’ll often see changes in how these people play. For instance, it’s well known that in poker the best players play aggressively, but they only do so in the right spots. Now our breakeven player, because of his poor short-term results, will often want to emulate the strategies that these better players use, and they’ll begin to search for alternate strategies, usually more aggressive and looser than they normally play. Thus the term “searching.”

But unfortunately for these people is the fact that poker is a complex game, and any strategy changes that you make to improve your game often require a lot of thought, and you don’t have the time to do this type of thinking at the poker table. Consequently, while these breakeven type players clearly need to make some strategy changes in their game to have better long term results, when searching at their table, the results they achieve will usually produce a lower expectation, often changing their expectation to negative.

Also, a searcher can be somewhat easy to spot and there are two characteristics you look for. First, they won’t have many chips in front of them because they’ve been losing, and second, they try to make plays which in some sense will appear tricky but to an expert player they’ll also appear ill conceived. An example might be in no-limit hold ‘em, when you start with a pair of aces, to check both the flop and the turn in an effort to get your opponent to bluff or bet a hand that he normally would fold if you were to bet. But the down side to this is that the free cards that you give in the aces example may allow your opponent to draw out. Now you have not only cost yourself the pot, but cost yourself additional bets as well and in no-limit or pot-limit, since the bets tend to get larger as the pot grows, this error can be quite costly.

In addition, I believe that searchers are fairly common at the poker tables. That’s because the large short-term luck factor, which can often produce a negative swing, will frequently put a player in a position where he’ll be attempted to search. Even worse, sometimes when searching, the player will come up with a strategy that actually reduces their expectation but, again due to the large standard deviation that is present in most forms of poker, happens to win a nice pot for them. As a result, this new poor strategy gets incorporated into their game and their long term results deteriorate.

State No. 4: Apathy. When playing poker, you’ll sometimes hear a frustrated player make a statement in an apathetic manner like, “What the heck, I’m calling.” And in most cases, this player has entered the fourth state “apathy” where his play can deteriorate.

In many ways, apathy is related to searching and may even be a sub-set of searching. But since the mechanism is a little different, it gets his own category.

When searching, a player becomes focused on two things. First, his poor results, and second, the long term results and the playing strategies of some of the other players who he knows do well. Thus, he tries to imitate exactly how they play. But poker is too complex to quickly copy how an expert player plays, and thus the newly adopted strategies usually reduce expectation (and often increase the standard deviation).

When in the state of apathy, the player in question while also trying to find other strategies that will work better than what he currently uses, doesn’t really focus on how some of his opponents play. In reality, he becomes more concerned with how he plays and thus without any outside guidance will begin to search for different strategies, and he does this under the projected illusion that he doesn’t care about how he plays, but in my opinion he cares very much.

Another frequent difference between searchers and apathetic players is that searchers frequently, but not always, begin to play in a more aggressive manner, while the apathetic player will usually, but also not always, do the opposite and become a more passive opponent as he adds in additional hands to play.

For those not too familiar with poker, it’s a game that rewards aggression compared to passivity. Of course, you can play too aggressively and have poor long term results. But if you’re an opponent of one of these players, in most cases expect better results against apathetic player than against the searcher even though there are many similarities between these two states.

Final comments: There’s a common theme through these four states which I assume that many readers should have already spotted. It’s simply that these different states that can cause a poker player’s expectation to go down, only occur when that player is losing, and this creates an interesting dynamic that can happen at the poker table.

When winning, especially if the game is short-handed, it means that at least some of your opponents are losing, and as we have just seen, losing players can enter one of the four states which means that the game you’re in can be a good game to play from an expectation standpoint. On the other hand, when losing, not only might you be susceptible to entering one of the four states, your opponents are more likely to be winning and thus playing at their best.

This is an important idea for the serious poker player, especially one who plays high stakes where almost all his opponents know how to play reasonably well. It means that given the exact same players, a game can sometimes be good to play, and sometimes not so good, depending on who’s winning and who’s losing.

