How Do You Prevent Yourself Tilting?

[dontshiveagit]

have a limit set aside of how much you will be losing to lose if your in a cash game...

i tell my self i will rebuy up to 3 times before im done...

if im doing really bad i will just sit out and stop playing for the day.

having the ability to stop playing is huge

 

[TheUndertaker]

This might sound crazy but I just sit and laugh at the bad beats for awhile then start back playing after I had laughed enough it works for me.I have suffer the impossible bad beats can't do anything about them but just laugh and move on right?

 

[doops]

While all those are good after the fact I'll take a different tack. Everyone's attacking the symptom not the real problem.

Prevent tilt to begin with.

Try to get in the habit of making good decisions. Know the odds. Then understand the flow of luck. If you are playing within a proper bankroll bad beats shouldn't matter much. Some of the best pros swear by this.

Tilt is just another form of "playing results" IMO. ...
goldog

Yes! I find that playing well within my bankroll, and setting a stop-loss point for those horrible times, has pretty much eliminated tilt-induced damage. Those streaks of awful surprise beats can still knock me off balance, but since I'm stopping at a preset loss point, I have time built in to get over the shock and get my head screwed back on. I may, rarely, get so bananas that I fail to follow my plan, but, so far, have not done more than put a dent in my roll. It can then take me awhile to build back up (dropping down if necessary), but I usually manage eventually.

The other points are fine, too, but playing within bankroll limits seems to work best for me.

Losing hands sucks but I expect to lose my fair share. I consider my play; if it's OK, I can usually shrug off the beat. If what I did was stupid, then I note that and tighten up a bit for awhile to get back on track. If the amount lost is not all that great, it really doesn't rattle me.

 

[belerophon]

All good advice here, I had a similar problem and I discovered that looking at my Pokertracker3 Graph helped immensely. There it was, my upward movement. Seeing that particular loss in relation to my whole bankroll made it so much easier to forget about and move on.
Moreover, being able to see on many occasions that the person beating me was doing so much worse overall that it helped take the edge off.

 

[Rycn]

I have a big problem with tilting.
I am a profitable player and my ROI is 20% this year but if I could play level headed all the time it would probably have been up at 30% if not 40%.
One or two bad beats is frequently enough to make me lose it. I get really angry, see red and start playing nearly every hand, then feel really bad about myself afterwards.
I wish I could stop doing this but it just happens so fast.

Alot of people are like this and its human nature. All you have to do is think about how much of THEIR money you will win if THEY keep playing the way they do. If you stick to a solid game and brush these little frustrations off then youll be fine.

 

[Theblueduce]

I apply a tip that I stumbeld upon and was coined by Mike Caro which was " My philosophy in playing poker is to make good decisions. That's my job. Weather I get paid or not tonight isn't my main concern. Doing my job is. I only become disappointed if I play poorly and that helps me from going on tilt".

 

[worditst]

I just take a deep breathe and say that is just poker and it happens. And then I yell! lol

 

[bsothe1]

Ya, but poker is gambling and with gambling comes issues. it's something we all love, but it's still gambling.

 

[wetyeti]

I had to something real cheesy but it worked. I put a sticky note on my screen that said 'are you tilting?'
if i was honest and said yes i had to do 20 pushups.
Kinda lame but now I rarely tilt and my pecs are banging!

 

[Poker Orifice]

THe crazy thing about it is that it typically only happens when you've played the hand GREAT, have gotten your money in good (I'm referring to Tournament poker (MTT &/or SNG) and are powerless over villain making the call & sucking out when his holding clearly didn't have the sufficient equity needed to be making the call based upon what he'd consider to be your range of hands in the given situation & how the circumstances played out. You want him/her to make this bad call (well... most of the time you do... other times even though you're way ahead & his/her call is incorrect, it's often still better to have just taken the pot down at that point in time)..... and have no control over the outcome. You can only control what you're doing (which you've executed well) but then now can feel in the pit of your stomach, a tightening that's telling you that you're going into 'tilt-mode'. It seems stupid really... doesn't it? But I think it's also totally natural.
I try to eliminate emotion & ego from the game (not easy for me to do) and play each situation as it happens. If I've gotten it in great and just lost an 80/20 to some donk calling off their stack while sitting in good shape on the bubble of a SNG sitting in 2nd, say I'm ChipLeader and the donk calls even with one super shortstack on table & now I'm the shortstack... oh well... now it's time for me to try to play optimally with the Shortstack I now have.