“I never tilt”
I was chatting to an online friend yesterday who is making good progress through the micro-stakes. He has kept me updated with his graph and stats from holdem manager and yesterday there was a 4 buy-in slump around 8k hands into his 50NL foray. Pretty normal we both agreed. I enquired as to how he was taking it and he told me he doesn’t tilt and he is immune to bad beats by now. Of course, anyone who truly can avoid the subtlest form of tilt has a very bright future in poker. Now as it turned out he was destined to have a pretty shitty Sunday, losing 150bb with a flopped straight Vs set and over 300bb with another flopped straight Vs overpair as I recall. How did he react? Well, like a normal person.
No one I know in poker has reached the level of emotional superman. That is, if you drop 8 buyins in games where fish are queueing up to get their money in with 2 outers, it kind of hurts. The mechanism of play good, reach long-run, make money starts to look a little less certain. We start to question the logic of poker in the most subtle and creepingly irrational ways: “it happens everytime at the weekend against huge fish” or “I’m gonna quit, I’m not tilting but maybe a break will end my bad streak”. We’ve all felt like this and I’m sure you can recognise the emotions involved. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make it that little bit harder to fold two pair when the fish has likely binked his flush draw on the river.
The point is we can still make good decisions when we’ve had a day like this but there’s still some distance to go before we are at the level of mental nirvana where tilt simply doesn’t factor in. If we were, we would simply recognise and appreciate all the times that we made a good +EV decision and got our money in significantly ahead. We would relish staying at the table with a villain who just poached 350bb from you with a 2 outer. We would play for as long as our bankroll management rules and mental alertness allowed. But it doesn’t work like that, sometimes we just have to say “fuck it” and sit out for our own good, and that’s where tilt lives.
