Mastering Resilience: Avoiding and Dealing with Tilt
Where poker tilt is concerned, prevention is always better than cure. If you spot the warning signs beforehand, you’ll save much wasted time, squandered money, and unnecessary grief. To do this, you must learn to recognize your triggers – those things in the game that, for whatever reason, are so upsetting and offensive to you that they have the power to put you on tilt.
Tilt triggers generally fall into two categories: things within the game itself and external factors that are technically not part of a poker game but make you more vulnerable to tilt.
External Factors (Pre-Triggers)
Let’s look at the latter category first. Think of them as pre-triggers. Any number of outside influences – stress at home, financial worries, lack of adequate sleep, alcohol, drugs, etc. – can leave you much more susceptible to tilt than you would be otherwise. While these outside factors won’t be the final catalyst to kick off your inclination, pre-triggers still share much blame. If you come to the poker table already feeling out of sorts over problems at work or a fight with your spouse, and then you decide to unwind by having a few drinks while you play, you are setting yourself up to go on tilt the moment something goes wrong in the game.
Think of pre-triggers as creating a kind of “perfect storm” for tilt to occur. When you combine stress and alcohol in a poker game, it’s like a cold high-pressure system moving in from the north, colliding with a tropical low-pressure system from the south. Now all it takes is one nasty gust of wind – one bad beat – and you’ll have a full-blown nor’easter on your hands. Without those pre-triggers, the bad beat might have blown over harmlessly.
Now for the Actual Triggers
You’re in the game, playing well, perhaps having to manage your emotions when the cards go against you, but you’re doing it. You’re in control. Then something goes wrong. Tilt triggers are different for everybody, but the common denominator for all triggers is that they run deeply contrary to your notions of how the game is supposed to be. The result is that the rational, thinking part of your brain takes a powder, leaving your pride and emotions in charge of the decision-making.
Bad Beats
The usual culprit for this ugly transformation is a bad beat. From the lowliest fish to the loftiest pros, from the mundane “that’s poker” beats to the soul-crushing, two-outer sickouts, bad beats are an inescapable part of the game, which is precisely why they are such a common tilt trigger and why you must be able to deal with them emotionally.
Bad Cards
The second-most common tilt trigger is being card-dead for a long time. After an endless procession of lousy starting hands, missed flops, and draws never coming in, even the most patient poker players would be tempted to snap. This is a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back type of trigger, as the frustration keeps piling on higher and higher with each successive fold until it’s finally too much to bear.
Online, where games move at the speed of light and multi-tabling is commonplace, tilt-by-cold-cards are rare. But that’s more than compensated for by the excessive number of bad beats you’ll encounter in online games. Between the sheer volume of hands and the fact that online opponents tend to play looser, it’s not a question of if you will take bad beats but when and how many. Add in the fact that your entire online bankroll is only a few mouse clicks away, and the ability to cope with sickouts becomes more crucial than ever.
Anything that gets your emotions flowing in a poker game has the potential to cause tilt. Excessive winning can do it. If you’re playing poker online and lose a big pot because of a poor connection or an accidental misclick, that can do it too. Offensive opponents also deserve an honorable mention as potential tilt triggers. But as a rule, obnoxious trash-talking opponents won’t get under your skin unless you win and lose, bringing us back to bad beats and cards. Those are the main triggers you must watch out for in one form or another.
Prevention
By far, the most effective way to combat tilt is to never go on it in the first place. Easier said than done, but it all goes back to that old axiom: knowledge is power. You must know and know the game to protect yourself against tilt.
Self-Knowledge
This can be difficult and slippery, if only because humans have an incredible gift for deceiving themselves. That’s why it’s so vital to know your triggers. What are the most disturbing things that can go wrong during a poker game? So disturbing that it can prompt you to fling all your hard-earned poker knowledge out the window? Only you can truly answer that, although a coach or a poker-playing friend might be able to help you find some tilt weaknesses from observing your play. Once you know your tilt triggers will put you in a much stronger position to side-step tilt before it has a chance to overtake you.
Know the Game
The more you know the correct poker strategy, the harder it will be for you to avoid it. The more you get in the habit of reviewing the hand and considering all angles – position, stack sizes, pot size, pot odds, betting patterns, playing styles, etc. – before making any important decision, the more it becomes second nature for you to think this way, even during times of stress. This knowledge will not give you foolproof protection against tilt, but it is a very effective buffer.
Know the Probabilities
Remember, the number one tilt trigger is a bad beat. But what’s sick about bad-beat-induced tilt is that many, if not most, of those beats were never all that bad. Poker players naturally overestimate the chances of their good hands holding up, making it feel more “unfair” when another player draws out and rakes in the pot.
But realistically, good hands get sucked out on all the time, and often, the “favorite” hand is favored only by a small margin. An awareness of common poker probabilities certainly helps. For example: against four random hands preflop, pocket Aces will hold up to win the pot about 56 percent of the time. Roughly translated, that means the best starting hand in hold’em is slated to lose about two out of every five hands when facing off against four opponents. Even if you reduce the number of opponents to two, pocket aces will still lose about a fourth of the time. Upsetting but hardly cause for a tilt-provoking, god-I’m-so-unlucky pity party.
As senseless and wasteful as tilt can be, the sheer stupidity of tip increases exponentially if the trigger that caused it in the first place is a run-of-the-mill loss the player should have seen coming. Worse still, some of these bad beats are self-inflicted hurts brought about by poor play, typically when the player is not aggressive enough and gives his opponents free/cheap cards to outdraw him.
But you can avoid this embarrassing trap by educating yourself. If you know your hand will occasionally fall victim to a suckout, you won’t be surprised or upset when it happens – let alone have a meltdown. If you realize you made a mistake in playing the hand, you can acknowledge and learn from it instead of railing against the poker gods because one of your opponents walked through an opening you created.
How to Avoid Tilt
And so, finally, how do you combat against tilt when it has already sunk its toxic little claws into you? If you have the insight and presence of mind to realize that you’re playing on tilt, that puts you far ahead of most tilt victims. But you’re still left with the problem of what to do about it now.
Stop Playing
That’s it. When you become aware you’re on tilt, get up, walk away from the table, or turn off the computer. Your only defense is to stop the train from derailing. It would be best to regain your composure, which takes time. If you have extraordinary discipline, you might be able to cool down after a five or ten-minute break from the poker table.
What you do at this point will determine the overall outcome of your poker session, and you mustn’t lose control. If you do have the discipline to take a short break, then the following are helpful tactics for controlling your emotions:
- First, get up from the poker table (or computer) and walk or go to the bathroom to cool off.
- Don’t use your break to call someone to discuss a bad beat – this will further tilt you, not calm you down.
- Don’t try to chat with your opponent and open the door for defensive comments that may fuel an argument.
- If you cannot get in the right frame of mind, cash in, and do not keep playing – you may need a long break to get back to your best game state.
Much depends on your personality and the severity of the tilt. If you have a mild case of frustration tilt – say, you caught yourself making an open call or two – ten minutes might be enough to get your head screwed back on straight. But if you’ve got a full-blown case of berserker tilt, no way is a ten-minute break going to do the trick. You’ll need at least a day away from the game, preferably longer.
Again it comes down to self-knowledge. This is a judgment call made by you and about you. When you return to the game, you must be brutally honest with yourself in assessing that you’re ready to play again. If you’re not 100 percent sure, wait a while longer. The game isn’t going anywhere.
Your Table Image
Another reason you should get up and stop playing is that your table image is almost certainly compromised. Any halfway-decent opponent will recognize and exploit your lopsided playing style when you’re on tilt. Even if you manage to un-tilt yourself with a short break, you’ll have a table-image problem when you return to the game. If you’re playing online, you might want to consider changing tables.
When a Long Break Isn’t An Option
Of course, if you’re in the middle of playing a poker tournament, anything more than a short break isn’t an option. But as long as you can afford to lose a few blinds, take a break. Getting off tilt and back to your A-game is more important than playing your blinds. Take a walk. Get your mind off of whatever it was that was upsetting you so. Give yourself a pep talk, and remind yourself that the players who sucked out on you were putting their money in with the worst. Whatever works to clear your mind and restore your sense of poker equilibrium.
A Stop-Loss Can be a Useful Tool
For some poker players, a stop-loss can be a useful tool in the fight against tilt. In theory, stop-losses shouldn’t be necessary since poker players aren’t necessarily results-oriented. But realistically, if you’ve lost three buy-ins in a row, you probably are on tilt at least a little bit – or this is lurking right around the corner, just waiting for one more loss. So until and unless you have the discipline to recognize the signs of angle and stop playing on your own, a stop-loss can provide at least a modicum of protection.
What you don’t want to do is chase your losses. Ever. The poker graveyard is littered with bones of players who went broke trying to “get back even.” Even more foolhardy is the idea of temporarily moving up in limits to win your money back faster. This is exactly how a moderate loss turns into a bankroll-busting catastrophe.
Conclusion
You’ve heard it before, and listen to it again: It’s a long session. This bit of poker wisdom is key to overcoming tilt. If you can keep your focus on the big picture – the long term – it will be much easier to let the short-term misfortunes of the game roll off your back. It will be much easier to take a break from poker when you’re tilting, confident that you’ll win your money back after your head screwed back on straight, instead of getting trapped in the desperate compulsion to get even again right now. Keeping good records and even graphing your long-term results is one effective way. Because if you don’t learn to control tilt, it’s only a matter of time before the angle will prevent you.
