by Barbara Connors
Everybody knows about tilt. You’re playing poker, doing fine, winning at your usual rate— and then trouble rears its ugly head in the form of bad luck. A series of tough losses or one soul-crushing loss at the hands of an obnoxious moron can be enough to make the wheels come off. Desperate to win back what was so unjustly taken away, you begin to make impetuous calls and hopeless raises. Whatever the original trigger that brought it about, a bad case of tilt is powerful enough to wipe out years of hard-won poker skill and knowledge—not to mention a good-sized chunk of your bankroll.
As nasty as that can be, the one saving grace of loser’s tilt is that at least it’s fairly obvious something is wrong. When suffering from loser’s tilt, you might not be willing to admit you’re playing badly but deep down you know it. Yet there’s another form of tilt that in many ways is more insidious because it’s much more subtle and difficult to self-diagnose: winner’s tilt.
We don’t normally think of positive emotions as being harmful, and yet in a poker game anything that distracts you from clear-headed thinking qualifies as a potential bad thing. For players who find themselves on the winning end of extreme good fortune, a big win can muck up the ability to think clearly and play good poker every bit as much as a big loss. Generally this happens in one of two ways. In the first scenario, the big winner gets swept up in a wave of rush-induced poker euphoria. Feeling invincible, he proceeds to loosen up his standards for calling, betting, and raising, in the misguided belief that everything he does will turn to poker gold. Though it is not necessarily apparent to the casual observer, this player is now on tilt.
True, he’s not as desperate or extreme as a player on “regular” tilt—at least not yet—but he’s still making decisions based on emotion, not logic. It’s only a matter of time before that bad judgment will catch up with him. Particularly in a nolimit game, where all it takes is one loose call or one overconfident bluff to blow a player’s entire stack to smithereens. Winning can also tilt players in the opposite direction. Rather than spew chips in a surge of overconfidence, they hang on too tight to their winnings. Having gained possession of a massive pile of chips, some winners feel an extremely strong aversion to the idea of losing those chips back. Since taking chips off the table is a big no-no in poker, the big winner finds himself faced with two choices: leave the game, or stay and play scared. The player who chooses to stay—believing that if he just plays extra-tight it will somehow “protect” him from giving back all his winnings—is a player on tilt. Hobbled by the fear of losing, he will make too many laydowns, be easily bluffed, and won’t get enough value out of his few winning hands.
There is of course a third choice: stay in the game and play good poker. Tilt is nearly impossible to simply “will away” once you’re already on it; a break of some kind, even just for a few minutes, is almost always required. But if you can regain your equilibrium by taking a short break away from the table and game conditions are favorable, keep playing and monitor yourself for any signs of winner’s tilt. Knowledge is power, especially in poker—and knowing that certain situations can put you on tilt is the first step in overcoming tilt in any form.
Big losses and big wins tend to churn up big emotions. And big emotions are apt to be intoxicating and bad-play-inducing regardless of whether the feelings are negative or positive. Winner’s tilt is a peculiar poker malady, but you must learn to be immune to it if you want to keep on winning.
Barbara Connors is a sucker for classic old movies, science fiction, and the St. Louis Cardinals. Her life’s ambition is to figure out the unusual behavior patterns of that unique breed of humans who call themselves poker players. Contact her at fyreflye222@yahoo.com.
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