As mentioned earlier, statisticians sometimes like to look at the extreme of distributions to see if any information can be gained. And the extreme of this distribution would be a top player, and a player of this caliber won't make this type of error. So, if you're having this problem of making the wrong play when you know another play is correct, the way to correct it is not so much to think about the wrong or right play, but how you differ from a top player who wouldn't do this. And that might be what you should concentrate on.

See my discussion of the four losing states of poker that players can enter into.

Okay.

What I said is a lot different from this. There's much more to what you need to understand than just poker strategy. The expanded edition of my psychology book does a more complete job of going into this.

Usually not. They're more likely to be going into one of the other three states of losing poker, something that most of these so-called poker psychologists aren't even aware of.

Get into a boxing ring, get hit a few times, and that should answer your questions on mental toughness.

Let me ask a question. Suppose you're a video poker player, are playing as part of a team where the money put up is not yours, and you have a memorized strategy to go by. Do you need to be mentally tough to execute this strategy perfectly?

Mason

When Mason says "all things poker", he is including a lot. Granted he has a mathematical background and talent for analysis - which may make a difference here. The thing is, when you have a good understanding of the game, someone hitting a 5% draw isn't all that frustrating and therefore isn't tilting.

On the other hand, the fact that someone puts in the amount of work (and it is work) to gain that knowledge would tend to discount an impulsive nature in the first place. Note that when I say work, I don't mean just reading a book, or five. I mean studying the book and discussing it with others.

I suppose I'm suggesting that people that get frustrated easily and have impulse control would not be able to acquire the necessary knowledge in the first place without developing the necessary discipline - which would negate frustration/impulse control.

Consider what he calls "That damn book" (Supersystem), just reading it didn't do anyone a lot of good. It had to be studied and not many people were able to do that.

I wasn't meaning to discount the advice in your book; it has been a few years since I read it, so maybe I should review the 4 states of losing poker you mention here (although I would guess most would be called a form of tilt by most players). I was more talking about the advice you give in this forum, and of course I simplified it.

I'm going to pass on getting into the boxing ring, as I think that is one of the worst displays of lack of humanity in the western world today and should be banned. But, if I did happen to try it, I still think I would need physical toughness more than mental toughness. I've never been particularly impressed by the mental capacities of any boxers, but they sure have impressive bodies.

Regarding VP, I certainly don't think you would need much mental toughness in that scenario, but there are so many things different there from regular poker that I don't see much of a similarity. Particularly important differences are that you may be playing poker to pay your bills (if you're a pro), and you're playing with your own money. Also, since you can't have a memorized strategy, you may be able to convince yourself that what you intellectually think is the correct play might not be right "just this one time" because "he's taking a shot at me" or whatever, which can lead to suboptimal plays. You may need a bit of what could be called mental toughness to stay up all night playing VP and focus on the video screen, plus remember the correct plays, while keeping up your number of hands per hour.

Overall, I think I very rarely tilt these days, and I nearly always make what I think should be the best plays. However, I do find that after I have had a large loss, I want to avoid going back into the game again, and prefer to take a few days off, which isn't good for my total hours played.
I feel like I could use some kind of increase in "mental toughness" to help me shake off the losses and go back for another chance to win.

Hi Jay:

I just want to point out that when I say "all things poker" I'm including the topic that things, like poker, that are based on probability theory can often be counterintuitive and this can lead to difficulties for many people. There's more discussion and some examples in Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition. Also, unless someone has copied me that I don't know about, I believe I'm the only one who has written about this subject.

Mason

"The Four States of Losing Poker" can be found in the sticky at the top of this forum: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...poker-1756469/

Three of the states are much removed from tilt.

Obviously, you'll need to be physically tough. There is a chapter on "Mental Toughness" in my poker psychology book.

Okay.

And that's just the point. In video poker or blackjack, the exact strategies are known. Thus, there's virtually no tilting. But in a game like poker, the more incomplete your understanding of "all things poker" the more likely you are to tilt. Again, see my poker psychology book for more discussion.

Both of these can be true for video poker or blackjack. I just used in my example the team idea to make my point more clear.

You can certainly have a memorized strategy for your starting hands in poker. But poker is certainly more complex than this. Also, I don't agree with your example of staying up all night playing video poker. When a team locks up a bank of machines, you'll see many people, but young and old, staying up all night.

Taking a break to enjoy life is probably good. If you do it after an occasional big loss that should be fine.

Mason

Really? Have to ever seen how Navy Seals train? Some of the toughest men can't handle it.

[flame]And, while off-topic, before you start wanting to ban boxing, remember that there are more than a few people that would like to ban poker. If you recall a little history, dancing was also banned in parts of the U.S.[/flame]

Perhaps it's my own interpretation, but I read "all things poker" as being multi-discipline. Yes, heavy on math, but also more - much more (tells, betting patterns/hand ranges, etc). It takes time, effort, and energy to absorb the information and apply it, which goes to my main point:

The discipline required to study poker to the depth necessary to beat the game translates to the discipline required to play the game.

