People who say they don't tilt must be lieing.

Poker is slow, poker is unpredictable, poker is all in and one outed on the river, poker is playing when tired, poker is playing your A game for hours then tilt one hand lose whole stack you built-up over hours just to lose it all in one hand, poker is getting out played by better players and the you take a stand against a aggro player and getting it in good and still losing, poker is run cards that are crap for full sessions, poker is not having winning session in months, poker is realising that rake is to big beat in plo, poker is having the nuts only to lose the hand....

Don't tell me you don't tilt because you know you do...

Fold river.

OP, your poker mindset sounds like how a fish sees the game. First, the rake in PLO is very beatable. If you truly believe it isn't, why even play? Second, you're talking about poker being about getting 1 outed on the river. That happens 2% of the time. What about the other 98%?

Even if it's impossible to avoid tilting ever, there are degrees of tilt. Some people break their walls, mice, monitors, some just yell, some are frustrated but don't show outward signs.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that you can absolutely reduce the severity of how you react to adverse situations. You likely have LFT (Low Frustration Tolerance), and it's easier for you to say not tilting is impossible than to actually put forth the effort of trying to improve.

Its impossible for me anyways.

But its impossible not to get mad losing for me, and lots of
people. Go watch youtube and video gamers smashing there Tv's
over losing a game for no money.

Like the previous guy said, its about controlling as bets possible.
I think playing smart poker is also recognizing when your too heated
and taking a break.

I believe anyone who could 100% control tilt, would become a great player
no matter natural ability.

Everyone tilts, some more than others, some faster than others.

I don't tilt quickly and I don't tilt hard.
Mostly because I've been working on self-control for my entire life.

It's a skill you can build.
It gets better with experience.
Just put in the work!

I don't tilt when playing Solitaire
but Minesweeper is where I draw the line

I believe anyone who could 100% control tilt, would become a great player
no matter natural ability.[/QUOTE]

Spot on. Why I think poker will be dead soon (online).

It will so easy to have cheap software telling you how to play or even playing for you. Software will always play with out tilt and humans are soooo emotionally attached to the highs and lows of winning or losing that any player will be burnt out before they can make good money.

I was winning player, but it was not enough due to tilt. Now I only depoist to play the highest variance and quickest games available and honestly say I still get frustrated with waiting for my turn. Poker is slow and if play good poker it is slow after you play and learn the game good poker is tilting.

- If you played hands as well as you could you don't tilt. Particularly if you got it in good but still lost there's no reason to tilt. Your play was still +EV and you should be proud of it.
- If you accept that randomness happens (and develop a feel for variability - which is not naturally innate to humans) you don't tilt
- When you can acknowledge when you get outplayed you don't tilt (only people who think "they're the best and can never be beaten" tilt hard...I think everyone can name a couple famous examples of this)

In short: If you judge by the quality of your play and don't mind the factors you can't control (randomness) then there's no reason to tilt.

I disagree. I think the best predictor of poker skill is work ethic. Hard work and productive learning are the best predictors. Some passive person who is indifferent to whether they win or lose isn't likely going to have the drive to improve. Most of the top players hate losing, that seems to be the driving force.



People have claimed online poker is dead since 2007. It's alive and well 13 years later.

As far as good poker being tilting, I don't know what to tell ya bud. Personally, all I care about is playing in the manner that leads me to the most profits. If that meant playing 1 hand per hour, I'd do that. It wouldn't be thrilling, but it beats being a punter who wants "excitement" from a card game.

A high stakes online guy once showed me a hand where he admitted a fish had owned him. I doubt if very many lower stakes players would have the confidence to admit that out loud to themselves or others.

if you know what you should be doing, its possible to do it whether youre angry, or not. its just a matter of doing it

if you find yourself in a confusing situation where you're making emotionally charged "guesses" , the root of the problem isnt tilt - its not studying enough. you should aim to take all of the guess work out of your game by studying as many spots as possible

at some point it becomes like a robotic production line job. i know im open raising X, 3b Y 5b jam Z. all ahead of time, so there's not even a possibility for some 'ong wtf do i do' ******ed emotionally based spot.
i know on a dry 9< flop im range betting 1/3. ott i know what im checking or betting for which size etc.
i can do all of those things in a blind rage because it's all precalculated.

if youre playing on a level thats even remotely serious, ithink other than some pathological ****** rage/self control issue, tilt is just a symptom of confusion

the moment you start playing reactively , or, out of your element ur gonna lose it. if youve done research into enough spots, youll know what to do and its just a matter of robotically doing it

I think being able to admit where you got outplayed is essential for realizing where you can/must improve.
If you cannot do this you will make the same mistakes over and over again.

