excellent blog entry about tilt

reilly110

this hits really close to home for me

http://blogs.cardrunners.com/internetpokers

fattony99

Any chance of a quick copy/paste, can't access in work.

Gholimoli

fattony99 wrote: »

Any chance of a quick copy/paste, can't access in work.

+1

RoadSweeper

So I haven’t written a blog entry in a couple weeks. From what I hear, this is not a good way to run a blog, so I’m going to try to be a little more regular with writing entries. I’ve felt a vague sense of guilt over not having written one yet, but I think I know why that is. The first and probably primary reason is that I have been on a rough downswing since Christmas and have just felt really ****ty about poker in general. Unfortunately, that’s made me feel a lot less motivated to do extraneous stuff like writing blog entries. Also, I have promised a couple of times to chronicle the latter half of my poker history, and really, I just don’t find it very interesting to write about. I’m not really in a positive state of mind nowadays, and it’s not very cathartic to try to frame my bitching in some glowing narrative; I’d much rather write some sobstory about how the world sucks and god hates me. So, in the interest of writing anything at all, I’ll delay the poker story crap for a day when I am feeling less negative.




[Note: This post is disgustingly long. A friend of mine suggested that I post a PDF version of this blog post, as it's rather hard to read in this format, so here you go - LEMON PARTY]

So the first thing that I should probably get out of the way post is a follow-up to the preceding post I made, “Poker is a Whore,” which got an insane amount of views and feedback (thanks in large part to Taylor Caby’s props). There were some comments and messages I got from a number of people, either wholly disagreeing with me or pointing out some inconsistencies / leaps of logic that were present in the post. As for those people who disagree with me outright, I don’t think there’s a lot to say other than that if my general point didn’t come across then the argument probably isn’t going to be resolved. But as far as some of the inconsistencies or leaps of logic, many of my detractors are absolutely right that I took a few leaps of logic and some of my arguments were hyperboles. Specifically, when I said that you can’t run bad and still be winning – clearly, that’s not true, and it was mostly an exaggerated point for rhetorical effect (obviously if you have a winrate of 10ptbb with a low standard deviation and you win 1ptbb over 100k hands, you’re running pretty bad). I was mostly thinking of higher stakes players when writing it. At lower stakes, winrates are higher and SDs are lower so it’s not as reasonable of a claim. That was the main point I made that was a half-truth, and I was probably remembering the quote I’ve read many times on twoplustwo: “someday you will run worse than you ever thought possible.” Just think of me like the preachers who will an hour long sermon describing how mind****ingly hot the fire is in Hell. I just wanted to strike a little bit of the fear of God into my fellow poker players.



The other main contention that people made was that you can’t really know your true winrate, so therefore my point is moot. Well, the first part of that is true – there is no point in your poker career at which you can know your true winrate due to the enormous variance inherent in poker; that, and the fact that your winrate is constantly changing as you navigate through different stakes, as game conditions change, and as your overall skill level / mental level changes over time. However, at any point in time your true winrate still exists, and obviously it’s going to be somewhere in the vicinity of whatever your winrate is over a large sample. So while I acknowledge this fact, you can still know your winrate within some reasonably wide confidence interval – but even if you didn’t it wouldn’t matter, because there’s no operational content to my post anyway. Just stuff to mull over. If you failed to “apply my thinking,” nothing apparent would change in how you play poker or anything, so then clearly nothing important hinges on what assumptions you use to approximate your true winrate. There were some other points that were reasonable objections but they’re probably more tedious to rebut, and really I found that people were taking my post rather seriously while the main point was pretty simple. Disagreeing on the various details is fine; I’m a blogging poker player, not an apologist.





