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Originally Posted by dandare131
I am trying to find Mason Malmuth's article 'A Mathematical Model of “Tilt” — Cause and Cure' from August 2013, on that issue page http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue104/ the articles are unavailable, I guess these are archived, could someone direct me to a working link / article page? Thanks a bunch in advance! Dan
The following is a paper that Mason gave at the 15th Annual Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking, jointly sponsored by the University Nevada Reno and the University Nevada Las Vegas, that was held at Caesars Palace Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. It’s also similar to an article that appeared here a couple of years ago, but has been expanded for more clarity.
A Mathematical Model of “Tilt” — Cause and Cure
by Mason Malmuth
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 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.
First off, notice that this little joke is funny. It also contains a logic discontinuity. 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:
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One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Or when Mae West commented:
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When I'm good, I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.
Or when W. C. Fields said:
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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 discontinuities are. We see the logic discontinuity and also understand the error of the logic. Thus we laugh.
But what happens when a logic discontinuity 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?
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 very simple. Understand poker and the probabilistic events that govern it better. Once you get a better grasp of the facts 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 sustained 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.
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 “flight or fight” 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.
