Intellectual Tilt

Ok, so you’ve worked very hard, maybe even to the point of playing in a semi-meditative state, and are able to control your emotions when you lose a bad beat hand, or simply lose a huge chunk of your stack when you thought you had it one. You’ve overcome the beast of going “on tilt” as I have in many situations, not all, but many. You no longer have a severely negative reaction to losing big. There is yet another aspect to tilt, and that appears to be an intellectual form of tilt. After losing a big hand I honestly do not feel angry most of the time (thanks to some heavy anti-depressants). However, I have found myself still on an intellectual form of tilt. I don’t know why, but there is this apathy and laziness about my play. Almost like subconsciously I’m giving up or just playing badly for who knows what reason. The last time it happened it was like I wasn’t even putting in the effort to figure out what they may be holding. And even after I realized it I was out of the tourney within 5 hands. The moral of my story is, perhaps there needs to be less focus on controlling your emotions when tilting and more focus on just controlling your intellectual reactions to tilting.

Tilting is an emotional behavior that leads you to take bad decisions. Either chasing losses aggressively, not following proper bankroll management, or simply playing irresponsibly and not your A game.

You seem to control the emotional aspect, that makes you want to break your laptop, punch the wall, kill everyone who dare to talk to you after a cooler. But if after a bad beat, you find yourself making moves that you wouldnt normally do, like playing more hands, playing marginal hands, making bluffs that risk your whole stack, shoving instead folding, then you are still tilting and not control it as much as you want to believe. Tilt is all about playing emotionally charged.

What I do after a bad beat, is not playing for a whole round or even two, tighten up, I am easily folding A10 cause I know I will overplay it and probably bust. Just do the opposite that tilt want you to do. Play less hands, tighten up your range, dont do massive bluffs or dont bluff at all until you feel that you are ready to play your A game again.