Hi FLop:

I don't tilt, and this is from my book Real Poker Psychology which should take care of this issue:

........A Mathematical Model of “Tilt” — Cause and Cure


Many years ago, in 1975, I finally left my home at Virginia Tech and went to work as a Mathematical Statistician for the United Stated Census Bureau. Upon arrival, I found myself assigned to an office with several well educated statisticians. This meant that there was always a statistical journal around and an article to read.

After working for a few months, my supervisor brought over the latest journal article that others had already found quite interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the article, who the author was, or what particular journal it was in. So to this unknown author I apologize for not giving proper credit.

The article was about a mathematical definition of humor, and it’s my conviction that tilt follows the same pathways with one major difference. However, for those who don’t know, let’s describe tilt at a poker table:


Generally, what happens is that a player, after sustaining a series of losses will begin to play in a sub-optimal manner, and sometimes this can appear to be, and truly is, quite irrational. Usually it manifests itself by the tilted player playing far too many hands, meaning many hands for which the expectation would be negative. Thus this player will tend to have results much worse than what he would normally expect.

However, by playing too many hands, the tilted player can occasionally get lucky and actually do quite well in the short run. When this happens, the tilting will almost always stop and the steamer will return to their normal game.

Other characteristics can also be seen. This can include yelling at the dealer, demanding that new cards be brought to the table, getting upset at other players, and playing in an extremely aggressive manner.

In addition, I have even noticed that on occasion tilt can carry over from one day to another. On several occasions I have observed a new player sitting down in my game, and after announcing that he was a big loser from the day before, immediately begin to play in a tilted fashion. So it’s clear to me that tilt can last a long time.

Now that we have a definition of tilt out of the way, to understand what is to follow, we need to define a continuous function and a point of discontinuity. And we’ll use this very simple definition:

A continuous function is a line or curve that you can draw across a piece of paper from left to right without lifting up your pen or pencil.


In other words, it will just look like a line, not necessarily straight, that starts on the left side of the paper and finishes on the right. On the other hand, if it’s necessary to lift your pen or pencil up and then set it down at another point producing a gap in what you are drawing, this is a point of discontinuity, and your function is no longer continuous at that point.

Continuing with the article I read many years ago, it then argued that humor was simply points of discontinuity in the logic presented that your brain had to process. And it gave this example which to the best of my ability is repeated below:

There was a young lady who wanted to have a boyfriend. But she had some requirements. She told her friends that her future man needed to be short but well dressed. So her friends introduced her to a penguin.

Notice that this little joke is funny and it contains a point of discontinuity which we’ll call a logic disconnect. While a penguin is certainly short, and they do appear to be well dressed, this is obviously not an appropriate boyfriend. But the brain processes this discontinuity, understands it, and finds it funny. And it’s my contention that the fact that the brain can understand what has happened is what causes it to be funny.

Put another way, the brain has figured it out or solved the puzzle, and we’ll come back to this idea below. But as long as the puzzle is solved, humor appears and we find the experience enjoyable.

Three other examples of humorous discontinuities are when Groucho Marx, aka Captain Spalding, stated:

One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

Or when Mae West commented:

When I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.

Or when W. C. Fields said:

There is not a man in America who has not had a secret ambition to boot an infant.

It should be obvious, as in the penguin example that was in the original article I read many years ago, what the logic disconnects are. We see the logic discontinuity and also understand the error of the logic. Thus we laugh.

But what happens when a logic disconnect happens and we don’t understand the error in the logic. That is, our brain is unable to solve the puzzle that has been presented to it. Do we still find it funny?

It’s my contention that instead of humor, the brain sort of shorts out, or perhaps gets caught in an infinite logic loop similar to what can be caused by some sort of bad computer programming. This leads to frustration, and in extreme cases, irrational decisions.

