Learning To Control Your Tilt Rather Than Being Controlled



September 1st, 2010

Many coping methods fail you when it comes to poker tilts, since the very nature of the tilt is to loosen control mechanisms. Aggression is an intrinsic part of human nature and can’t be eliminated even by the most self-disciplined among us. However, there is always a reason behind running amok, there is always a trigger that leads to acts of aggression: hitting your finger with a hammer, an insult, bad news or some other fardle, as Hamlet would call it, while contemplating his bare bodkin. The most common inducer to push one into immediate aggression is discomfort, like pain or pressure.

Everyday life does not necessarily require you to know your aggression triggers by heart and be able to curb your fits of mild rage against poorly placed items of private furniture. Poker does. To be a self-possessed cucumber-cool poker pro, you must be closely familiar with the circumstances of your personal reactions. You must literally be able to list your triggers, from the minor to the major.

Once you learn to do this regularly, you will be able to effectively say to yourself, even aloud: “Alright, this is precisely the kind of dumb good luck on the part of an aggressive “moron” which starts inching me ever closer to a tilt – look out. When that happens again, I will not tilt; I will recognize it and relax; I will play cool straightforward poker for some minutes.”

You will be able to admit even as you maintain control that in poker you do not have full control and that you, a good poker player, play poker not because you expect to win no matter what – precisely the kind of blind ideals which lead to disillusionment and despair when they collapse in any field of human endeavor – but because you enjoy the challenge of doing your best against the specific odds of the game: a combination of chance and your opponents’ skill.

By behaving as in the above example, your energy will be spent in a positive manner and you will have less to expend in the negative behavior of building up an uncontrollable aggression. You will have more energy to put toward the task of maintaining your equilibrium so even if you feel a tilt coming on, you can keep your cool and be in control of yourself and your game.

A few common triggers are:

Overall discomfort such as hunger or lack of sleep. Because these are not really instances of extreme torture, these can be overcome with introspection about the problem and how it is related to the emotions.

Bad mistakes: poker is a highly competitive sport, which perhaps makes it hard for players to forgive themselves; artists, most of the time, it seems, are somehow less hard on themselves, perhaps because to any practicing artist rough drafts and revisions are an obvious and necessary part of the otherwise more or less satisfactory creative process; any good artist will proudly admit that before they managed that amazing line they had to erase and rewrite pages’-wroth of limp, turgid verbiage or that before they had finally written that one true masterpiece of their career they had to write a series of “serious” well-meaning flops. You should not numb yourself to self-criticism, but you should be sufficiently immune to it to learn and improve from you own mistakes without plunging into despair.

There are many, many other triggers to be aware of, any of which, can be coped with as long as you can identify them. Become aware of what puts you on the defensive (yet another tilt trigger). It may be stupid mistakes (think bad instead of stupid), loss to a terrible beginning player (who probably goes on to lose everything in another game), fatigue, lack of focus, tedium, fight with girlfriend/boyfriend, one too many or one not enough, etc.

The author of this article plays online poker and gets Rakeback at Absolute Poker where they offer the highest Absolute Rakeback.

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