Tilt

I've been playing for about a year now, and so far it seems like my biggest leak by far is tilt.

This is far worse when I play live than online. Playing online, it is quite easy to just stop playing when on tilt. When I play tournaments online - I also tend to prefer HORSE simply because when the game switches, it's easier for me to start fresh.

But live is another story. I'm a lousy hold-em player, and prefer omaha hi-lo. Perhaps I've gone to Vegas for the weekend, and waited an hour or two for a spot at the Omaha table. It's just not easy to pack up after a couple of hours if I'm on tilt - say after having my aces full lose to quads in a large pot.

So I take a break, walk around, etc, and come back after a half hour. But, I'm still not playing my A game.

Suggestions? (other than living next to a casino)

Not much you can do other than simply get over it. It's often hard to do but just realizing that bad beats will happen is helpful to me. Just try to get your money in ahead as much as possible and you should feel fine about your game.
As odd as it might sound you shouldn't really worry about winning pots, you should be more worried about making the right decisions. If you do this the winning of pots (and money) will take care of itself.
If you think about it the majority of the time your As full will win so while you lose every once in a while so what? Dwelling on it won't help you out during the rest of your session, you just have to learn to shrug it off. It is hard to do but once you learn to keep your emotions in check I think you will be able to play your top game no matter what the cards may throw at you.

[quote=burton_boy;810991]Not much you can do other than simply get over it.



ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE! TILT IS VERY, VERY FIXABLE... BUT IT DOES TAKE A LOT OF WORK


Hi Rapheal,

Tilt comes in MANY different shapes and sizes, but learning how to get a handle on it will make a huge impact on your game. There are so many "tilt-factors," it would take me all night to list them...

EX: Ego-tilt, angry-tilt (all % of anger from kinda to extremely...), entitlement-tilt, trash-tilt, tired-tilt, stuck-tilt, winning a lot-tilt (cocky, arrogant, best in world mindset), taking a shot today-tilt, too aggressive-tilt, too passive-tilt, embarrassed-tilt, revenge-tilt... mad at my wife-tilt... on-and-on ...

Any time you're not playing your best game, YOU'RE TILTING! It's just a matter of degrees, types, and the duration of your TILTS!

Most people think of tilt as pure anger and negative emotion, but TILT is so much more, as stated above. There is no easy answer, but there is an easy beginning:

1. Write down "your specific types of TILT." Be totally honest w/ yourself. You're TILTING in different ways than just getting angry... write them all down.

2. Recognize when, why, and how often you tilt (also write them down).

That's where we'll start.

My eyes totally opened up after I began looking at the affects of TILT in this way: When I was playing my best, I would win 2 BB/hr... When I was not playing my best (TILTING), I'd lose 5 BB/hr! Do the long-term math...

I immediately began making LESS TILTING my #1 priority!

Rapheal, write the above suggestions down, and keep us updated! STEP 3 NEXT!

Good luck,
Dayne

Nice Dayne...never thought of tilt in that way. Can fully appriciate it though in that light. BTW are you DayneBeast on Doyles?

LOL! No, unless he's the biggest winner on that site... THEN YES!

Tilt is something to come to terms with... to me it's about accepting that you're playing a game that has a luck element. That luck element part of what attracts the bad players - otherwise every bad player would just lose their money and go home, and wouldn't want to stick around, so there'd be no value in the good players playing.
So, whenever you have a bad run or even just a single big suck-out, you learn to accept that it's all part of the game. If you're a good enough player, then you'll in the long run turn a profit even with them, and just keep playing the same game as before. I think it's mainly a gradual acclimatisation thing. As you build profits you can accept bigger short-term losses as you can look at the bigger picture. As you move up the stakes your losses in a bad session get bigger, and you have to learn to cope with that anew.
There's talk elsewhere of bankroll management, and I think it's also relevant for going on tilt. If you lose say 50% of your bankroll, then that's likely to be harder to just accept than losing 10% of your bankroll.

He won two bounties on Wed nite bounty tournament and collect a cool $5 K. . Only thing worse than tilt is losing more money by being on tilt.

Take control of your emotions, dont let them control you.

Thanks for your replies.

Dayne - I already do what you are suggesting (except for the writing down part), but I am missing the link between diagnosis and cure. For example, in the hand I describe, it wasn't as much angry tilt, as it was resigned-to-losing-tilt that pushed me towards being a donkey, which when I recognized I tried to combat by folding more. But regardless, the decision of when to fold and not to fold was compromised by the emotions involved (and my play suffered).

starfall - the bankroll problem isn't my issue. Aside from that, what you are saying would be of comfort if I knew I were a good player. But, I have no metrics for that other than if I win...which brings us to burton_boy

Burton says "As odd as it might sound you shouldn't really worry about winning pots, you should be more worried about making the right decisions. If you do this the winning of pots (and money) will take care of itself." This is a philosophy that could work very well for me, but my problem is this: aside from whether I won or lost, I have no metric for determining whether I made the right decision.

OK, that's not quite true. If I am a drawing hand, I can calculate pot odds based on what I believe the number of outs are. If I end up seeing my opponent's hand, I can even verify if the number of outs was right. But often I don't get to see the opponent's hand if I fold. For instance, if I check-raised and fold because I think I'm beat, I don't know whether it was a good decision.

So - other than winning the pot, what is the right metric?

You don't find out whether you made the right decision if everyone folds... sometimes you will, sometimes you won't, no matter how good you are. All you can do is analyse the other players styles on hands they do show and take your best guess. It can be tempting to call down to see, and doing it once in a while may be useful by off-setting the cost of the call you expect to be wasted against telling other players you won't always be pushed off a pot and the information on what they were playing - mainly early in a session, when you may make them think you're more of a calling station than you are, and can use that table image later - just make sure it doesn't become an expensive habit.
Winning pots is the wrong way to look at it, winning money is. A common mistake is to try to win pots, and you can end up winning lots of small pots then losing big ones, for an overall loss. You have to minimise your losses on the hands you don't win, while maximising the profit on the ones you do. Over time, a good player will be in profit. The good 'starter' strategies involve losing a lot of small pots, because you're only playing premium hands, and folding a lot. That's just poker.

For being a good player, use tools like Poker Tracker to see whether the hands you're playing are profitable or not, and try to see why that might be the case (not enough draws, playing too strongly or weakly to get maximum pay-off when you hit, etc). If you don't have one of those hand analysis tools, you can at least read one or more poker books for strategies to use - preferably several as different authors have different takes on things.
Try to find any leaks you're particularly prone to (going on tilt, calling too much, bluffing too much, folding too readily, overvaluing hands, etc).
When you're playing, try to put opponents on particular hands, and see if you were right at the end, to develop your skills at reading your opponents.
You can't readily know you're a 'good' player (all you have to be is good enough to beat the table you're at, anyway), but you can make sure you keep learning and keep getting better, by paying attention to all the facets of the game.

i see here it really possible that you have multi coolers. and you tried to play tilt was dumb stop say 2 days from now and you play and forget everything unless you run like jaime gold luck box and 100% win showdown like i did here so i'm not luck box look at pokercrusher.com for my user name proam45 and get my stats

I think the most important thing is to try and reduce your ego. In order to be a winning player you do not have to be a winning player every day/session. To be able to say, "ok i'm running like shit atm...it doesn't matter if i have the 2nd nuts i am losing every pot" or "i really am getting outplayed today" and to quit playing while you are down money is very important imo. Personally i know i get into trouble when i get pissed during a losing session, decide to play more to try and at least break even, and end up losing more.