Anyway, let’s settle on a topic for the day. As of late, I’ve been emoraging pretty hard and been feeling vindictive about poker, which is a pattern of thinking usually followed by a lot of insecurity about what I’m doing with my life. I was talking to one of my students yesterday about it, and we got into a discussion about life and the value of money and other sappy bull**** that I’m not shameless enough to repeat here. But we got onto discussion of one interesting topic that has come up a few times in my recent past: the relationship between emotion and rationality in thinking about poker. What I mean by this is not the relationship between intuitive and rational thinking in poker (gut feelings or whatever); nonrational thinking is not equivalent to emotion. What I mean by emotion is rather how or what you feel while playing poker.



You can’t bring up any discussion about emotion in poker without talking about tilt. Tilt is the inner demon; it is what all players fear. It is the bane of poker, the snake, the thousand-eyed Argos, the sphinx. Tilt is the bitch god that watches everything you do, waiting for a reason to devour you, to strike you down, or just to make you shove every hand preflop. Everybody knows what tilt is, it’s in our gut, we know it like we know anger or fear. But if we want to lift ourselves out of our ordinary language and understand our relationship to this game we have to define what tilt is a little more clearly.



As it happens, the phenomenon of tilt has been well studied by many people of greater insight than me, and tilt itself, under different names, has been a part of human performance since ancient bum**** whenever. It’s an integral part of sports psychology, or just the psychology of performance in general – all sorts of people learn how to deal with tilt, such as athletes, concert pianists, actors, portfolio managers, etc. I’d say the cleanest and most reasonably inclusive definition of tilt would be as follows: tilt is when your ability to perform is negatively affected by irrelevant past or future events. Sounds vague enough, but I don’t think it’s too vague. It covers pretty much anything – if you lose a stack the previous hand and then you play worse the next hand, that qualifies as tilt since an irrelevant past event is affecting your ability to perform. The same could be said if you had just gone through some messy **** in your life (got in a fight, bad day, whatever) and that made you play poorly. It also takes into account tilting because you’re anxious about something in the future. Looking in the other direction, it seems to be appropriately exclusive because it doesn’t include something like somebody deceiving you with a metagame play or switching gears which causes you to make a mistake – that doesn’t qualify as irrelevant to the performance itself (the same way that a portfolio manager making a “bad decision” based on poor research doesn’t count as tilt, although the past events clearly made a negative effect on his performance). One thing that this definition is pretty unclear about though are instances of tilt that involve physical inconstancies, such as being drunk, being tired, being sick, and the like. Let’s just call this a special case of tilt, and ignore it for the time being.



Of course this is not meant to be groundbreaking by any means, but this methodology forces us to think more clearly about concepts that are too integrated into our language and thought to be brought into focus. So we’ve established a pretty wieldy definition of what tilt is, whose essential phrase is “irrelevant past or future events.” If this is the truest definition of what it means to tilt, then we can infer what tiltlessness means: simply, to not tilt is “to not let one’s performance be affected by irrelevant past or future events.” Well, there’s a somewhat cliché notion known as “living in the moment” – is that the same thing? “Living in the moment” is more difficult to adequately define and has some aesthetic/spiritual baggage, so let’s just say that they’re similar. But the core of the idea is the same I think. In order to completely escape tilt, you must sever your emotional attachment to the past and the future, and only think about now – how do I optimize my play now, what is my opponent thinking now, how are our strategies interacting now. There are things that escape us when we tilt, when emotion starts to affect our thoughts – anger or indignation at being down or having a bluff called, anxiety about being on the losing end of a match, or having your concentration waver while something else in your life is hanging over you. You start to desire and think about things that are beyond your immediate situation, and the analytical thinking gets relegated to your subconscious, your auto-pilot. In order not to tilt, nothing else can matter but what matters in that moment – you must be reborn into a new situation, and your past experience and choices can no longer matter, all that can matter is what you do in that moment with what the moment gives you. You alone with the moment. That is what completely tiltless play is: utter self-containment (or maybe it’s self-exclusion).



