Poker gems, #456

Ed Miller, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 38.

Whenever you beat players in a hand and they complain about how you played it, you're officially in their head.

Poker gems, #452

Lou Krieger, in Poker Player newspaper column, May 7, 2012 (vol. 15, #23), page 6.

For some, tilt has ended otherwise promising careers--even some WSOP main event champs, who were not able to control their emotions at the table--and many big-money winners who have gone completely broke, due to an inability and an unwillingness to deal with being on tilt. In other words, the willingness and commitment to get up from the table when stressed, and to take a short walk every hour or so, has cost some players millions--everything they earned and every dollar they had--while a simplistic little remedy might have prevented it all.

...When it comes to managing tilt, you are the one in charge. If you are unable to deal with it, the fault is entirely yours.

Poker gems, #396

Al Neipris, in Poker Pro magazine, November, 2010, p. 75.


I wouldn't be surprised if a few stressed-out card players are already starting to pop up in psychiatrists' offices around the country complaining about their inability to stay off tilt.

Once the shrinks get hold of a thing, can medicalization be far behind? There are pills for anxiety, pills for depression, pills for seeing little green men. The pharmaceutical industry rakes in billions of dollars of profit every year. If they think there's money to be made, you can be sure they'll be trotting out some sort of anti-tilt pill sooner rather than later.

Poker gems, #357

Ilari Sahamies (who apparently has hired Phil Hellmuth as his poker etiquette coach), in the Full Tilt Poker chat box, on January 30, 2010, upon losing a $602,000 pot to FTP red pro Cole South, as quoted in All In magazine, March, 2010, p. 85.


i hate him so f much

i really hoped that someone would shooted a newyears rocket to his eyes so he couldnt play without helper and couldnt see how f lucky he is

A little poker wisdom from Willie Nelson

Yesterday on my drive home from Utah I was listening to my one and only Willie Nelson recording, the two-disc compilation shown above. I hadn't heard it in quite a while.

I was struck by these lyrics from "Nothing I Can Do About It Now":

I've got a long list of real good reasons
For all the things I've done
I've got a picture in the back of my mind
Of what I've lost and what I've won
I've survived every situation
Knowing when to freeze and when to run
And regret is just a memory written on my brow
And there's nothing I can do about it now.

...

And I could cry for the time I've wasted
But that's a waste of time and tears,
And I know just what I'd change
If went back in time somehow
But there's nothing I can do about it now


(You can listen to the extremely catchy song here or watch it embedded below, at least until somebody cries foul on the copyright issue and yanks it off of YouTube.)

Great advice to remember. You misplayed a hand, misread an opponent, mistimed a bluff, maybe even did something as boneheaded as to forget what your cards were, and you lost a bunch of chips as a result.

Now you have a choice. You can sit there and sulk about it, replaying the mistake over and over again, wallowing in your misery. Or you can say, "There's nothing I can do about it now," let it go, and move on to the next hand.

One mental exercise I have sometimes found helpful is this: When you have a problem or issue over which you have no control, picture it as a pencil in your hand. Mentally squeeze it as hard as you can, representing all the effort you have expended in vain. Does it accomplish anything? Nope. You can't remold the wood. When you're ready to acknowledge that you have done everything useful there is to do, and nothing more that you can do will change anything, then stop squeezing the pencil. Picture your hand opening and letting the pencil fall to the floor. That's it. You have let it go. It is literally out of your hands. Now you're free to put your mind to work on something over which you do have control--like the hand the dealer is pitching your way right now.

Of course, there's also the point about figuring out what you'd do differently so that you don't make the same mistake again. Sometimes you do that on the spot, sometimes later when reviewing your session privately or with a friend or coach. As long as the intention is to plug a leak in your game rather than to pour salt in your own wounds, it's a useful exercise. But then when it's done, you file the lesson nonjudgmentally in your database of poker experience, and let it go.

I don't suppose that Willie Nelson has poker specifically in mind when he sings that song, but he's got a point. As with many things in life, once the thing is done, it's over and there's nothing you can do about it now. Crying about it is "a waste of time and tears." Put it behind you and get on with the next hand.

Poker gems, #328

Graham "Ribbo" Ribchester, in Bluff magazine, November, 2009, p. 94.


The thing about tilt is that when you finally realize you need help controlling it, it's too late as, you've already burned through a significant portion of your bankroll.... Hindsight is a wonderful thing in the world of poker. Players often muse, "How could I have played that hand differently?" A question they should ponder over is "Could I have played those last 50,000 hands differently?"

Poker gems, #303

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, July 29, 2009 (vol. 22, #15), pp. 87-88.


Your Problems + Denial = Tilt.

...

[Y]ou can't master poker if you can't master yourself.

Poker gems, #296

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 220.


Among equally skilled players, the one who spends the least time on tilt wins the most money.

Poker gems, #294

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 217.


The best psychological way to handle losses is to begin every hand fresh. You're neither ahead or behind. You are where you are when the next deal begins. Your good decisions will give you the best chance of rising from that point. But if you lose that hand, forget it. It's on to the next one. Again, you're neither winning or losing. You're starting fresh. You're even when the hand begins. You are where you are. Remind yourself of that again and again.

Streaks, winning or losing, are always something seen in the rear-view mirror. There is never anything in the cards that will dictate that the streak either will or won't continue. So, you're always starting fresh. Just like every hand is a new start, every session is a new start. Never give a streak unwarranted importance that negatively influences your future.

Poker gems, #293

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 215.