Yes I hear you saying that you don't see frustration, frustration tolerance, and impulse control as particularly germane to tilt. Though that is largely true for a very small slice of the poker personality profiles out there, it is ineffective and unrealistic to tell a highly emotionally vulnerable player to ward it off by studying strategy. The meat and potatoes of the problem for the non 1-percentile player is frustration tolerance and impulse control. Once into the super elite level of play, that often changes, but to group the masses in with advice for this class of player is bogus. That seems about like an oncologist specialist who never smoked telling a layman smoker, "Look, you just need to study and master the knowledge of how cigarettes are toxic and then you'll make the right decision when the impulse to light up strikes." Nope.

You're missing one essential piece of the puzzle. Before a person can get to "all things poker", they have to study the game. Consider the 10,000 hours concept. People with impulse control issues that put in the study time required will see the impulse issues dissolve on their own - no conquering required. It just happens as a result of putting in the study time and sticking to it.

What I am not talking about are the people that read one book, one time, and think they can become a consistent winner - of which there are many.

Why do you believe this or what evidence can you give? It certainly isn't self-evident.

I think there are some people who will never have good impulse control no matter what they do.

You pointed that up well and I didn't miss it. Academic type learning does indeed enhance ego strength to some small degree, or at least there is a correlation between the two, but the world is full of people highly knowledgeable and expert in any given field, yet far from high on self-control, patience, discipline. In other words, in-depth knowledge of a given subject does not equate to emotional self-control. Far, far, far from it. And it does not equate to ego strength, though there is a correlation there. Self-control/discipline is itself a skill and it isn't produced by academic learning, as is blatantly obvious in these threads. Take a look at the personal lives of the "robots" at the poker table. This clearly points up that an elite poker player totally unaffected by emotional unraveling at the poker table is merely exhibiting this at the poker table, and for him/her, true enough, tilt is not a problem needed to be redressed. This does not mean that their unique style of adaptation to the poker table is a universal thing, far from it, it's a special case. To assume that this is the dynamic of everyone because it is for "me," is an error in perspective re psychology. And so this gaining expertise to redress tilt idea is more a personality feature of certain players than the dynamic of gaining self-control for people in general.

Well, I seriously doubt that you could find such a person that would also put in the level of study required. But if you could, I might very well concede the point. I feel very safe.

Now that only the most serious ones remain - those of you who actually got the personal discipline/mental toughness element out of the term ''robot'' - I can only put a quick word to thank you all. I sure wasn't expecting this topic to provide such a rich source of relevant information. By all means, feel free to continue.


Currently playing NL5 on GG, 4 tables instead of 12 like I used to, much softer on the ego area


OP

Cigarettes are addictive. That's very different from what I talk about. The following is from my book Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition.

Mason

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.

This is the core of what I've been saying. When someone calls a big bet with a gunshot on the turn and hits his straight to beat your set, it's not something to be upset about (though it is annoying), they just hit an 11:1 (9%) draw. So, if they didn't make at least 11:1 on their turn call, it was a bad play. If they made one bad play like that, they will make more bad plays and you want to play pots with them.

However, if they made a lot more than 11:1 on the turn call, it was a good play and they should be watched for further information as it was a high-variance play. You need to understand why he did it. This is where the hours upon hours of study come in.

That article makes its case well but I think there are a few conflations. First, after describing tilt well it makes an unwarranted leap to what is causing it. It claims the player has “lost the ability to think rationally,” when what is actually happening is the player is simply disregarding the rationality he in fact does still possess. To wit, if you give the player a written exam at the table about the reckless action he just took, he would answer the question differently than he acted during the hand. This is important. He hasn’t lost rationality; he has lost discipline, patience, temperance, judiciousness, restraint. He has lost executive function.

He/she didn’t lose the knowledge of the right and wrong action, but the execution of doing the right action. We all have times when we have done a lousy action when we knew better, so there is execution in poker. Sound play does not automatically proceed from one’s knowledge base. For the same reason a tennis player is capable of going for a 100+mph ace second serve at match point against him, or a golfer is capable of using a driver on the last hole of a tournament when it is about the only thing that can cost him his lead, etc, a poker player is capable of knowing damn well that calling a 3-betting nit showing rare strength pre-flop isn’t judicious, but do it anyway.

I agree that it certainly helps to have a realistic and accurate view of the run-bad events, but notice, critically, that this is more about meta-awareness and detachment than it is about understanding. Everyone knows aces can get cracked and get cracked a bunch of times in a row, but not everyone is capable of a detached, once-removed perspective regarding it. The “short circuit” is caused not by lack of understanding nearly as much as by lack of detachment from the results. “I want my chips back now” is the command of the tilting ego, whereas, “I want to make good decisions” is the command of CEO executive function.

Ego strength/CEO executive function is missing in action in tilt. Instead of skippering their boat they are awash in the waves. The quality that the non-tilting pro is exhibiting in keeping his A-game under adversity is mindfulness – a detached ego observer (as opposed to being awash in the experience of the moment). His being goes deeper than the frustration of the moment, whereas the tilter doesn’t. Chuckling at one’s own bad beat is a classic example of detachment from results. Non-tilt is much more psychological than it is mathematical or academic. Level-headedness under stress and adversity does not come from the size of one’s database.

