Tilt = Attachment

 I’ve been reading more stuff from my man, Tommy Angelo.  Turns out he’s had the brilliance to apply some Zen teachings to poker, specifically to the recognition and management of tilt.

Tilt can have such a devastating effect on poker.  I’ve had so many sessions when I’m tired, frustrated, indignant or tipsy and almost always my play has suffered.  So many players think of tilt as steaming, of getting ticked off over a stretch of card death or a few bad beats and then losing their minds chasing loses.  But, what’s interesting (and maybe more damaging for me) is the tilt I have experienced when things are going well at the table.  Usually, this looks like playing low expectation hands I normally never would but feel like I can handle it because “Hey, I’ve got a few extra dollars here.”  The other end of this goes something like this, “Okay, I came out smoking this session!  Remember what happened last time!  Be careful and don’t blow off your winnings!”  I then proceed to tighten up and play far too timidly, missing important opportunities and leaving money on the table.

Tommy points out the Zen teaching that attachment to failure and success creates unhappiness, not these events in themselves.  This is mind blowing to me for two reasons:

1.)   Most players, including me, assign tilt to external events and not on their internal cognitive and emotional reaction to the event.

2.)   Because tilt is manufactured by me, and not imposed on me by some external event or force I can have some influence on it!

My fuzzy thinking about tilt leads me to curse my fate when I go through stretches of card death.  It also leads to me berate myself for making bonehead plays, missing important opportunities or picking bad spots.  All of this involves me assigning significance to events.

It’s folded around to me on the button and I have A-rag.  I raise hoping to pick up the blinds but with a hand with some slim showdown value in case of a call.  But, I fail to take into consideration a strong player in the big blind who vigorously defends his blinds, which he does.  The board is very small and dry and I bet and get called down on the flop and turn.  I fail to improve all the way to the river and my opponent bets out and now I’m in a fix.  My internal dialog goes something like this:

“I’m a terrible poker player! Look at this terrible line I took!  I’ve got nobody to blame but myself!  What was I thinking, that I could play poker, what a joke!  You know, I’m not just a bad card player, I’m an idiot!”

I have attached A LOT of significance to this hand, even beyond my ability (or lack thereof) to play poker.  Tommy says this is the essence of tilt.  Bonehead plays, failure to consider all the available information and just plain errors in judgment happen all the time in poker.  It’s what we make of these events that makes all the difference in terms of tilt.

Attaching meaning to success can also be problematic.  I played in a game last night when a youngish man was the victim of a cooler or two (one from me) when I first sat down.  He started wagging his jaw and from the way he spoke I could tell he was a fairly experienced player and as the game went on, I could see he was moderately talented as well.  The more he complained about the poor cards he was being dealt, about what he believed was the poor and lucky play of his opponents (including me) the more his play deteriorated.  By the time I left the table, this guy open raising every hand and was flinging his cards face up into the muck on the river in disgust.  The last two hands I saw, he actually mucked back to back winning hands (one to me).

This is a fellow who obviously attached a great deal of significance to his prowess as a player and ability to win.  So accustom to winning was he that he felt entitled to it and indigent when it wasn’t forthcoming.  The focus of his monsterous tilt was completely external.  Everyone and everything was in the crosshairs; fate, dealers, incompetent opponents, you name it.

Another Tommyism is, “Tilt is like crooked teeth.  It isn’t your fault and you can do something about it.”  We humans are wired to look for patterns and assign meaning to events.  Thousands of years of evolution has made it that way and nothing we can do will change that.  In this light all players are subject to tilt, it’s all a matter of degrees.  So, to the degree I can minimize negative and blaming thinking to past events I can start to get a handle on tilt.  Likewise to the extent that I can let go of my expectation and sense of entitlement to success that breeds disappointment, frustration and more misery; I can make progress.