Previous book “Mental Game of Poker” part: Additional strategies for problem-solving
Tilt = anger + bad play
The traditional definition of tilt is too broad. Sometimes tilt simply means bad play, but it can also mean bad play because of winning, playing too many hands, playing too conservatively, or playing while drunk. Tilt is hard to get rid of because its definition is so broad that it practically includes everything except good play.
To eliminate tilt, you need to know why you played badly. Only when you understand the reason for your bad play can you create a specific strategy to overcome tilt. The strategy will be as clear as the problem itself. There are hundreds of reasons for bad play, and each requires a specific strategy. If you think that specificity is not important, then consider this comparison:
“I was doing well, made a few good reads, and won a buy-in, but then I tilted and scattered all my chips.”
In general, poker players are not inclined to analyze tilt as they analyze played hands. Their tilt analysis can be as absurd as this hand analysis:
“I am in the small blind, everyone folds to the cut-off, who raises to $10, I have AQ suited, then I make a technical mistake and lose my chips.”
You might as well say, “I sat at the table, blah blah blah, and lost.” All the important information needed for proper hand analysis is omitted. Without that information, it is impossible to improve your poker skills. The same can be said about tilt.
After spending enough time observing poker players, it becomes clear that most references to tilt usually mean players' frustration, anger, or rage. For this reason, this book defines tilt as a result of anger. However, this does not mean that the solution to the problem is simply not being frustrated. Thinking that tilt can be turned off by pressing a certain button is a fantasy. Moreover, it is often mistakenly believed that anger is the problem. Anger is just a symptom, not the real problem.
As mentioned in Chapter 4, solving the tilt problem means successfully managing tilt and simultaneously working off the poker table to understand the causes of tilt. Both sides of the strategy are very important and necessary, so do not fall into the trap of thinking that deep breathing, breaks, stopping play, going to the gym, holding your breath, or positive thinking are long-term solutions. These strategies only help manage tilt until it is completely eliminated.
The goal of this chapter is to provide the basic information needed to confront tilt and eliminate it from your game. Organized into sequential sections, the information about tilt will gradually become more detailed and specific. Although it may sometimes seem that the details are delved into more than necessary, mastery lies in the details.
The Nature of Anger
Anger is an emotion that represents conflict. Conflict is essentially a contradiction. Conflict is best recognized when it occurs between you and another person, such as when someone cuts you off on the road, when a drunk friend acts like an idiot, or when someone humiliates you at the poker table for making a bad call. By nature, anger is not a bad thing; it can be a great motivator to take action, but it can also be the cause of big problems. The first step to solving your tilt problem is to identify the causes of your anger.
Conflict between you and poker, and between you and other poker players, is much easier to recognize than conflict with yourself. Players often describe that feeling as a “struggle with oneself” when trying to control tilt. Such conflict is not imaginary. It is real and exists between what the player consciously knows and the shortcomings that exist in their unconscious competence. In other words, they struggle to prevent those shortcomings from becoming the cause of tilt.
Sometimes you manage to win that struggle, and sometimes a clear mind is overwhelmed by intense anger, and you lose control. Our minds often find it hard to understand when control is lost because logically, you know how you should think and why tilt is irrational. So why is that not enough? Here are three possible reasons:
- Your logic is correct, but it needs to become unconscious competence.
- Accumulated tilt quickly overwhelms your mental abilities.
- You think you have all the pieces of the logical puzzle to solve the problem, but you don't.
The vast majority of poker players most closely identify with point 3, and the goal of this chapter is to provide those missing puzzle pieces.
Accumulated Tilt
Anger-inducing tilt is not just the result of one session or tournament; it can accumulate over a certain period. When the causes of anger are not addressed, that anger accumulates and becomes a burden for the future. If you have ever experienced sudden tilt, like a bomb explosion, it was caused by accumulated tilt. This usually happens during prolonged periods of bad variance. Each day it becomes easier to tilt because the anger from the previous day carries over to the next. Playing poker can handle a certain amount of anger that accumulates while playing, but if that's not enough to completely refresh your mind, you'll reach the breaking point faster the next time.
Your thoughts are not as powerful as your emotions. No matter how mentally strong you are, accumulated tilt can overcome your ability to control your emotions. This means that the only way to fight accumulated tilt is to work on your emotions when you are not at the poker table. To deal with accumulated tilt, use the strategies described in this and the “accumulated emotions” chapters.
Tilt's Tilt
Anger arises in two places. The most significant form of anger comes from bad habits that exist in unconscious competence. For example, you don't like losing, and when it happens, you get angry; you think you deserve to win because you are a better player, so you get angry when a bad player sucks out; or you can't stand bad drivers and lose your temper when they cut you off on the road.
Anger also arises when you realize that you are angry – tilt's tilt. Essentially, you get angry because you are already angry – you tilt because making mistakes makes you angry, you tilt because you let an opponent tilt you, or you tilt because you have no ideas on how to fix your tilt problem.
These additional levels of anger are like adding logs to the fire. The flawed logic in unconscious competence fuels that fire, and more effective use of the mind is necessary to extinguish it. The last three sections were dedicated to facilitating thinking during tilt. It's so simple that you can tilt just because you didn't realize it earlier. Players often don't understand that they are adding fuel to the fire, thinking it's water.
The Benefits of Tilt
Yes, you read that correctly – tilt can be a good thing. It can be used to improve your game. Of course, the ultimate goal is the complete absence of tilt, but since it's impossible to just turn off tilting, it's better to use it to become a better player.
As described in Chapter 3, when emotions (in this case, anger) are activated, the part of the brain responsible for thinking shuts down. Thinking protects against weaknesses in the game that have not yet been trained to the level of unconscious competence. Since it's hard to understand when certain poker skills reach the level of unconscious competence (because it happens unconsciously), tilt can be an indicator of what still needs work. And reality can be very harsh when you realize how small a part of the game is mastered. However, when success and profitability depend on how accurately we can assess our game, tilt can serve positively.
When you start tilting, it becomes easy to focus only on how badly you are playing. But you need to learn to distinguish that not everything is bad; there is something you are doing very well.
If you are still folding medium hands without position, it means you have mastered good hand selection and understanding of the importance of position. Although when tilting you might play too loose or tight, your bet sizing or thin value bets might be good.
Of course, there is another side of the coin when failure or constant aggression directed at you makes you lose patience, and then your biggest weaknesses come out. Suddenly, you find yourself trying to bluff a fish when he clearly has a good hand, showing that you still can't automatically take your foot off the gas. If you catch yourself calling too loose on bets or chasing various draws without proper odds, it may indicate a lack of deeper mathematical understanding of the game or an excessive desire to gamble.
The mistakes you make while playing are usually elementary and happen because you haven't mastered correcting your game errors. Of course, anger also plays its part, because if you weren't angry, you could think normally and avoid mistakes. Nevertheless, your poker weaknesses need to be corrected, and tilt helps to identify them.
