Quote:
Originally Posted by ringring088
so, I dabble in online and live poker. Online, I'll 4-table 25nl and not get rattled even in the slightest if I find I'm in 5 buy-ins on one table... in fact, I might not even notice. In live, I typically play $2/5 1k buy-in and if I'm stuck $3k+, I notice I get pretty steamy and chase / tilt / punt through my play. I try to view the game through the lens of, "this is a long-term game, you shouldn't care about local results; that is, it doesn't matter if you're up or down in this session."
do people have the same issue? maybe im playing to big of stakes live if losing 3k-4k annoys me? Online, I like the notion of checking-in (looking at my graph, results, p&l, etc.) every 10k hands or so, to not make sure I'm not letting variance get to my head. what equivalent would you employ live? every 500 hours?
I guess the jist of this post is, like, how do you not give a f*** about individual session results?
cheers,
ringring
The following is from my book
Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition. To understand how to solve tilt problems you need to understand what causes you to lose the ability to think rationally. All comments are welcome.
____________________
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 often stop and the steamer will calm down and 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 the definition of tilt out of the way, and a short way of stating this is that
a player goes on tilt when he loses the ability to think rationally, 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 important 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 Helsinki 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 when 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 and a logic disconnect that I can’t solve has been created.
Also, 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 and it’s time to deal with it.
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 supposed 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 were cracked, or have trouble dealing with running bad, it’s again a logic disconnect (for them). 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, and they begin to lose the ability to think rationally.
So, what’s the solution? 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. And the reason for this is that you’ve solved the logic disconnect that was created.
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 the forums at 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 can solve the problem and won’t get hung up in an infinite logic loop, tilt, at least for the large majority of people, should be a thing of the past.
Final Comment: Since the above was first written as well as the original publication of this book in 2015, I’ve still read many pieces of advice from some of the poker mental coaches that were much different from this. Much of their advice has to do with learning to control your emotions which of course leads to “fight or flight.” Can this be correct? And is what I’ve written above not accurate?
I think the way to answer these two questions is to decide on how well the mathematical model described above represents tilt. I think the answer is that it does a very good job. In addition, notice that things like learning to control emotions or “fight or flight” have no place in the model. Thus, it’s quite unlikely that either of these or some of the other things that the poker mental coaches advocate have anything to do with tilt and its cause or cure.
