TILT

Ever played pinball? On a real machine, if you ball is going down the drain, you can lift your flipper and hit the machine to try to get the ball back up before it’s too late. If you hit the machine too often in a short period of time, the flippers are disabled and it says “TILT”. In poker, if you tilt, nothing will disable, you will simply lose money (unless you are very lucky) and you will have to stop playing by yourself, stop tilting or run out of money.

Everyone tilt once in a while, it will happen to you, it has and will happen to me, it’s part of poker. You just have to control tilt as much as you can. The first step toward controlling tilt is to understand it.

Tilting usually append after one of more suckouts. You have your AA, you raise, you get reraised, you reraise again, the other guy pushes you all in, you call. He has 88 and gets his 8 on the flop. You then rebuy, your turn to get 88, same guy with you on the flop, flop comes 28K rainbow, you end up all in with him on the flop just to see he bluffed you with A3 and gets a straight with a 4 on the turn and a 5 on the river. That’s it, you can’t it anymore, you are on tilt! You start playing much more hands than you should and you call big bets with low pairs because you think the others players are bluffing you. A few hours later, you realize you just lost 250$ playing no limit 25c/50c. Now you realize you just tilted.

How to avoid tilt

You first have to notice your behavior change after suckouts. Once this happens, you can simply stop playing. But sometime, you can’t explain it, but you just can’t stop playing. You have to find something that you will tell yourself over and over when some players gets very lucky and takes your money even though he played terribly. Here’s a few examples of what somebody can say to himself to avoid tilt:

“I want bad players, I want them to play junk hand and put a lot of money on those hands, that is what’s allowing me to make money playing cards! I have to remember that playing betters hands than others means I won’t suckout often and I will get sucked out all the time.”

“He is losing money, not me. Maybe he will make money today, but he will lose it tomorrow. I’m not like him, I will continue to play well and money will come back when the time is right”

“I don’t see myself getting lucky like him because I don’t suckout often, my kind of luck is winning AK 5 times in a row. The kind of luck you just don’t notice, but still pays”