marvelous article!
Tilt is something every player deals with. Knowing how to recognize it and combat can be the difference between protecting your bankroll, or spewing it away.
Our new and improved guide goes over everything you need to know about recognizing tilt, combating it, as well as how to handle variance and keep from tilting. We've combined all that along with tips from our Poker Experts. If you have ever suffered from tilt (and face it: we all have) then this is a must read:
Top 5 Ways To Battle Tilt At the Table
Let us know your thoughts: how does this article stand up to your own methods? Do you have any tips and tricks to share with us on battling tilt?
Hello there, good evening Tammy! Thank you very much for bringing to light this paramount subject.
I would like to share with the community my own experience with tilt.
Last year, I made some poker courses and believed I was the best player in the world
lol
The situation gets even better when I make a run of over 1 month without any big losses.
I had a bankroll of 20 buy-ins and in one month I went to 48 buy-ins of 2 NLHE (awesome!)
However, I got myself so confident that I was a good player that I forgot to review my hands, I forgot to study more the things I was learning and then comes a HUGE dowswing, for over two months I couldn't win anything, no flips, when I have A's and I got broke, I took coolers from Full-Houses x Quads and all this sad story.
I began assuming to myself that I am not so good as I thought I was! I am just a student and I know just a couple of things. This was the best step I ever took!
I learn that bankroll management is essential for our emotional control at the tables, and more important than being sharp with strategy is to look for this:
A) Focus
B) Decision making
C) Emotional control/tilt control
A mediocre player which has focus and emotional control will have edge upon us, if we don't have it, no matter how much strategy we know.
I know which situations in the game that makes me mad or sad, or I start to feel that heat in the back of my neck (I know I am getting angry). Today, I do not wait for the tilt to take control over my personality and I get off the tables in the first slight sign of disturbance, for example, a hand that I think I didn't play so good is more than a reason to quit the session for the day. Or a flip coin where I had the upper hand and went nailed.
I stopped playing Multi-Tables, because I simply cannot sustain the variance.
I stopped playing for over two months, until I felt myself secure enough to return to the tables, and even so, I quit at the first sign of anger/increase of body temperature.
What the CardsChat article states is the pure truth: we should prepare ourselves for war when we enter a poker table: absolutely nobody is going to make our lives at the tables easier, but the contrary, players want to take our heads off and we want to take their heads off as well too.
Preparing physically, and mentally before a session is something that should not be undervalued: meditation, praying, yoga, hypnosis, we gotta prepare our body for a very extreme hard moment, which is going to the table.
When I sit at a poke table I know I am not the best player, far away from it, I don't look to be fancy, to show others that
"I have the guts" or whatever. When I sit at a poker table, I am prepared for "bad beats", "coolers", players that will level their souls against me, very extreme hard decision making spots, I meditate and I am prepared.
Controlling the bankroll also helps us a lot: like many Cardschat's articles say, we should not worry about the pressure of money. We gotta play our best game without any other concern than what we are doing at the specific moment.
Without being too much boring, I wrote a little text talking about phycological strategy for cash games:
https://www.cardschat.com/forum/cash-games-11/cash-games-448217/
Anyways, we gotta be humble at the tables, we gotta really know our level so we can know the level of our opponents and respect it.
We should not leave the table when we are screaming loud and beating in the computer or the table! We should leave the table when we feel we are starting to get unconfortable, or in situation where we cannot have enough focus, because your family is in the house, because your phone rings, because your dog barks a lot and breaks your concentration, whatever.
We gotta look for the most ideal situations for playing poker. This means, when we can have complete control of the environment around us, so we can have focus and decision making working together to avoid tilt.
When I get myself really angry at the tables, I do not play for at least three days! We gotta clean our minds from time to time, we gotta recognize we are not machines, we are not perfect and that we can make mistakes.
Know when to stop is paramount. Rest is paramount. Sleep and eat good is paramount for our mental and physical health.
Regards;
Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa
