Don't let tilt ruin your game

To paraphrase poker legend Barry Greenstein, ‘The winner in any game is usually the player that steams the least.’ When we think of tilt we usually think of someone raging, thumping down their chips or mouse, and generally being just a couple of steps away from actual steam emerging from their ears. For seasoned poker players this is rarely the case – in fact if this happens to you, you should probably be leaving poker far behind in favour of some kind of outdoor survivalist hobby. A more useful definition might be ‘any kind of change in your emotional state which affects the decisions you make and the way you play.’ Tilt comes in many forms and degrees but all of it is bad because it means we’re making decisions on the basis of our emotions not the cards and the actual situation.

The different forms of tilt

Traditional tilt is anger and frustration that things aren’t going our way coupled with the pain of losses. It is especially acute if we feel injustice. For example we get our money in good having out played someone and they suck out. This feeling makes us ram and jam our chips in, almost demanding our money back.

There are other manifestations of it too – one we can call ‘zombie tilt’, which is the slide into accepting losses in a nihilistic way rather than getting angry and jamming chips in, we call too much and become passive and accepting.

Then there is also the imposter we can call ‘positive tilt’. This happens when you’re winning and you think you can bully your way through every pot. Again it is playing based on an emotional state and can be equally destructive to profits.

The key thing to realise is that you can be as happy, sad or pissed off as you like when you play poker – the cards don’t know. In poker the only control we have is over our decisions. If those decisions are being made through anger and frustration they are unlikely to be clear-thinking quality decisions. Tilt is the enemy of the winning poker player: it can turn winners into losers and small losses into huge ones. Avoid it at all costs!

Read Part 2...