With this characterization of totally tiltless play, we can return to the initial problem – what is the relationship between emotion and rationality in poker? I think that the most common answer to this question is as follows: emotion is what causes tilt, since emotion is what makes us react to irrelevant past and future events; if we played purely rationally, then we’d be tiltless, so the goal should be to purge emotion from poker. The ideal becomes total indifference.



Well, aside from maybe monks or autistic people, nobody can experience poker that way. Each and every one of us, even the most seasoned of grinders, has some emotional attachment in every game he plays. We gets pleasure from winning and displeasure from losing – if that weren’t the case, we’d have no reason to ever play poker or get good at it in the first place. You must love to win in order to sacrifice all of the time, mental energy, and potential opportunities for the sake of getting good at poker. So clearly on the most basic level, emotion must have some place in poker, since these emotions are what drive us to put in hours and to better our skills. But I would go even further to argue that not only are emotions invaluable in the context of playing poker, but they can also be rational.



Now, it’s important to clarify what exactly I mean by an emotion being rational because it’s a deceiving concept. When I say rational, what I mean is “furthering one’s ends or goals.” This is different from the idea of “justified emotions” – for example, the idea of “justified anger,” the idea that you both can and should get angry if somebody insults you. Essentially, this is a social idea which boils down to “people think it’s appropriate or obligatory to exhibit emotion X in situation Y.” This is much different from the idea of rational anger, which would be distilled to “in order to further one’s ends, one should exhibit emotion X in situation Y.” So getting angry at your child if he does something bad is rational because the act of getting angry will discourage the child from repeating the behavior. Of course, the anger is a justified emotion too, but for a markedly different reason.



What I want to argue is that a lot of people talk about and approach tilt as though it were synonymous with emotion, and ultimately I think it’s downright wrong and actually an ineffective approach to understanding the problem. Let’s instead use the framework I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and apply it to poker – the social context that we’ll assume is the community of professional poker players. Let’s look at what are some justified (socially normalized) emotional responses to situations. One easy to grasp example would be getting hit and run – anger is considered to be a justified response to getting hit and run. If you get angry after somebody hit and runs you, this is considered normal and a totally acceptable. An example of an unjustified response would be to show contempt after winning against somebody (i.e., berating somebody who lost to you). This would be considered unjustified and scummy/mean/a douche thing to do. Now what about rationality? How do decide which emotions are rational and which aren’t?



Let’s use the previous examples. If we get angry at a hit and runner, does this further our ends in any way? Well, I’d say pretty clearly not – the hit and runner won’t be less inclined to hit and run us if we get angry, nothing positive comes out in our external (outside from poker) life from getting angry, and it has the possibility to negatively affect future hands that we play in poker. Clearly, getting angry at getting hit and run has no value to our ends. It is an irrational response. How about berating somebody who just lost to you? Well, I’d say it probably depends – berating somebody who has lost to you has the possibility of making him want to play you again, and if he’s an inferior player then this is a pretty negative outcome. However, it may end up aggravating and tilting your opponent and discourage him from quitting you. In that case, it can have a very positive outcome. Of course, you also have to take into consideration what you think is the value of your reputation as somebody who doesn’t berate others (that is, not the monetary value, but the value to you). So berating your opponent can be rational, or it can be irrational, depending on how you think your opponent will react to the beration.



