Principles of Tilt Control
Introduction
In this article
- What tilt is
- How to spot the early signs of it
- How to control tilt
The only way you can solve your tilt problem is by remaining in control at the table when you would typically lose control. Period. There’s no other way around it. I want to make that clear from the start because the strategy that I lay out in this article is designed entirely to help you remain in control when you typically lose it.
It sounds obvious enough but all too often players don’t quite think in those exact terms. They sometimes think the solution to tilt is to quit. Quitting is not a solution. It’s a way of managing your tilt problem by avoiding the situations that provoke it, or make it worse. You can’t solve your tilt problem from the rail.
That doesn’t mean you have to jump right in and challenge yourself to face a barrage of bad beats on a downswing and handle it like a grand mental master. Tilt control is a skill, and just like in poker you have to develop that skill over time. In essence you have to build “mental muscle” and the process of building that muscle is exactly the same as building real muscles in the gym.
This process in turn is exactly the same as building actual poker skill. You’re not just going to jump into playing $25/$50, because you’re crushing $2/$4 (though you may when on tilt). You wouldn’t do that because you’re not ready. Without the skill to beat high stakes games yet, you keep working hard on your game and making steady progress. With tilt control you have to think in the same way. Work your way up the ‘limits’ by acquiring the skills necessary to control tilt.
Far too often, players think that improvement in the mental game and with tilt specifically, should happen much more quickly. When something clicks, improvement can happen rapidly – just as when you have a big realisation or learn something that makes your poker game click. That’s rare. More frequently improving tilt requires sustained focus over a longer period of time.
Before I get to the strategy to help you move up the mental stakes, it’s important to define tilt.
What is tilt and what is tilt not?
Being an outsider in poker has given me a perspective which has allowed me to see things poker players often miss. By studying the psyches or mental games of poker players over the last four years, I’ve found that the vast majority of references to tilt refer to being frustrated, annoyed, angry and steaming mad. Tilt is not just about playing badly; it’s why you play badly. You play badly because you’re angry.
Autopilot, boredom, fancy play syndrome, winner’s tilt are all examples of how the definition of tilt has become so broad that it can mean anything but playing your absolute best. If anything less than playing your best is tilt, then every conceivable reason that you might play badly is now suddenly connected to one word. That’s comparable to going to the doctor’s office with a fever and the doctor diagnosing you as being sick. There are hundreds of reasons for a fever and in order to cure the fever, you need to know what’s causing it. Being sick is such a broad term that to a doctor it’s basically meaningless.
If you want to solve your tilt problem, start with a more narrow definition of tilt. In my view, tilt is only caused by anger. Every other reason you play less than your best, is caused by something else, such as poor focus, being tired, lack of motivation, anxiety, overconfidence, playing too many tables at once and much, much more.
Thinking = control
Thinking is like exercise for the brain. You control anger by using the higher thinking parts of the brain. The stronger your ability to think properly through a bad beat, a fish sucking out on you, constant aggression by your nemesis or a stupid mistake you made, the better you can control your anger. Seems easy enough, however, the reality of how the brain works makes it harder.
Here’s a simple rule:
When your emotions or anger rise too high, the brain shuts down your ability to think.
Basically, if you’re too angry to think straight, you can’t think properly because your brain has turned off that ability. This rule is incredibly important when it comes to tilt control, because in order to control your anger and avoid making poor decisions at the table, you have to stop tilt early. You have to catch the early signs of anger, so you can control it while you can still think. If you wait until anger has already taken hold of your mind, it becomes much harder to regain control and get back to playing well without needing to take a break to cool off.
Instead, take aggressive action to remain in control of your anger at the first signs that it’s rising. Why? Because once your emotions rise too high, you aren’t able to think straight, and thinking is your only way to control your anger.
Recognition
Spotting the early signs of tilt may be obvious to some of you, but to many others it’s not. That’s why I mentioned the need to complete a tilt profile in my last article. By studying your pattern of tilt, you can identify the subtle signs that show your anger is rising.