To finish, many poker players like myself recognize the late Chip Reese, who passed away in 2007, as one of the greatest poker players who ever lived, and he regularly played in some of the largest cash games ever played. But he had a characteristic which many of his competitors, in my opinion, didn’t fully appreciate. When he was winning, Chip was known to stay at the poker table for a very long session. But when losing, Chip was also known to quickly and quietly leave. I don’t know how well he had these ideas thought out, or whether this was something he just did intuitively, but this pattern certainly contributed to his long-term success against some of the best players in the world because when he put his time in, it was more likely that one or more of his opponents had entered one of the four psychological states of losing poker.

Thank you for posting this.

State No. 5: Bloodthirsty

Very interesting!

Apathy is the root of all my crazy risk taking. I'm bored, so why not.

Beautiful read. I love the part about apathy, resonated with me a lot. Incredibly insightful, thank you.

Great post, lots of great insight into how we can sometimes be our own worst enemy at the poker table. I imagine the "apathy" stage is what destroys bankrolls.

The part about Aces getting cracked over and over and our brain not computing why reminds me of the psychological concept of "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is actually part of the brain's defense mechanisms to make whatever is happening to the person "make sense" to the brain's preconceived belief/notion in that situation. I imagine in poker playing this presents as when one just says "this can't be so , how could my Aces get cracked AGAIN in 5 minutes!" which creates dissonance: "reality is they did get cracked twice in 5 minutes" but "this can't happen , it never happens" thinking counters it. Rather than accept it, the brain tries to figure out how to make it's narrative fit the reality. So "the site is rigged," "no one runs as bad as me, " that guy never loses," "that's the last time I go all in with Aces pre flop!" and so forth. Take that reality! We may even know deep down we're wrong but the dissonance fades a bit and we've convinced ourselves of the lie.

But you've highlighted these states, now players reading this can begin to recognize when they start to slip into these states. I can definitely relate to the "changing strategy" on the fly stage then having to "reset" and realize what I'm doing.

Hi JeeeroyLenkins:

Adding a bit to this what is often happening is the struggle of living in the real world versus living in the probabilistic world, and poker is a game based on probability. One of the things that this difference causes is that it makes some of the events related to poker seem counter-intuitive to many players, and this of course leads to what you have addressed in your post.

From page 26 of my book Real Poker Psychology:

Now if you’ve been playing poker for a while this is something that you probably already know, but what you may not realize is that events from poker strategy to your overall results can be counterintuitive, and when this is the case and the result is bad, it can trigger tilt, both short and long term if your understanding of what is actually happening is lacking.

Best wishes,
Mason

Thank you very much for this post.

Good read.

Good read and have been thinking about this a lot. Expectations of winning a session for me is my biggest leak. I put too much weight on winning individual sessions. If I can train myself to care less about small wins and losses, I'll be a better player, it's all a desensitization process.

Very interesting and helpful read. I am a little surprised that the explanation of tilt in the above article does not address the idea that tilt has more to do with the subconscious part of our mind than with the conscious one. Even the best players have to deal with tilt, so simply studying and understanding the game is no cure for it. Why? Because in poker, as in life, it does not matter if your conscious mind understands and accepts any particular concept as long as your subconscious rejects it. That's the number one reason why addicts keep smoking, drinking, gambling etc even though they clearly understand the negative impact on their quality of life. Of course, studying the game will make one a better player, and the better the player in comparison to his opponents the easier it becomes to avoid tilting scenarios, but that's more of a "side effect" of becoming a better player than a cure for tilt.

Hi zinzir:

You might want to pick up a copy of my book Real Poker Psychology and read the chapter "A Mathematical Model of Tilt -- Cause and Cure."

If you go to the Amazon page for this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Poker-Ps...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

and take advantage of the Amazon Look Inside function, that chapter is there and you can read it for free.

Best wishes,
Mason

Excellent article Mason. There's a few little edits needed, minor stuff. Most of these truths I've known for some time, but the idea that the game you are winning in will likely be better because others are losing, and games you are losing in are likely to be worse for the opposite reason, is a great addition I'll add to my awareness.

I'll buy the book listed above right now.

One of the most powerful skills a poker player can have, is the ability to not care whether or not they win today.

Hi Carnivore:

I'm expecting to do a podcast interview with Runchuks on the psychology of poker. So, to prepare for the interview, I'm rereading my book Read Poker Psychology right now.