Now let’s try to focus on common forms of tilt and try to judge them in regards to rationality. When a poker player loses a big pot, he tends to feel upset or possibly angry. Different players feel this response to different degrees, so let’s think about the gradations of this reaction after losing a big pot. On the extreme end of the spectrum is a player who gets very upset and angry when he loses a big pot. What this reaction will do is threefold: first, it will discourage him from losing big pots in the future. This is a good thing, because it will motivate him to want to play big pots well , and it will also encourage him to try to lower his own variance – this effect is therefore rational, because it furthers his ends, whether he knows it or not. The second effect it has is that it makes him want to get his money back so as to feel unwronged (as an angry man feels unwronged when he punches the person who insulted him). This has a very negative effect on his immediate expectation, and is the most recognizable form of tilt – the desire to get even will cause him to take gambles to try to play big pots with less regard for his holdings, will discourage him from folding hands (since he knows folding means he loses the pot), will get him to try to force more action, and can cause him to disregard his bankroll management. This effect is not merely negative – it’s disastrous. The last effect that this reaction has is the external effect: the effect that it has on a person’s life. If one is moved to anger easily by losing hands in poker, then not only does it immediately detriment one’s emotional experience, but one’s emotional threshold is lowered in general. Clearly, it is better to be more emotionally resolute. So, beyond being absurd, anger as a response to losing a big pot is overwhelmingly irrational.



On the other end of the spectrum is complete indifference. That is, if you lose a big pot, you don’t feel anything at all. You are totally detached from the money you’re playing with; all you’re interested in is playing your own game. What are the effects of this response? Well, externally it’s beneficial – to not feel negative in your life when you lose at poker gives you an emotional composure that’s hard to disrupt. Most poker players feel terrible when they’re going through rough patches, so having to totally forego negative experiences is nice. However, there are also a few problems with this response. First and foremost would be that it when you don’t feel bad about losing a big pot, your natural self-conditioning is impaired. Imagine one of those kids who are born without the ability to feel pain – clearly, these kids will have fewer subjectively negative experiences, because they won’t feel the pain of falling down, touching very hot things, running into objects, but ultimately it causes them to have enormous difficulties learning to avoid these negative stimuli. Foregoing the negative reaction also foregoes the conditioning that comes with it, and so if you feel the pain of falling down, you’ll learn to stop doing it. Perceiving the pain is precisely what forces you to adapt in a way that optimizes your performance. That’s not to say that people who are indifferent about winning or losing money will be clueless and just throw around money – but what it does mean is that they will be much less adaptive than players who feel stronger reactions to losing. I think when you imagine this type of attitude, you shouldn’t think about a stoic character like Jman shrugging off his losses, but think more of somebody like Guy Laliberte, who drops 500k and doesn’t bat an eye, continuing to enjoy his afternoon. There are lots of advantages that players who have strong emotional ties to poker have that those who don’t cannot, and like I said before, the desire to improve is closely tied to the desire to win.



The last type of response is I think the most tempered one. It is to feel negative about losing a big pot, but not to feel angry about it. This player will think about big pots that he lost and question himself and feels uneasy whenever it seems like he might’ve made a big mistake (even if he is being results oriented), but doesn’t translate this negativity into anger or a feeling of being wronged . Instead he uses this emotional momentum to channel into constructive patterns of thought and re-evaluation. The effects of this sort of thought can range drastically – some people don’t have the emotional composure to distance themselves from poker, and so can feel pretty negative in their lives when they’re doing poorly, and yet other people can segregate their insecurities about poker from the rest of their emotional experience. Some people have slight tilt, some people are inclined to take breaks, and other people are driven to put in more rigorous hours and study the game harder. But ultimately what I want to say is that in order to be a great poker player, your ideal shouldn’t aspire to some kind of enlightened indifference. To be a great poker player, you have to struggle, to doubt yourself, to crave winning, and to hurt when you lose.



So when you think about to avoid tilt and how to optimize your emotional relationship with poker, you shouldn’t try to think of emotion as the bête noire. Being intimately attached to your poker experiences is integral to becoming a fuller player. You shouldn’t think about trying to squelch your emotions, but instead you should try to evaluate them rationally, and then channel them into positive endeavors. So when you are going through a big downswing, instead of telling yourself that a “real poker pro” would be completely indifferent, what you should think instead is this: first, you should recognize that your negative reaction to your downswing is not merely “justified,” but it’s also to an extent rational (a process known as hypercognition). Feeling bad about losing is essential to getting better.