The good thing about tilt is that it happens in predictable patterns in each person. The more you pay attention to your pattern, the stronger your ability to take action. Actually study and take notes about your tilt. It’s really the only way that you’ll be able to control it and in the long-run understand it well enough to resolve the causes of your anger.
Here are a few examples of signs to look out for:
- Starting to open up more hands and play more aggressively
- Acting faster
- Head becomes hot, hands clench and/or holding your breath more
- Swearing to yourself or at your opponents
- Forcing the action and making basic mistakes
This is just a general sample of signs of tilt. Make sure in your tilt profile that you also write down what triggers or sets off your anger, for example a bad beat, losing, mistakes, aggressive action etc. Ultimately, knowing what sets you off becomes another way to recognise that tilt may be rising. If you tilt because of bad beats and you get a bad beat, it’s safe to assume that you need to take, or be ready to take, aggressive action to control your anger.
After you’ve recognised the small signs that tilt is beginning to develop, a simple yet important way of remaining in control at the table is to take a few deep breaths. The purpose of taking a few breaths is not just to relax you. It’s to create mental separation from your emotional reaction, so you can inject logic. The purpose is similar to leaving the room when in a heated argument with a friend to clear your head and start thinking straight.
Creating separation is important, because all too often it’s easy to just get caught up in the momentum of tilt. You need a way of taking a mental step back. Taking a few deep breaths is also a way of controlling tilt without anyone at your table (in live play) realising you’re tilting.
Thinking is the basis of mental control but what you’re thinking about is how to gain the most control. I am not a big advocate of making positive affirmations per se, but I am a big advocate of doing what most people do naturally and making it more effective. Generally, when players start to get annoyed, they talk to themselves to try and calm down. The trouble is that sometimes what you say is like throwing gasoline on a fire, “How can I be so f***ing dumb.” While at other times, it doesn’t really get you calmed down enough to work towards curing tilt in the long-run.
The whole idea behind injecting logic is that what you say not only calms you down, it also helps to correct the flaw in your approach to poker that’s causing you to tilt. For example, let’s say you tilt when a fish sucks out on you. You may hate it in the moment, so much so that you tilt, but when you look at it logically afterwards you realise that a fish sucking out now and then is precisely what makes poker profitable.
It’s not that you don’t know what’s correct, you simply haven’t learned it well enough to prevent yourself from tilting. Therefore, your logic statement might be, “fish have to suck out for me to make money long term. Stay focused and play well, that’s all I can control right now.” The flaw in your logic is that deep down you wish or want poker to not have variance. Logically though, you do want it and when you master that perspective you’ll no longer tilt when fish suck out on you.
There are tons of other reasons to tilt in poker. Here are a few other examples of logic statements that can help for a variety of causes of tilt:
- Don’t let variance beat you by forcing you to play badly
- Poker is a game of skill; you’re just not being rewarded right now
- You’re a terrible psychic and can’t predict when a bad run is going to turn around
- You control how you respond to the cards, not what cards are dealt
- Mistakes are going to happen. However, the bigger mistake is letting one turn into more
As your mind is not completely right when you begin to tilt or are tilting, you should actually have your logic statement written on a note card, in your mobile phone or in a Word document. That way, you don’t have to rely on your memory. It’s there in front of you to read quickly and keep your head together. Also, keep in mind that during a session or tournament, you may need to repeat you logic statement many, many times, as signs of tilt keep popping up. What you’ve mastered is the old logic, and this is your way of correcting it.
Strategic reminder
The main reason tilt is a big problem is that it overwhelms and shuts down your ability to think and you make mistakes. If you could be in a complete rage and still make quality poker decisions, tilt wouldn’t exist. It would just be anger. The loss of quality decision making is what makes tilt so bad. To make sure you play as well as you possibly can, try the following:
Take some time out to think about whatever it is about your game that disappears when you go on tilt. Essentially, what are the poker skills that you really need to remember but typically forget at that time. Then, write down a checklist, which I call a strategic reminder, of these things. That way, just like the logic statement, it’s easy to review and keep playing well at times when you typically would not.
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