Contrary to what you might think, tilt can come in many different forms. While many
poker players these days have 🔔 accepted that tilt does exist and can negatively impact
their game, most of them probably don’t realize just how many 🔔 ways it can affect
them.
Tilt can have a detrimental effect on your poker game whether you’re winning or
losing, and 🔔 even something as simple as distraction can lead to massive tilt – quickly
followed by significant losses at the poker 🔔 table. For more in-depth information on how
to deal with tilt at the tables you can check out this handy 🔔 Tilt Management
Guide.
Here, we’ll break down the 6 types of tilt you may experience and give you some
guidance on 🔔 how to break away and readjust. Let’s get started.
Victim tilt is an
extremely common form of tilt and pretty much 🔔 all of us are very susceptible to it.
When you experience a bad beat or have been having a bad 🔔 run of cards it is very easy
to fall into a victim mentality. These thoughts are typically something like
this:
“Nobody 🔔 is as unlucky as me, I’m the unluckiest person in the world!”
Or-
“Why
does this always happen, I can never 🔔 seem to catch a break!”
While deep down you might
understand in theory that these statements aren’t true and that 🔔 everyone experiences
the same amount of luck and variance in poker, it can be extremely hard to break away
from 🔔 this kind of negative thinking at the table.
The reason we tend to do this is
because we don’t want to 🔔 take responsibility for our circumstances, so we pass off the
blame on circumstance and chance.
We’re basically saying to ourselves that 🔔 our poker
results are due to bad luck or misfortune and have nothing to do with our own skills or
🔔 the skills of our opponents. While luck can obviously play a factor in individual
hands, it affects everyone the same 🔔 and cannot be controlled, no matter what we
do.
Blaming our results on just ‘being unlucky’ takes the responsibility of our 🔔 results
away from us and puts it on sheer luck instead. If we just tell ourselves we’re unlucky
we don’t 🔔 have to focus on improving at poker, and get to just complain and whine
instead.
Because of this, we must focus 🔔 on the actions we can take that will have a
positive effect on our results. Watch Pokerstars Learn videos and 🔔 put in the work off
the tables, and you’ll be more focused on the decisions that you make instead of 🔔 the
outcome.
We’ve definitely seen revenge tilt before, even from some of the biggest names
in poker such as Phil Hellmuth! 🔔 This form of tilt comes about when one specific
opponent keeps getting the better of you at the table. Common 🔔 signs of revenge tilt
include phrases like:
“I can’t seem to win against this guy!”
Or-
“Why do you always
just have 🔔 the nuts?”
While we all know that we definitely can win against that player
and they’re probably just getting a 🔔 little bit lucky, we again find ways to detach
responsibility from ourselves and blame it all on luck.
Maybe they are 🔔 just lucky, or
maybe they’re outplaying you. Either way you end up feeling like you must seek revenge
against that 🔔 specific player.
Emotional attachment to your nemesis at the table will
cloud your judgement and affect your ability to make optimal 🔔 decisions and stick to
your strategy. Players will often ramp up their aggression trying to win a big pot
against 🔔 their enemy, which can then result in big losses and more
frustration.
Emotional decisions are basically never bound to be the 🔔 right decisions in
poker, so if you’re feeling revenge tilt towards a certain player it may be best to
change 🔔 tables or at least take a short break to gather your thoughts and recenter your
emotions.
Have you ever felt like 🔔 you’ve lost the concentration or motivation to make
optimal decisions at the table? You aren’t affected when you lose, and 🔔 you aren’t
affected when you win. You just feel nothing at all.
This is an extremely dangerous
state of mind to 🔔 be playing poker.
While it’s good to focus on making optimal decisions
and detach yourself from the short-term results, being completely 🔔 dissociated from
winning or losing leads to “button-clicking” or just taking actions with little to no
reasoning behind them.
You may 🔔 find yourself in an extreme form of autopilot, randomly
going all-in with no thought behind it, or calling just to 🔔 see what your opponent
has.
Players deep into dissociation don’t care whether they’re right or wrong and they
don’t care whether 🔔 they’re making a good decision or a bad one. They are completely
detached from reality.
If you find yourself feeling this 🔔 way, you must take a break
from poker immediately until this feeling goes away.
If you don’t, you’ll likely wake
up 🔔 from your disassociated phase with a disgust for the game of poker, as well as a
diminished bankroll.