Recently, I was sent a paper titled “‘This is just so unfair!:’ A qualitative analysis of loss-induced emotions and tilting in on-line poker” by Jussi Paloma, Michael Laakasuoa, and Mikko Salmela from the University of Helsinski in Finland. One of the things that they pointed out is tilted players often don’t sleep well. Could this disruption in sleep be caused by the infinite logic loop that our brain is stuck in still being active? I believe so.

When playing poker, despite what some others have claimed, I virtually never go on tilt. But there is something I do all the time where tilt occasionally gets the best of me. It’s playing tennis, and this is an activity that has been part of my life since I was a kid, and that was a long time ago.

What will occasionally happen is that I’ll miss an easy shot which is simply impossible to miss, or perhaps miss several shots in a row where I shouldn’t miss any of them, or my service toss isn’t straight when trying to serve, etc. And my mind will view these things as simply being impossible. That is, there is no logical way that any of this can happen. I’ve been playing too long and have too much skill for these events to occur. But they do occur and a logical point of discontinuity is manifested.

But unlike the humorous examples given above, there is no solution. I’m not able to realize that a penguin is not a potential boyfriend for a young lady even though he seems to meet some of the criteria, that an elephant was not really in Captain Spalding’s pajamas, that Mae West wasn’t referring to being polite and well behaved, and that we’re not suppose to be kicking little kids across the room. My logic just fails because, again, there is no solution, or at least it seems that way.

This brings us to poker. Here it’s my opinion the same problem occurs for many people. When they lose several hands in a row, or can’t understand how their aces are cracked, or have trouble dealing with running bad, it’s again a logic disconnect. To the person on tilt, in their mind, the events that just occurred are simply impossible, and thus their logical circuitry, so to speak, gets locked up as the information that their brain needs to process enters some sort of infinite loop.

So what’s the solution to this? It’s simple. Understand poker and the probabilistic events that govern it better. Once you get a grasp of the fact that your aces can be beat, it’s very possible, and eventually quite likely, to lose several hands in a row, and running bad for long periods of time can and will happen, tilt goes away.

In fact, when you see good players who are known not to tilt suffer a horrendous beat, they usually chuckle. Their minds have the solution at the end of the discontinuity. So instead of processing it as frustration, they process all the chips going the wrong way as an “elephant in my pajamas.” That is, they see these events as being funny, not frustrating.

On the other hand, you’ll occasionally hear about a player, usually because he has won a tournament or two, who claims to have never read a poker book. While this may be literally true, it’s also my observation that many of these people are steamers and do poorly in the cash games. I also don’t think their poor results here and lack of studying is coincidental, and suspect that their constant tilting is from an incomplete knowledge of poker, and an unwillingness to gain that knowledge.

On our forums at www.twoplustwo.com, I have written many times that understanding the game of poker well is the best cure for tilt. Now most of you can understand my reasoning behind this. Tilt is not a “fight or flight” experience as some people have proposed. (If it were, we would see lots of fights in the poker room, and a poker room fight is something that only happens on very rare occasions.) It’s actually something humorous where the logic that your mind requires gets hung up. And once you acquire enough information that your mind won’t get hung up in an infinite logic loop, tilt should be a thing of the past.

Best wishes,
Mason

I do not agree that everyone tilts.

If you are able to concentrate on decision making and detach from results, then there is no reason for you to tilt, right?

I have been trying to do that with reasonably good success, and surely know some pros that I have never seen tilted.

I think its ok to get angry,curse at the poker screen,curse your bad luck,punch something.Obviously dont do these things live as long as you dont let the frustration spill over into playing **** cards or doing stupid things.

Im currently on a horrendous downswing/runbad but a lot of the bad beats/cooler situations i could have gotten out of by folding/not overplaying my hand/trying to bluff obviously sticky players.

actually forget what i said about,just got knocked out of a tourney where i was card dead but patiently folding bad hands and playing disciplined and 4bet all KK v AK,Ace on river of course.
Actually knowing you played well makes it worst,when you do the right thing and get screwed over constantly,yea I agree with you

If you're punching things because of what happens in a card game, you should seek help.

