FULL TILT POKER BLOG

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I started a blog at the beginning of January titled 99 New Year’s Resolutions. It was almost finished and I kept meaning to edit it, but time kept slipping away. When I did reread it, the first thing I noticed was that I had to delete all the abandoned resolutions. So it became 66 New Year’s Resolutions, then 22 New Year’s Resolutions. Still, I couldn’t get it finished.

Now that we’re in mid-April, I was finally able to get the time to complete it. I was left with the blog that follows, which was very close to being called One New Year’s Resolution.

My one New Year’s Resolution that has lasted four months: STAY OFF TILT.

Players ask me all the time about how to stay off tilt. (The alternative, and sometimes more frequent, versions are “How do you deal with bad beats?” and “How do you deal with running bad?”) For all the attention given to the concept of tilt, the situation is like Mark Twain famously described about the weather: “Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything.”

“Tilt” – Def.: any behavior caused by the results of a poker game that keep a player from playing their best poker. Usage: (a) Noun – “After the guy wearing the cowboy hat backwards called him with fourth pair, he went on tilt and lost the rest of his chips”; (b) Verb – “I tilted off my chips by reraising all-in with 7-6s against the guy who was playing every hand and ran into pocket kings”; (c) Adjective – “Ivey is so deep inside that guy’s head that he’s throwing in a tilt-reraise every time Phil goes after his blind.” Origin: From the rapidly-disappearing arcade pinball game. To keep arcade players from jostling the machines and influencing the path of the ball, manufacturers installed a sensor that would cause the machine, when jostled, to disengage, causing the ball to roll untouched to the bottom of the board and end that player’s turn. To signify that this was not an accidental malfunction, all the lights on the machine would shut down except for those lighting the word “TILT.”

I have divided tilting behavior in poker into six degrees, in decreasing levels of intensity. But don’t be misled by the declining order. I think the behavior that can hurt a player most over the long term is the sixth, or least intense, level.

First-degree tilt: explicitly throwing away your chips. Just about everybody has experienced this, hopefully not too often. This is where, for example, you take a bad beat in a tournament to lose 80% of your chips and say, “Aw, fuck it,” and throw the rest of your chips into the pot regardless of your cards on the next hand.

Second-degree tilt: throwing away your chips under the guise of “adjusting to the table.” This tends to happen at tables where opponents seem to be playing far too many hands, or remaining in a hand when they “should” fold. After losing to those players a few times, a player might go on tilt by playing too many hands themselves and remaining in a hand when they should fold. Logically, you should make adjustments to how your opponents play. In this instance, though, that type of adjustment is the opposite of how you need to change your play.

Third-degree tilt: nastiness towards opponents. This is so common online that it is almost expected. The costs of losing your temper toward an opponent are significant. First, if you are not in control of yourself, you may start engaging in the behavior described above. Second, you are potentially educating a weak opponent. It’s likely that most players who make mistakes and win won’t stop making them simply because the loser in a hand complains, but it does happen. In addition, the cumulative effect of losers criticizing lucky winners may, over the long term, influence those lucky winners to improve their play. Third, you run the risk in a cash game of offending this bad player and having them simply leave the game with your money. Fourth, and perhaps most significant, you are revealing way too much information about yourself to other players. For example, if you re-raise all-in with A-K and your opponent calls with A-Q and hits his queen, what message are you sending the other players when you tell this guy how stupid he is? For sure, you are telling them that you are going all-in only with A-K or a big pocket pair. That means you have given everyone at the table information about how to fold hands where it might otherwise be profitable to you for them to call.

Fourth-degree tilt: sarcasm or passive-aggressive behavior toward the opponent. This is really the same as above. You are not being any nicer or classier when you say, “It must be nice to play any two cards and have the deck bail you out,” than when you say, “Fucktard”.

Fifth-degree tilt: passive-aggressive behavior toward other people. This is more common in live games than online, and generally involves abusing dealers, cocktail waitresses, and other players. This does not incur the same costs as above – you are less likely to educate your opponents when you throw your cards at the dealer – but this is still bad behavior. Apart from the obvious fact that you should conduct yourself like an adult, your lack of control over your emotions will cost you money. The reasoning is not as clear-cut as in the degrees of tilt described above, but is still significant. I will explain this fully in the final degree of tilt.

Sixth-degree tilt (a/k/a “gentleman’s tilt”): Seething privately or offline about bad players, bad beats, and bad luck. I’ve certainly been guilty of this, but thinking about the consequences has motivated me to make this resolution. There is an argument that this is actually healthy and beneficial behavior. For example, when I wake Jo Anne to tell her I just missed making a final table because I re-raised all-in with Q-Q and the original raiser called with 9d-6d, I’m not hurting anyone, right? And because I’m not keeping my anger bottled up, I am engaging in something psychologically healthy, yeah?

On the contrary, this is probably the most dangerous and destructive form of tilt.

Let me start by posing some questions, the answers to which, even if we don’t know them, demonstrate how even Gentleman’s Tilt (and maybe especially G.T.) can interfere with a poker player’s development: Where do winning streaks and losing streaks come from? When does “running good” or “running bad” begin and end? When are you getting more bad luck than you deserve? (And what can you do, other than give up poker, to remedy this?) Finally, when should you look at negative results as evidence that you need to change how you play – not to mention the even more difficult question of how you figure out what changes to make?