Take a break.
When 🔔 asked about what tilts them the most, many
players say they aren’t bothered when they get sucked out on, or 🔔 are dealt a bad
beat.
What hurts them the most is when they make a mistake.
We can sometimes feel like
we 🔔 aren’t allowed to make any mistakes, or that we’re better than everyone and should
never make simple errors. However, the 🔔 fact is that we’re human and we will always be
mistake-prone to some degree.
Setting realistic expectations for yourself is very
🔔 important, because one mistake can send you spiraling into tilt if you aren’t careful.
The more study we put in 🔔 off the tables the less mistakes we’ll make, but even the best
players in the world can still mess up 🔔 from time to time.
Dwelling on your mistakes for
too long won’t help you avoid future mistakes, and could instead lead 🔔 to the opposite.
Continuing to beat yourself up for an error actually increases the chances you’ll make
another mistake dramatically.
If 🔔 you find yourself still dwelling on a mistake that
occurred several hands ago, it might be a good idea to 🔔 take a quick break and allow
yourself to think through what happened away from the poker table. Running a full 🔔 hand
breakdown can be a good way to understand what happened and what you can potentially do
differently in a 🔔 similar scenario going forward.
Once you have had time to move past
your mistake you can return with a more confident 🔔 and focused mentality, instead of
beating yourself up over it and knocking your confidence.
This one may come as a
surprise, 🔔 but tilting is not just for losers. In fact, winner’s tilt can be just as
harmful, if not more harmful 🔔 as other forms of tilt, because it’s much harder to just
walk away from.
We’ve all heard a story of a 🔔 player who got lucky and won a massive
tournament for lots of cash, just to blow it all over the 🔔 next few months and end up
losing money in the long term.
When everything is going right and you’re on a 🔔 massive
heater, it’s so easy to get extremely overconfident in your abilities. After all, you
can’t seem to do anything 🔔 but win.
If we aren’t careful with how we handle our emotions
while winning, we can often get swept up in 🔔 the emotions of success.
Players suffering
from winner’s tilt will typically become overly aggressive at the table, play stakes
that are 🔔 too high for their bankroll, and sit down in games where they’re probably not
a winning player long term.
This is 🔔 all well and good while you’re getting lucky, but
once variance swings and you inevitably stop catching good hands, the 🔔 tables will turn.
You have to focus on sticking to your bankroll strategy, playing correctly at the
table, and making 🔔 the correct adjustments based on the information you have.
Just as
you shouldn’t attach too much meaning to a downswing, you 🔔 also must be careful not to
get too attached to success. Swings are a major part of the game, so 🔔 stay consistent
with your habits and study routine and make sure that your decisions aren’t being
overly affected by the 🔔 results of your previous sessions – win or lose.
This is the
most underrated, but possibly the costliest tilt of all. 🔔 Elite poker players can also
suffer massively from this one, even if they have conquered every other form of
tilt.
Distraction 🔔 tilt refers to the ever-tempting call of social media, video games,
movies, multiple tabs and other vices that distract you 🔔 from the task at hand. Some
people have even more subtle symptoms of this form of tilt, such as daydreaming 🔔 or
going into autopilot mode.
Not giving poker your entire focus while you are playing
will cost you money, plain and 🔔 simple. If you’re scatterbrained and unfocused at the
table, this could easily lead towards you making suboptimal decisions.
Distraction is
extremely 🔔 detrimental to your poker game and puts you in a state of autopilot or lack
of presence at the table, 🔔 which leads to a higher chance of making mistakes. Then those
mistakes lead to mistake tilt (number 4!), and the 🔔 vicious cycle of tilt begins.
Put
your phone in another room, close all your tabs, turn off the TV and focus 🔔 on playing.
This change alone could go a long way towards increasing your winrate.
Coach
Bahman:
Bahman Zarghami is a mindset and 🔔 performance coach who has helped poker players
and other high-performing individuals achieve their full potential for over 7 years. He
🔔 is the head mindset coach for Raise Your Edge as well as the lead mindset instructor
here at Pokerstars Learn.
To 🔔 learn more about Bahman and some detrimental issues most
poker players struggle with (and how to overcome them), check out 🔔 this in-depth
interview with him where he tackles some of the biggest problems you’re likely to face
at the poker 🔔 table.