Not sure why you'd be upset about KK vs AK hitting, as it's going to win 30% of the time. If that's your idea of "horrendous", you're likely magnifying things in your head. Plus in your own post you admit most of those situations have been avoidable. Maybe it's not a huge downswing and you're a mental game fish.

https://twitter.com/Kevmath/status/1265680140194983939

It was an allin how is that avoidable?Its not horrendous in one instant,i know the odds of AK v AA.Its horrendous when it happens constantly,downswings and runbads do happen,i understand variance.
Im saying its ok to get angry/pissed when nasty things happen,its a normal thing that normal people do.Just like when you smile when good things happen.
Ive seen your first responce and you seem to like calling people fish.You some kind of top level pro or something?

I'm not referring to the KK vs AK. You said that most of your other scenarios were avoidable.

If you understood variance, you'd also understand that it's not logical to punch something just because a card didn't hit. I can call someone a mental game fish if I think the term applies. Don't be a delicate flower than can't take any outside criticism.

Thinking that getting mad is normal is just a justification of your poor behaviour. The reason Phil Hellmuth gets teased by the other top pros is that his behaviour is silly. Why would it be silly in person but fine to punch things at home? What changed between the internet game and the casino game that allows for those reactions?

Well I’m just human not a robot,humans get angry and do illogical things from time to time Mr Spock.Havent you ever roared at the tv when your team messes up a play?Well most humans do this now and again,not logical but there you go.
There are also things you can do in the privacy of your own home that you don’t do in public.Humans have emotions,I don’t see what’s the big deal about expressing them. Explain that to the people on planet Vulcan.

No need to take my point to an extreme example like Spock. If you wouldn't behave that way in public, clearly there's a reason (it's abberant behaviour), why would it be acceptable at home?

Using the excuse of being human is also silly. You learned to respond in the ways you do in front of your computer. You also learned to modify those behaviours in public when you realized it wasn't acceptable.

However, you're failing to see the parallels between your ability to control your emotions in public and your angry behaviour regarding the same circumstances when they happen in online poker.

It's such a lame copout to simply pretend that anyone who doesn't get physically angry over a card game is a robot, or that anyone who can mentally handle downswings without freaking out has no emotions. That's why I used the term mental game fish, because it's an area that you seem to need work on. GL

Hi BicycleRepairMan;

As long as you're ready to play the next hand, you're fine. But, when the next hand comes and you're still focused on the bad beat then you have a problem.

This sounds like your understanding of strategy may need some improvement. While the short-term luck factor can make you think that your bad results are due to variance and not incorrect plays. If your poor results keep up for a long enough time, you should start to look at exactly how you're playing some of your hands. And make sure you do this away from the table.

This is incorrect. It's not so much of knowing you played well whether you actually did or didn't. What's important here is an understanding of the variance that's present in the game and how it can affect your short-term results.

Best wishes,
mason

Thanks for the reply,Ok my little rant was a bit self indulgent.But a while ago i flopped a set and stacked a guy so all happy in my nappy again
Actually i think i played it pretty bad ,ill post it here later i think.

I do understand variance and I am reading Jandas books at the moment and analyze hands using flopzilla also watching various poker videos on YT,but i think i need a more structured way to learn.

Im also playing less zoom type games and more regular 6max which are less aggressive,its 3bet pots OOP when i miss the flop is where im having problems,but if i stick to more passive opponents this shouldnt be too much of a problem and reduce swings and frustration


Can you recommend any decent structured poker courses,Im looking into Raise Your Edge at the moment.

So youv'e never gotten angry in your life even on your own in your own home? Ok pod person.

Hi BicycleRepairMan:

If you haven't read The Theory of Poker Applied to No-Limit by David Sklansky, I would highly recommend it. The first book by Andrew Brokos is also good and he has just come out with a second book (that I haven't read but would assume it's also good).

I'm familiar with the Upswing Poker stuff and think it's good, so they have my recommendation.

I'm negative towards stuff by Jonathan Little, but this is based mainly on his books which the ones I have read take an approach I don't like. But I'm not knowledegeable about his websites so don't want to comment on them.

As for other sites, such as the one you mention -- Raise Your Edge -- I'm not knowledegeable about them.

Best wishes,
Mason