The answers to these questions, even if we don’t know them, come down to one word: PERCEPTION.

All these questions are about your perception of your overall results and how overall results in poker never correlate EXACTLY with the quality of your play. For all the information out there about how to improve at poker, no one really explains how it all coalesces. We know that you don’t read a chapter in Harrington or Sklansky & Malmuth or the Strategy Guide and instantly become a better player. The “eureka!” moments are subjective or ill-defined, and most of the process is incremental. You gradually learn from mistakes (yours and the mistakes of others), develop ideas that work, and modify your approaches to changing circumstances.

That’s how you improve: from the sum and total of all the pro tips, books, articles, forums, videos, TV, and thousands (more likely hundreds of thousands) of hands of you play of poker. We don’t know how it happens, and it doesn’t happen the same for everybody, but it happens. It’s how players improve.

What does all this have to do with tilt?

The sixth degree of tilt, supposedly the most innocent and acceptable, destroys this process. In the short run, there will frequently be a difference between the quality of your play and the results. If you can’t understand this difference, quantify it, and properly attribute it, your play can’t possibly improve (either organically or consciously). Something as small as complaining to a friend after a session is enough to derail that process. I’ll try to give some examples.

If you lose $1,000 in a month of poker, does that mean there is something wrong with how you play? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you were disproportionately hurt because you got unlucky and busted fourth in a tournament you otherwise would have won. Maybe you actually should have lost more, but got lucky in a key hand that added disproportionately to the bottom line. Or maybe the sum of your good and bad luck precisely evened out, and you are a $1,000-per-month losing player. You certainly can’t make conscious changes in your play if you don’t understand whether there is a disparity between skill and results, or its cause. If you keep whining about your opponents’ smaller pairs making sets, you might never get to the point where you understand how to play small pairs and how to play against them, when you are giving/getting correct/incorrect odds to try to hit a set. I swear, some people spend years cursing their bad luck and never realize all the times they gave an opponent the right odds to call and hit (and all the times they didn’t try to hit a set themselves).

In fact, a lot of what some players attribute to “luck” is the result of better players understanding and manipulating probability. An aggressive player raises almost every hand late in a tournament. Blinds are 300-600 with a 75 ante, and he makes it 2,000. The tight player on the short stack moves all-in for 8,000. With J-9s, Mr. Aggressive is probably getting the right odds (6,000 for a showdown-shot at 12,000 or 2:1), even accounting for Mr. Tight being a nit. If the tight player has A-K and complains about his bad luck the 40% of the time he busts, he’ll never understand how J-9s plays against A-K (or how any two cards do against any other two cards), or even whether the aggressive approach is better. How much does the aggressive player gain from his raising? How much does he lose from hands where he folds? How much does he lose when he calls all-in with the odds as an underdog? How much extra action does he get with a premium hand?

Most important: How can a player even raise these questions if he attributes his losing with A-K to “the hyper-aggressive donkey who raised with J-9 and called even though he knew I’m not pushing without a super-premium hand”?

Complaining, even when it’s just muttering under your breath, is a way to removing responsibility. When you complain about what the guy did, there is ZERO chance you’ll understand why he did it. And if you think you don’t need to know that, you’re implying that you are incapable of improving.

That sounds pretty serious to me. Consequently, you generally won’t see me utter a word after I lose a pot, no matter what the reason, no matter what my opponent did or didn’t do. Conversely, I’ve stopped getting angry at the ill-mannered players who have to issue an insult after every loss. Win or lose, they can’t improve as players, and that has to be positive for opponents like me.

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4 Responses to “#727 – Six Degree of Tilt”

1. SolusQuinn Says:
   April 15th, 2009 at 7:48 pm

   I’ll start by saying i’m probably a below average poker player. I love to play but over time my bank roll will and does slowly deplete. Lately i’ve started applying the thought process of realizing why I lose hands that if played correctly I should have won and usually i can find a mistake in my play that can be considered the ultimate mistake not the bad call or raise of others. I think this post is very informative if you can “man up” and take responsiblity for your own “bad beats”. 90% of my losses come from me being in hands i should have never called before the flop or tried to “milk” the pot with way to many outs for any oponent. Thanks for the input

   JC

2. Brian Says:
   April 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am

   EXTREMELY thought-provoking! Although it wouldn’t be the first time, this is the first thing I’ve read in a while that makes me seriously re-think my entire game!

3. Johnny D Says:
   April 18th, 2009 at 6:39 am

   David Mamet on Poker
   “Poker reveals to the frank observer something else of import—it will teach him about his own nature. Many bad players do not improve because the cannot bear self-knowledge.”

4. chris Says:
   June 20th, 2009 at 11:04 am

   look – I am a great poker player. Anyone who plays me heads up will lose (IN LIVE CARD GAMES). online poker is a joke. there is no way to explain exactly how the percentages are so different during online play. in a live card game you can use the knowledge of your percentage to win to gain a slight advantage because numbers hold true. (especially if you have the nuts)
   it is not a bad beat – in online poker – if you are way ahead or have the nuts and another player comes back to win.

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