The very word evokes memories. Scraped walls, smashed keyboards, marathon sessions. The flat, painful feeling at 5am, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, having scraped half your bankroll, waiting for sleep to take you back to your own realm. Everyone has their own stories of what they have done on the tilt. Everyone has their own scars. It's a very common demon among players, and probably one of the most painful, frustrating and human aspects of poker.
Let's take a closer look at tilt. In previous articles we have discussed how to identify a tilt opponent, now we will turn the perspective inwards. We'll look at how and in what forms tilt manifests itself, as well as different strategies for taming it.
As mentioned above, tilt has a negative effect on your normal game. Tilt is primarily caused by five things: losing a pot, playing poorly, feeling insulted or disrespected, an altered state of mind (fatigue, hunger or hangover), and concurrent events (loss of a job, a fight with an important person, etc.).
It was mentioned earlier that there are two types of tilt: cold tilt and hot tilt. A hot tilt is an aggressive, angry, try-to-back-it-up-right-now tilt that is often marked by a blind all in preflop shove. Cold tilt is more submissive, tired, begging to be allowed to catch aces, usually playing 12 hours straight and folding to all 3-bets.
The metaphor "a pot of boiling water" is very apt to describe Tilt. The level of Tilt is like a pot filled with warm water; whenever something bad happens, the water in the pot gets one unit hotter. For a while the heat will not affect you and your inner state will remain calm and stable. But, at a certain point, the boiling point of the pot, the water will start to boil. The more heat is added, the stronger the pot will boil.
This doesn't mean that the tilt will go to zero as soon as you leave the hot zone (step away from the poker for a minute). The pot also maintains a certain temperature when removed from the fire, this is known as accumulated tilt. This is simply the residual tilt left over from downswinging. The result is that the next time the heat is turned back on, the cooking temperature is more easily reached. The accumulated tilt can easily be solved by allowing the pot to cool completely, but there are also other methods to manage it. So that gives us a definition of tilt , but why does it occur at all?
Let's start at the neurological level. If the tilt is having a negative effect on our normal game, then we can reprogram it at the level of the mind. During a tilt, our limbic system (the part of our subconscious that regulates our emotional response) blocks our consciousness (it should regulate the subconscious poker game, according to known theory). When a player tilt, he or she is experiencing the primordial state of the human ancestor, saying fight or flight. This is due to neurochemical reactions, the player's unconscious mind takes control of the poker decisions through its impulsive, instinctive reactions. The conscious mind, which tends to veer off course, is simply trampled on and silenced. When the player tilt's, the conscious mind is simply pushed out of the picture. Only the subconscious mind is left to control your behaviour, just as with conscious and unconscious competence. When you start to operate at the level of unconscious competence, the conscious mind is no longer looking over your shoulder. In this way, all conscious skills are discarded. In other words, what you do on the tilt is equivalent to playing with your unconscious competence.
And have you ever wondered why people behave so differently on the bridge? Let's take two players, Mantas
and John. Both are in the same stakes and at the same skill level, but tilt completely differently. Let's say they both become equally furious and tilt. Mantas starts to 3-bet more aggressively and to call and 4-bet with medium pairs, making increasingly desperate hero calls. John, despite not being any more furious than Mantas, open shoves ace-rags to four players, checkraises and triple barrels with a gutshot, and starts to overbet-shove in the river.
It's clear as day that these two players bridge in completely different ways. A naive reviewer would miss this by saying, "Gee, John probably just doesn't think." But let's be critical, If the tilt is a descent down to the level of unconscious competence, it means that when Mantas takes off all the unconscious checks, the only thing he can do unconsciously is to raise his 3-bet frequency, more 4-bet/call. Mantas cannot make an open shove with an A4o preflop, as
Jonas. His subconscious will not allow him to do so. Mantas cannot even conceive of such a possibility or decision as permissible. In other words, John does not need to be "more" tilt'inus to do more tilt'inus actions. It is just that John's subconscious is less constrained in its choice of possible actions in poker space.
Tilt brings out the most unrestricted concept of poker you have in your subconscious. Most people, however, have too many mental limitations to be able to make an open shove with confidence, no matter how tilt-like they are.
Some play tilt more freely, others 3-bet more, some make hero shoves. But your subconscious mind only does what it thinks should work. It is likely that if someone open shoves preflop, they subconsciously believe that it might result in a win (and if it hasn't been liquidated yet, it must have ended in a reward at some point), or they might want to lose.
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