First of all losing a few hands should not tilt you, and if it does, this is really something, you need to work on. Or even give up poker, if you cant change it. The simple fact of the matter is, we are not always going to win. So this is something, we must be mentally prepared for, when we sit down at the tables. Also rather than just focusing on the fact, we lost a hand, we want to look at, if we potentially lost more, than we had to. Poker is not about winning or losing hands. Its about winning or losing money, so cutting losses is just as important as maximizing wins.
In the first hand with AQs you ended up with the nut flush, which is a very strong hand but not the nuts, since the board was paired. Unfortunately he had you drawing nearly dead since the flop, which is of course a bit of a set-up or "trap". However if at any point you either raised or called an overbet, then you overplayed your hand. And then the tilt might be due to the fact, that deep down inside, you kind of know this.
In the second hand with A9, you had top pair with a marginal kicker. In fact with this specific board runout you lost to any AX other than A3 and A5-A7. So if you put in more than 2 bets or called a raise at any point, then you overplayed your hand. And then again the tilt might be due to the fact, that deep down inside, you kind of know this. But rather than admit this to yourself, you blamed the opponent in classic Phil Helmuth style: "Honey he called a raise with QT!!!!" (A classic hand where Phil got felted by QTs, which made a straight after a completely reasonable preflop call).
As for remedies they depend a little upon, weather you are a tournament or a cash player. While a single hand should not tilt us, if it actually does, then a quick fix for cash players is to instantly sit out. Maybe you can wait for the blinds to come around especially at 6-max. But if the tilt is bad, its also fine to click the "instant sit-out" button and take a 5-10 minute break to get your head straight. Walk around the house, make a cup of coffee. Whatever works for you.
As a tournament player you obviously want to finish the games, you already paid for, but you can stop adding more games to the session. I started out with cash games, but since late 2020 I have mainly been a tournament and SnG player. Under "insights"
sharkscope has the following advice for me:
"Some of your losing streaks are statistically improbably for natural variance, suggesting you may have a tendency to go on tilt. If you lose multiple games in a row take a break."
And this is pretty much, what I try to do. If I have played 10-15 tournaments resulting in a lot of early bustouts and maybe a single min-cash or a few bounties, then I typically end the session early. And if I want to play again after a few hours, then maybe I play SnGs, where its easier to get small cashes to get my confidence and joy of playing back.
For a cash player the equivalent could be to move from fast-fold tables to regular table or from 6-max to full ring. Slow things down and make your life at the tables a bit easier. Which for both cash and tournament players can also include less multitabling. If you normally play 5 tables, then maybe go down to 4 or 3.
If you are in a more persistent "downtrend" losing for maybe a month or more, the classic remedy is to spend less time playing (if you dont depend on poker for a living), and equally important move down. In 2023 I was in kind of a slump for most of the year not really losing but not winning either over several 1.000`s of games.
And at some point I made the decision to temporarely cap myself at 5$ games and start to play some 2$ games again, which I had not done for a long time. This kind of worked, and towards the end of the year, I finally hit a sunrun and managed to finish the year solidly in the green thanks to a number of large MTT cashes, one of which was my second largest ever.
2024 has so far started with a bit of a downswing again. And this is just the way, poker works. We are not always going to be sun-running. Sometimes we are going to get more than our statistical long term share of coolers and bad beats, miss most of our draws and so on and so forth. And this can last over 1.000`s of tournaments or 10.000`s of cash game hands, which we need to be both mentally prepared and bankrolled for.
