Tilt happens to you every day if you play poker. Many people think of tilt strictly as a major emotional blow-up that causes a loss of control. Though that is certainly the most dangerous form of tilt, much of the tilt we experience comes in the form of smaller, seemingly minor tilts, which, if unchecked, can lead to blow-ups. The consequences of a major tilt are heavy. It can destroy your emotional state for months if it leads to you tilting off your bankroll. Many of you have been through this already. This crazy but inevitable state of mind can be controlled, and often prevented.

Tilt is a form of anger, so it’s important to understand what causes anger. This way you can understand yourself better.

What causes anger:

Anger is often caused by an irrational perception of reality. The biggest irrational perception of reality is a lack of control. A good example would be when your aces lose after being all-in preflop. If this upset you, the reason it did is because your irrational perception of reality is that you are supposed to win with the best hand all of the time, or possibly that your irrational perception of reality was that you couldn’t have possibly played the hand better, so you should have won. Your lack of control over the situation can cause you to lash out!

Emotional reasoning causes anger. For instance, someone bluffs you out of a hand, then shows you his cheesy 23o that didn’t pair the board. Someone who makes a personal attack on you, often if this attack is often only perceived, can become the target of your emotional reasoning, to his great benefit! You take this as a personal attack. Your lack of control of the fact that you cannot go back and make the right decision can cause you to make a move that is too aggressive and unprofitable. Slowrollers, people who have an avatar or name you don’t like, people who use chat as a weapon, people who play too slowly, people who raise a lot, people who call too much, or people who use illogical reasoning can all become this type of target.

What escalates anger is breaking afrustration point. An example would be somebody raising your blind three times in a row when you have no hand and no fold equity for a reraise. The fact that he seems to think you are weak by raising you all of the time, coupled with the fact that you cannot change his thinking is a lack of control, and you may be inclined out of anger to steal his blind with nothing next time or fight back with less than the required hand value.

A lot of outside factors lower your frustration point. Lack of sleep, drinking, pain, stress, anxiety, and hunger are factors that can cause your frustration point to start lower than normal, meaning that it won’t take as long or as many of the above factors to get you going. While you may normally be able to take five bad beats before losing control, on a given day when some of these factors are going against you, it may only take two.

While recent irritations don’t lower your frustration point, they may bring you closer to it. The little irritations that occur during the day lower our tolerance for frustration. While you may require five bad beats to lose control, a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a flat tire, or spilling food on your shirt can count as three of those five. Then you only need two more to lose it. A recent losing streak can provide this type of problem as well.

When you first reach your frustration point, you will have a “little tilt.” You may say something stupid in the chat box, play a level higher than you should, or make an ill-timed overbet. Taking out your anger with a bad decision actually helps you temporarily lower your frustration if the results aren’t bad. However, it won’t take much to put you over the edge again, as once again you are only slightly below yourfrustration point. What takes you deeper into “major tilt” is when your frustration greatly exceeds your frustration point. This usually happens when one of your “little tilts” doesn’t work out, which is inevitable. Once you’re well past yourfrustration point, if you don’t stop playing poker, very bad things will usually happen. You could lose a lot of money and even lose your entire bankroll chasing down the desire to feel okay again (chasing losses).

Now that we’ve talked about how your brain works, let’s solve the problem before it occurs.

Tilt Prevention:

– Keep good records, and write down the buyin before you register. If you are forced to write down every screw-up you make before you make it, you may catch yourself when it might otherwise be too late.

– Play well-rested. If you have a tendency to tilt, you already know that it usually happens at the end of the night when you are most tired, and often after a short night’s rest.

– Don’t mix alcohol and poker. I’m sorry to even bring this up as it is so obvious, but drunken tilting is something that frequently happens to people. One drink is one too many.

– Eat. Hunger causes frustration, and you don’t need any of that!

– Have a respected buddy to whom you e-mail your results. If you’re a $20 player and you have to e-mail your results to your friend, who may chastise you if you play a $100 game, win or lose, you may be less likely to chase those losses when things are bad.

– Spread your bankroll over a few sites and e-wallets. If you already have a tendency to tilt your whole bankroll off, you should seriously consider quitting poker. However, since you won’t, this is the next best thing. It’s harder to tilt off your whole roll off at one site after another than it is to tilt it all off if it’s in one place.

– Don’t keep your whole online bankroll online if it’s large. You can’t easily tilt off what’s in the bank.

– Don’t engage in hate-chatting. While it may temporarily make you feel better to put an opponent down, major tilt can happen if he then beats you. If you insulted him for playing loose, you may feel the need to not attempt a loose play against him, for fear of getting caught playing loose. Don’t even say “well-played” if you don’t mean it. If people get to you when they attack your play in chat, turn the chat off.

– Stay away from grudges. The guy who got you mad has no more worth to his chips than anyone else at the table. Everyone’s chips are of paramount importance to winning, not just the dumb donkey who rivered himself your chips.

– Take time off after something frustrating happens. Since a hand of online poker happens in about thirty seconds, it can only take ninety seconds or so to send you from normal to completely over the edge! If you notice you are frustrated, stop playing.

– Stop immediately if you notice a“little tilt.” DO NOT wait for the big blind in a cash game. Get off right away. If you are making bad plays, you aren’t missing out on positive value by leaving.

– Teach poker. I do this, and it helps me play my best game when I know that one of my students could be watching anytime.

What to do if you can’t just decide to stop playing:

Once in a while you will find yourself on tilt or on the verge of tilt in an MTT or SNG. An example of this would be that you’re the chipleader in an MTT with 200 players left and you get bad beat three times in a row, then lose KK to AA. You are still in the middle of the pack though, and you need to play sharp.

– IMMEDIATELY adopt a normally sub-optimal uber-tight preflop strategy. If you are going to have “little tilts,” you may not want to try a raise that could fail and leave you in a spot where you should fold to a reraise. Also, playing a tight strategy can minimize the hurt of deviating from that strategy, as is likely to happen on a “little tilt.” If you play a loose aggressive strategy on tilt, you will often end up busted, because good loose aggressive players, by nature, are very close to the fine line between genius and insanity. It won’t take more than one “little tilt” to cross that line.

– Try play-by-play commentary. Pretend a lot of people are watching and call everything you see, a la Mike Sexton. This will keep your focus on the game and the actions of the others, rather than the beat you just took. I swear it works!

– Make yourself laugh. There are plenty of places to find funny videos online. Pranks and practical jokes help you get back into the fun-loving mood you need. If you aren’t having fun, you aren’t winning. Next time you take a bad beat, try this and tell me if it desn’t help. Someone in a thread recently suggested making a goofy smile at yourself in the mirror. It worked for me!

– Get a friend on Instant Messager or the phone right away. You won’t be as likely to screw up badly if someone else is watching.

When you are on a losing streak:

– Drop in stakes. This has a double-effect of keeping you further from the games you shouldn’t be playing and increasing your chances of winning, which lowers your current frustration level and helps you regain confidence.

– Keep on hand a video or two of a game you dominated with superior skill.This has an artificial effect on your brain which helps you restore confidence. Watch it after two consecutive losing days.

– Don’t tell your friends about your bad luck. This reinforces that your streak might be about luck, which it might. However, you are better off looking to change things you can control. People don’t want to hear it anyway.

Stop playing immediately if you do any of the following:

– Play a higher level than you should, even if you win.
– Fight in chat.
– Exceed your stop-loss for the day.
– Get tired.
– Make a bad play out of frustration.

Failure to stop when one of these things happens can cause great damage to your bankroll.

Why chasing losses hurts you so much and what to do about it:

You are a $20 SNG player with an 8% ROI. You are having a losing session, and you decide to step up to the $100 level to “make it all up.” You play frustrated and inevitably lose your $100. Since you average $1.60 per $20 SNG (8% of $20 is $1.60), it will now take you, on average, SIXTY-THREE $20 SNGs to make up for this mistake. In addition, over those 63 SNGs your frustration level will be higher, making it more likely for you to tilt again. It’s a vicious cycle, and winning players CANNOT afford to be stuck in it. Some of the most fundamentally talented players I ever knew have had this problem and failed because of it.

If you chase a loss, you should impose a stiff penalty on yourself, such as no poker for a week. In case of a second offense, no poker for a month. If you routinely engage in this sort of behavior, I recommend quitting or even contacting Gambler’s Anonymous at (213) 386-8789 for assistance. It’s a gambling problem, and winning poker is not gambling.

Good luck folks and keep playing with a clear head!

Jennifear

Jennifear is a proud Contributing Writer for Pocketfives.com and a Presto Award Winner for 2006’s Most Valuable Poster, as voted by the readers of PocketFives. She teaches private poker lessons, and you can find the details at Jennifear.com. A discount on these lessons is available if you support pocketfives.com by joining a poker site through one of their links.