Secondly, ask yourself how you are using this negative energy that the downswing has imbued in you. If you don’t confront this question, then naturally the negative energy will take the form of negative effects on your poker game, making you more inclined to tilt, loosen your bankroll or game selection standards, and feel angry or vindictive about poker in general. Instead, you should consciously make yourself focus this negative energy on positive endeavors – use the desire to win money back as an impetus to study the game more rigorously, to review sessions more frequently, to sweat your poker buddies to keep your wits sharp, or whatever else that you feel you can do to turn that negative energy into positive momentum.


The third and I think most subtle element of coping in poker is the ability to reframe your narrative. This idea is rarely discussed, but I think it’s tremendously important to being an emotionally resilient poker player. It’s impossible to play poker without framing yourself in some sort of a narrative – when we start our careers, we imagine how we’re going to study and improve and move up stakes; we are all infatuated with the journey from rags to riches. Even for those people who no longer think in terms of moving up and down stakes, we are always framing our efforts into narratives of how much you’ll make this month, next month, how much you made last year, how much you’ll make next year. A downswing is an unexpected blotch on this narrative. Any downswing is always going to frustrate the benchmarks that your narrative has arbitrarily defined for you. The ability to reframe your narrative is basically the ability to allow yourself to wipe the page clean and start anew from your new situation. You must be willing to repudiate your old goals and expectations and to supplant them with new ones. This means that in the middle a bad month, you don’t think yourself, “Ugh, my goal was to make 20k, but now I’m down 10k. I’m screwed, I’ll never be able to make that money back, I should be up 10k by now,” but instead, “Okay, well I had a downswing and that was pretty unfortunate. My goal for the month is now just to get even; if I can get myself into the green on this month, then I’ve accomplished something!” This helps you to keep your spirits up and a positive mindset, making poor results much more manageable. Don’t let your goals become your master; become the master of your goals.



Tilt builds up gradually. Every moment that something goes wrong, a small increment is added toward your tilt threshold. Once you pass that threshold, then you start to tilt and make mistakes, and the further it goes, the more severe your tilt becomes. The obvious metaphor would be a thermometer that measures the temperature of water as it boils. Tilt itself, however, is not uniform. Downswings are a different species of tilt than the sort of tilt you experience within the window of a single session. Dealing with short-term tilt and long-term tilt are thus totally different skillsets, and I think that there are two main aspects to dealing with short-term tilt.



The first aspect is preventative conditioning. Being realistic about your own level of self-control is essential to being emotionally intelligent – even the best and most untiltable players will know (or approximate) their limits, and will have enough self-awareness to know when their own emotional stability won’t be able to prevent them from some level of tilt. If Jman loses 7 buyins, even if he doesn’t feel like he’s tilting, he knows that he should quit or take a break. He doesn’t tell himself “no, I’m not tilting – I know that I am very good at handling tilt, I think I’m playing fine.” He has preventatively conditioned himself to quit after he’s down however many buyins, or when he starts to feel the first tinges of anger or frustration or whatever cocktail of emotions that he thinks precedes tilt. He doesn’t have to know through his own intuition that he’s tilting in order to engage in anti-tilt measures. That’s the point of preventative conditioning – the state of mind we call tilt harms not only your poker judgment, but your self-judgment as well. The only way to keep yourself in check when you no longer should have faith in your own self-diagnosis is to condition yourself preemptively (like a sort of superconsciousness). So taking the previous metaphor and butchering it a little, preventative conditioning would be to say “okay, after one minute of the stove being on, I’m going to take the pot of water off the stove, even if my thermometer doesn’t seem to say it’s boiling.” This secondary rule will forcefully prevent tilt even when your inner thermometer is lying to you.