And if you live in the US and want to purchase this book, we have it for sale in our own bookstore at a special price:

https://www.twoplustwo.com/store/

Best wishes,
Mason

Hi Carnivore:

And while this is true, in my new book Cardrooms: Everything Bad and How to Make Them Better; An Analysis of Those Areas Where Poker Rooms Need Improvement, I show that you should care whether the weak players do have some winning sessions.

Best wishes,
Mason

niceo one thanks for posting that

What about impulsivity/lack of discipline? And this is not exhibited only when behind, but often when ahead.

Okay impulse control/lack of discipline is not a factor in tilt ... it's this thing about you can't pass a test on sound strategy while sitting at the table under the sway of emotions?? Really?

There is a fundamental wrong assumption that starts the paper. If you play reasonably well you should not expect to be a winning player as poker is not a zero sum game it is a negative sum game as the house makes their profit by sucking money out of the game. You need to play very well(say top 20%) to expect to beat both your opponents and the house. Now in larger games rake becomes a smaller factor but cheating becomes a greater factor.

I am grateful I came across this post. I am clearly a searcher and also have expectation bias characteristics (deciding i don't like someone). I could very well fit into the category of a possibly break-even player (when playing well) with a negative observed win rate online and depressed win rate live.

What brought me here was my last session live. I have been in a downswing, 15 buy-ins over 6000 hands. Recently, to compound the issue, I have also been card dead. When I last sat down, there was the dream donkey at the table. He was very drunk, and he was both spewing AND a calling station. He was handing out chips to everyone else while I sat there card dead. Finally, I get my chance and 3bet his 10bb open, get a solid flop and value bet him all-in, except he made a flush. I was the only one at the table he had any luck against. Then I was card dead again. After that, I did some stupid things.

I shared those awful hands with a friend, and he pointed out how stupid they were. I actually defended them. But the next day I realized I had gone into some kind of psychological state. I called it tilting. A little later I was reviewing hands from my online play, and out of 10 hands I saw one that was clearly "stupid". That got me thinking about the other stupid hands I have ever come across during a review where I just shrugged them off. They actually add up, the pots tend to be large, and they are often against players I have decided I don't like (but not always).

That brought me to this thread. Not sure where to go from here, though. Not making the game personal is easier said than done. I have noticed this character defect before and when I notice it happening I tell myself it doesn't matter who the person is, it's how they play the game. This mantra tends to help but the overriding antagonistic feeling still gets in the way.

I do like what you suggest about simply leaving/stopping playing after identifying a losing session. I'm curious how much time has to pass before we start afresh. It would suck to drive all the way to the casino just to drive away after an hour and not use the time set aside to play. Online, seems easier. Just go and do something else and consider playing again after a few hours if I feel I've reached a calm and neutral state.

Hi solarglow:

From reading your post, I suspect that your knowledge of the short-term luck factor/variance/standard deviation needs much improvement. You may want to look at my book Real Poker Psychology -- Expanded Edition which begins with a discussion of this topic.

Mason

Kind of a bizarre dismissal of the "fight or flight response." Saying we don't see many fights break out or people running away from the table.

First of all, the fact that we do see fights break out at all says a lot. This is not common in the world. You don't see fights break out very often at the office.

Second of all, obviously the fight or flight response is not literally just about fighting and running. It is theorized that the original adaptive function of our stress response was to aid in these two activities.

I am not dismissing your paper outright. You seem to capture some truth about the kinds of thoughts and feelings players have when losing. But people are complicated. Multiple things can be true at once. One of them is probably a stress response.

One reason many people probably love poker is that when their stress reasons is properly modulated, they are experiencing something similar to a state of flow. When it's not modulated... let's just say that cortisol is one hell of a drug, and people will do all sorts of irrational things to deal with negative feelings.

"So what causes tilt. Many so called poker psychologists, most of whom my opinion towards is negative, claim that tilt has something to do with the “fight of flight” mechanism that we all have. But if this was true, fights would be common in the poker rooms, and they only rarely happen, and occasionally we would see someone grab their chips and run out of the poker room, and I’ve never seen this."

What I was referring to^^