The word itself already brings back memories. Scratched walls, broken keyboards, marathon sessions. The crushed, painful feeling at 5 AM, staring at the bedroom ceiling after blowing half your bankroll, waiting for sleep to take you into its realm. Everyone has their own stories of what they did while on tilt. Everyone has their scars. It is a very common demon among players and probably one of the most painful, exhausting, and human aspects of poker.
Let's examine tilt more closely. In previous articles, we discussed how to recognize a tilting opponent; now we will turn the perspective on ourselves. We will explore how and in what forms tilt manifests, as well as various strategies to tame it.
As mentioned earlier, tilt negatively affects your usual game. Tilt is primarily caused by five things: losing a pot, weak play, feeling insulted or disrespected, altered mental state (fatigue, hunger, or hangover), and concurrent events (losing a job, an argument with an important person, etc.).
Previously, it was mentioned that there are two types of tilt: hot and cold tilt. Hot tilt is aggressive, angry, trying to recover everything immediately, often marked by a blind all-in preflop shove. Cold tilt is more submissive, tired, asking to catch aces, the player usually plays for 12 hours straight and folds to all 3-bets.
The metaphor “boiling water pot” is very apt for describing tilt. The level of tilting is like a pot filled with warm water; when something bad happens, the water in the pot heats up by one unit. For a while, the heat won't 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 more vigorously the pot will boil.
This doesn't mean that tilt will reduce to zero as soon as you step out of the heat zone (take a moment away from poker). A pot removed from the fire still retains a certain temperature, which is called accumulated tilt. This is simply residual tilt left over from a downswing. The result is that the next time the heat is turned on, the boiling point is reached more easily. Accumulated tilt can be easily resolved by allowing the pot to cool completely, but there are also other methods to manage it. So, this allows us to understand the definition of tilt, but why does it arise at all?
Let's start at the neurological level. If tilt manifests as a negative impact on our usual game, it means we can reprogram it at the mental level. During tilt, our limbic system (the subconscious part that regulates emotional response) blocks our consciousness (which should regulate subconscious poker play based on known theory). When a player is tilting, they experience a primal state of human ancestors, saying, fight or flee. This happens due to neurochemical reactions, the player's subconscious takes control of poker decisions with its impulsiveness and instinctive reactions. The conscious, prone to deviation, mind is simply trampled and silenced. When a player is tilting, the consciousness is simply pushed out of the picture. Only the subconscious remains, which controls your behavior, just like when talking about conscious and unconscious competence. When you are tilting, you start acting at the level of unconscious competence, and the consciousness no longer looks over your shoulder. In this way, all conscious skills are discarded. In other words, what you do while tilting is equal to your unconscious competence level of play.
Have you ever wondered why people behave so differently when tilting? Let's take two players, Mantas and Jonas. Both are at the same stakes and skill level, but they tilt completely differently. Let's say both became equally furious and tilted. Mantas starts 3-betting more aggressively and calling 4-bets with medium pairs, making increasingly desperate hero calls. Jonas, despite not being more furious than Mantas, open shoves ace-rags to four players, check-raises and triple barrels with a gutshot, and starts overbet-shoving rivers.
It's clear as day that these two players tilt completely differently. A naive evaluator might dismiss this by saying, “Oh, Jonas probably just isn't thinking.” But let's be critical. If tilt is descending to the level of unconscious competence, it means that when Mantas removes all conscious checks, the only thing he can subconsciously do is increase his 3-bet frequency, 4-bet/call more. Mantas cannot open shove with A4o preflop like Jonas. His subconscious won't allow him to do that. Mantas can't even conceive of such a possibility or decision as permissible. In other words, Jonas doesn't need to be “more” tilted to perform more tilting actions. It's just that Jonas's subconscious is less restricted in choosing possible actions in the poker space.
During tilt, the most unrestricted concept of poker that you have in your subconscious emerges. However, most people have too many mental restrictions to boldly perform an open shove, no matter how tilted they are.
Some play looser when tilting, others 3-bet more, some make hero shoves. But your subconscious only performs actions that it believes should work. It's likely that if someone open shoves preflop, they subconsciously believe it can end in a win (and if such an action hasn't been eliminated, it must have ended in a reward at some point) or, perhaps, the person wants to lose.
