Many years ago, in 1975, I finally left my home at Virginia Tech and went to work as a mathematical statistician for the United Stated Census Bureau. Upon arrival, I found myself assigned to an office with several well educated statisticians. This meant that there was always a statistical journal around and an article to read.
After working for a few months, my supervisor brought over the latest journal article that others had already found quite interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the article, who the author was, or what particular journal it was in. So to this unknown author I apologize for not giving proper credit. The article was about a mathematical definition of humor, and I am convinced that tilt follows the same pathways with one major difference.
First, however, to understand what is to follow, we need to define a continuous function and a point of discontinuity. And we’ll use this very simple definition:
A continuous function is a line or curve that you can draw across a piece of paper from left to right without lifting up your pen or pencil.
In other words, it will just look like a line, not necessarily straight, that starts on the left side of the paper and finishes on the right. On the other hand, if it is necessary to lift your pen or pencil up and then set it down at another point producing a gap in what you are drawing, this is a point of discontinuity, and your function is no longer continuous at that point.
Continuing with the article, it then argued that humor was simply points of discontinuity in the logic presented that your brain had to process. It gave this example which I will repeat below as best I can:
There was a young lady who wanted to have a boy friend. But she had some requirements. She told her friends that her future man needed to be short but well dressed. So her friends introduced her to a penguin.
First off, notice that this little joke is funny. It also contains a logical discontinuity. While a penguin is certainly short, and they do appear to be well dressed, this is obviously not an appropriate boy friend. But the brain processes this discontinuity, understands it, and finds it funny. And the fact that the brain can understand what has happened is what causes it to be funny.
Three other examples of humorous discontinuities are when Groucho Marx, aka Captain Spalding, stated:
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Or when Mae West commented:
When I'm good I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.
Or when W. C. Fields said:
There is not a man in America who has not had a secret ambition to boot an infant.
I think in all of these examples, as in the penguin example that was in the original article I read many years ago, the discontinuities are obvious. We see the logic discontinuity and also understand the error of the logic. Thus we laugh.
But what happens when a logic discontinuity happens and we don’t understand the error in the logic. Then instead of humor, I believe the brain sort of shorts out, or perhaps gets caught in an infinite logic loop similar to what can be caused by some sort of bad computer programming. This leads to frustration, and in extreme cases, irrational decisions.
When playing poker, I virtually never go on tilt, but there is something I do all the time where tilt occasionally gets the best of me. It’s playing tennis, and I have been playing since I was a kid, and that was a long time ago.
What will occasionally happen is that I’ll miss an easy shot which is simply impossible to miss, or perhaps I’ll miss several shots in a row where I shouldn’t miss any of them, or I can’t toss the ball straight when trying to serve, etc. My mind will view these things as simply being impossible. There is no logical way that any of this can happen since I’ve been playing too long and have too much skill for these events to occur. But they do occur and a logical point of discontinuity is manifested.
But unlike the humorous examples given above, there is no solution. I’m not able to realize that a penguin is not a potential boyfriend for a young lady even though he seems to meet some of the criteria, that an elephant was not really in Captain Spalding’s pajamas, that Mae West wasn’t referring to being polite and well behaved, and that we’re not suppose to be kicking little kids across the room. My logic just fails because, again, there is no solution. Or at least it seems that way.
This brings us to poker. Here I believe the same problem occurs for many people. When they loose several hands in a row, or can’t understand how their aces are cracked, or have trouble dealing with running bad, it’s again a logic disconnect. To the person on tilt, in their mind, the events that just occurred are simply impossible, and thus their logical circuitry, so to speak, gets locked up as the information that their brain needs to process enters some sort of infinite loop.
So what’s the solution to this? It’s very simple. Understand poker and the probabilistic events that govern it better. Once you get a better grasp of the facts that your aces can be beat, it’s very possible, and eventually quite likely, to lose several hands in a row, and to run bad for sustained periods of time, tilt goes away.
In fact, when you see good players who are known not to tilt suffer a horrendous beat, they usually chuckle. Their minds have the solution at the end of the discontinuity. So instead of processing it as frustration, they process all the chips going the wrong way as an “elephant in my pajamas.” That is they see these events as being funny, not frustrating.
To finish, on our forums, I have written many times that understanding the game of poker well is the best cure for tilt. Now most of you can understand my reasoning behind this. Tilt is not a “flight or fight” experience. It’s actually something humorous where the logic that your mind requires gets hung up. Once you acquire enough information that your mind won’t get hung up in an infinite logic loop, tilt should be a thing of the past.