The cause and dynamics of tilt are important, and there is execution in poker (although it is not what it is in sports). For this last point take the case of an excellent calculus student but who suffers from test anxiety. They do poorly on some test when they actually understood it well. Execution failed. They short-circuited under the influence of their emotions. Execution does not proceed automatically from knowledge, and that is why tilt is a thing.

I believe what Mason is referring to is Cognitive dissonance, a condition that occurs when beliefs and actions don't match up. In poker, that happens when someone hits a low-probability draw to beat you. Your belief was that you had a lock, however, that belief was wrong. You didn't have a lock, you had a 91% chance of winning the pot.

Studying and the knowledge that comes with it sets up more realistic beliefs, thus avoiding conflict in the first place.

Therefore, Mason didn't make an "unwarranted leap" at all.

Takashi Kotegawa, the best daytrader in Japan is a great twitter follow (twitter.com/ryobaomahe) for the mental game. He says working on his mental game is 95% the cause of his success, and that’s all he focuses on (whereas the other 5% is having a very simple but solid technical strategy and executing it). And from his twitter it seems like the dude is obsessed with the mental game side of things, and that’s why he’s great at what he does. Lots of neat ideas from that guy about this.

No. It doesn't say this. What it does say is that tilt occurs because of the inability to solve what I call "logic disconnects." When this happens, your mind can get caught in something like an infinite programming loop that it can't get out of.

When a player is truly on tilt, he can't do much of anything including answering questions. I believe you're confusing tilt with one of the other three losing states that some players go into.

Okay. But you're not describing a player on tilt. Also, comparing athletic sports where execution is important to a game like poker which is mainly a knowledge game will often lead you to wrong conclusions. See my book Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition for more discussion.

Okay.

Mason

It sounds like we are making progress on seeing each other's points. However I quoted the article directly that a player goes on tilt when "loses the ability to think rationally" ... and you responded with it doesn't say that. (Paragraph 8.) I realize it has been several years since you wrote it.

You wrote:

when what is actually happening is the player is simply disregarding the rationality he in fact does still possess.

and the chapter from my book doesn't say anything like this. That's because when you choose to disregard something, you're making a rational decision even though it might be an incorrect decision

Mason

If I choose to disregard that a bus is coming down the street and I walk right in front of it, if I choose to disregard that 2+2=4 and decide that it equals 5, if I disregard that it is negative EV and choose to blind straddle and then call a 5x raise in the dark out of position against Patrik Antonius, if I disregard that smoking is dangerous to my emphysema and decide to smoke anyway, if I disregard my anxiety and decide to join a cult that demands that I sacrifice autonomy, if I disregard the vast majority medical opinion about treatment of a disease and decide to follow idiotic religious prohibitions against such treatment for my child, if I disregard all the data about the earth being a spheroid and choose to insist it is flat ... are these rational decisions? They might be conscious decisions, deliberate decisions, but they can hardly be called rational?

Obviously there are some things that can't be disregarded and remain on rational footing. The ability to be rational does not come and go in a global sense this side of psychosis, however, the willingness to be rational does come and go, the discipline to be rational does come and go, usually under the stress of strong emotions. For instance, and this isn't beyond the pale in this crazy world, there could be a religion to which part of the doctrine is "2+2=5, and who are you going to believe, man or our holy book?" Lots of people in that spot under indoctrination decide to believe the holy book. I'm certainly preaching to the choir with the 2+2 thing, but I can't see why you are calling that decision up above rational. My point is our rationality is in flux as to our willingness to employ it, it isn't something that evaporates routinely. Under more and more intense stressors we can act more and more extremely and "crazy," and some of these situations do indeed involve a loss of rationality, but the player at the table simply playing badly is nowhere near that level, and is much more near the level of impatience of "I want my chips back right now and I'm not willing to follow the rules of rationality for this game that I know like the back of my hand."

It makes sense that your approach to this is heavily mathematical and mine is heavily psychological. I do think you are guilty of lumping players into the category of your own psychological approach to the game, but that is not what is out there in the main.

First, you use hyperbole and sarcasm. Then you seem to try and establish yourself as an expert ... and not for the first time. OK, let's play. A while back you said you wrote a book. Using your username, I looked and didn't find anything. So, this time I'll ask directly:

What qualifies you as an expert and has your work been peer-reviewed?

First, virtually no one does this. And if you are prone to do this sort of thing then you probably need serious professional help, and that's way beyond me.

Okay.

Mason

Disregarding the reality of 2+2=4 is akin to disregarding the reality that the earth is a spheroid, not flat, and people do it all the time; playing hands in the dark or calling off in horrible spots happens all the time; continuing to smoke with heart disease, lung disease, and cancer happens all the time; joining cults to ward off denied existential anxiety happens all the time; people refuse their children medical care on the basis of religious beliefs all the time. Yet you say virtually no one does this. ???????? Jaykon apparently thinks its hyperbole or sarcasm. Yet its meant literally. (Only the stepping in front of the bus example isn't literal.) In most cases like this people are just adjourning their reason and rationality to indulge a belief, just like the player on tilt is bypassing their rationality to indulge an impulse.