2. Don't Forget Poker's Most Important Secret

The secret is simply, "Play your best game all the time." It's a secret that's easy to acknowledge, but hard for players to follow, especially when they're losing....

What kind of a secret is that? Everybody understands it already. Sure, but not everybody does it. In fact, almost nobody does it. That's what makes it important.

Poker gems, #257

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 58.


Here are the three main causes of tilt:

• Winning
• Losing
• Breaking even

Poker gems, #256

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 56.


Tilt reciprocity is your slippage matched up against everybody else's. Tilt reciprocity recognizes that any reduction, however small, in the frequencies, durations, and depths of your own tiltings will always have the effect of favorably widening the gap between your tilt and theirs, thereby earning immediate reciprocal advantage. To make money from tilt, you don't need to be tiltless. But you do have to tilt less.

Poker gems, #89

Lou Krieger, in Poker Player newspaper column, March 3, 2008, p. 6.


All it takes is a short period of erratic, undisciplined play for an otherwise good poker player to blow back money that took hours, days, or even weeks to win. You can't allow your discipline a day off when you're a working professional poker player. The price is just too high.

Taking the walk of shame

In poker, taking the "walk of shame" commonly refers to leaving the table to hit up the ATM for more cash so that you can keep playing.

At the Palms tonight, over the course of a little less than seven hours of play, I saw the woman two seats to my right make this walk six times. I have no idea how long she had been there before I arrived, but occasionally when somebody at the table commented on being down, she would feel obligated to "top" that with a complaint about how many hundreds she was down--and the number kept growing.

She was trying desperately to get back to even, obviously. But she was simply outclassed--and not just by me, but by most of the other players at the table as well. We were all like a flock of vultures picking her bones. She was incredibly easy to beat, because if she had a big hand on the flop, she would bet big. If the flop missed her, she would check if she had not been the pre-flop raiser, and if she had been the pre-flop raiser, she would make just a small bet on the flop, then check the turn card. In other words, she was incapable of playing her weak hands as if they were strong. Since I nearly always had position on her, I was able to steal pot after pot from her by floating her smaller flop bets.* When she actually made a strong hand, she would bet big, and it was easy to fold with minimal financial damage.

She may have been the grouchiest woman I've ever shared a poker table with. She was always throwing her cards at the dealer. She openly, repeatedly blamed the dealers for bad cards and bad beats. Once when I won two large pots in a row from her in the first few minutes of a female dealer's session at our table, the woman turned to her and said, "That's $200 you've cost me just since you sat down here." Yeah, right--it's all the dealer's fault.

There's no question this player was having an unlucky day--flops didn't hit her hands, and on the rare occasion that they did, often another player would stick around and hit a straight draw or flush draw against her. She was on constant tilt, and in a constant foul mood, for the entire seven hours I was observing her. It was a really remarkable display of tenacity--that is, of holding on to every possible bad thought and feeling she could conjure up. It was as if she perversly loved wallowing in her misery and misfortune. There are people like that, you know; they enjoy obsessing on everything bad that happens to them because it confirms their preconceived notions about how unfair the world is.

Every time she stood up, I thought, "Well, she's finally had enough and is going to quit." But every time she came back within a few minutes with one or two crisp new Benjamins, and bought more chips. A hugely disproportionate amount of my winnings for this session came from her repeatedly replenished stack. I'll admit that I showed her both my strong hands and my bluffs in a deliberate effort to keep her steaming, because both actions had the same effect. If I showed her a bluff, she'd get mad at herself for folding the best hand. If I showed her that I was ahead, she'd get mad at the dealer for giving her the second-best hand or for letting me catch a lucky card to beat her. And the more smoke that poured out of her ears, the easier she became to beat. On the rare occasions that she made a strong hand, bet it hard, and everybody folded, that, too, would make her steam, because she couldn't get paid off. Her frustration was palpable.

Here's today's lesson: There are going to be poker-playing days when nothing goes right. Maybe it's because something is on your mind and you're not focusing well. Maybe you've sat down at a table of sharks. Maybe the poker gods just have it in for you today, and every possible unlucky outcome will happen, no matter how well you play. Maybe you started losing, and changed how you play--for the worse--in an unwise attempt to catch up again.

It doesn't really matter why it's happening. You have to recognize that it's just a bad day to be playing poker, leave, and come back another day. One of the most reliable and tangible indicators that you've reached a good quitting time is that you have burned through all of the cash that you brought with you. If you prepared properly for your session, that's probably at least two or three buy-ins. If you haven't gotten anywhere with that, it's probably not going to be happening for you today. The empty wallet should serve as a big, red, flashing beacon that it's time to quit. Maybe you should even put a note to yourself in there, right behind the 100s: "If you've gotten down to this note, GO HOME!!!"

If you've run through that money and have to make the walk of shame to the ATM, you will almost always be doing yourself a favor to keep on walking to the parking lot. Conversly, if you pull more cash out of your bank account and bring it back to the table, you will be doing me and all of your other opponents the favor.

Which way do you want it?


*"Floating" is the term for the ploy of calling an opponent's bet on the flop with nothing, then taking the pot away on the turn or river (still holding nothing), either because the opponent shows weakness by checking on one of those streets, or by putting in a hefty raise if the opponent makes another smallish bet.

Poker gems, #82

James McKenna, Poker Player newspaper column, February 4, 2008, p. 10:


[O]ther players don't cause tilts. We do it to ourselves.... No one can put you on tilt without your consent.