The second aspect of short-term tilt is to slow the buildup of tilt. Like I said, tilt builds up gradually in small increments. The two ways to stop the pot from boiling over are either to set a rule to take it off the stove when it will probably start to boil – or to turn down the heat on the stove so that it takes longer to boil. This would be the idea behind slowing the buildup of tilt. Essentially what you want to do is look at every possible incident that adds an increment of tilt to your tilt threshold, and to condition yourself so that it’s less likely to have an effect. For most people, the obvious candidate would be the loss of a big pot. The goal would be to condition yourself to not let this negative event contribute to your tilt threshold. There are numerous ways to do this, and since it’s a pretty subjective experience, different people have different solutions to this problem. Some people force themselves to shift the notion of “winning the pot” to “making the right play,” some people repeat to themselves vague mantras like “that’s poker,” and yet other people have other convoluted mental mechanisms for dampening this effect. The important thing is that you find what works for you, and then you commit yourself to consciously applying it as often as you can. The unconscious association builds up between losing a big pot and some mental process that dampens its tilting effect, which allows you even in your least self-aware moment to keep your inner demon at bay.



Ultimately, keeping emotion and rationality both in check is one hell of a balancing act. The key is self-awareness, which means not just to be keeping watch over your emotions, but to understand yourself in relation to the game. Less self-aware players might think only about what they’re doing internally to the game, but truly self-aware players understand themselves as part of the poker-playing system. It’s like the difference between thinking about a pool player who only thinks about the pool cue and which way he wants the ball to go, as opposed to a great pool player who will think not just about what he wants to happen on the pool table, but also thinks about the way that the rest of his body is positioned with respect to the cue. He understands how his every movement and nuance is contributing to the quality of the body-cue-table system. In the same way, you yourself are the least visible factor in any poker game you play, and often you are the easiest part to overlook.



In spite of the authoritative air with which I’m writing all this, I admit that I am not the best spokesperson for an essay of this character. I don’t handle myself at tables as well as others, I am not as emotionally adamantine as many of my peers, I’m not even particularly qualified to talk about psychology and I don’t really have experience training other poker players not to tilt. In reality, I think you could say that I’m writing this out for myself just as much as I’m writing it for others. We all spend most of our time trying to hone our rational understanding of poker, but for a lot more players than realize it, emotional intelligence is what is preventing them from taking their next step in poker evolution. I just hope that maybe some of you got a bit of insight or some better perspective about the emotional side of poker.



Sorry this post ended being so ****ing long, I’ll try to keep them shorter from now on. Thanks for reading, and best of luck to you all.



INTERNET POKERS

http://blogs.cardrunners.com/internetpokers

Whyno

The thoughts of reading all this just put me on life tilt.............:eek:

The C Kid

His blog is so f**king emo all the time.

Who wants to read that? I wanna see more of "How Can You Call with Fkin J High" kinda stuff.

tylerdurden94

I havent read it yet, whos blog is it?

akkenny

long read but worth i felt, really enjoyed the read and one of the big flaus in my and im sure a lot of peoples game is tilt, so as long as it is im sure its worth the read, took me 30 minutes:)

ianmc38

tldr

pok3rplaya

lol at you all who don't read this.

Tony3004

who is it, whos blog

gotta see if its worthy of a read

Rakeline

Hes DogisHead used to be a DC coach/video maker. Very very good poker player and great teacher. You should catch his HU series on DC its one of the best series ever made for all types of players.

Hectorjelly

I read it, its pretty good but nothing life changing. Most of the benefit of reading things like this is the benefit of forcing you to think about the subject

Goodluck2me

akkenny wrote: »

long read but worth i felt, really enjoyed the read and one of the big flaus in my and im sure a lot of peoples game is tilt, so as long as it is im sure its worth the read, took me 30 minutes:)

30 mins? did you have to google some of the bigger words in the middle of it or something?

akkenny

goodluck2me wrote: »

30 mins? did you have to google some of the bigger words in the middle of it or something?

sorry 28 minutes to be exact but i was making dinner and playing 8 hi low tables aswell as 4 heads up turbo horse games and talking to you on msn about my weekend away remember?

califano

stldo