how to not give a f*** about how stuck you are?

Whenever i lose too many buy ins in a single session I just remember myself that this is not even the biggest downswing I will ever have.

Specially if you want to play highstakes in the future, you must be prepared to face 6 figure downswings all the time.

And when that time comes what are you going to do? Get angry like a baby? No. You must be capable of losing 6 figures and move on completly from it.

Otherwise you wil start drinking too much and beating your wife because of poker.

Two paths, first:

1. Study a ton to the point where you’re good and you’re confident you are good. The majority of 2/5 live players aren’t beating the rake. If you’re taking the game seriously, you should be confident that you’re one of the best players in your game.

2. Countering that, be honest, data based, conservative in your estimation of self. There is a big difference between “I’m good at poker,” and “I’ve studied poker 10 hours a week for two years and have a win rate of 10bb/hr over 2,000 hours so I’m reasonably confident in a significant winner in my game”

3. Be properly bankrolled.

4. Play a ton.

5. Pay next to no attention to short term results. You have virtually no control over whether you win a hand, or a session, or 100 hours of play. Focus on your inputs that you control. While playing, once a hand is over, note it, and then on to the next one. When a session is over, give yourself a quick pat on the back, or a “darn, we lost that one” and then go back to your life. Look at results over significant sample sizes only where meaningful insights can be pulled.

6. Play a ton.

If you’re not taking the game that seriously , there’s path two:

You’re gambling, enjoy it, if you don’t enjoy it play less, play lower, or don’t play

If you typically play NL25 online and NL500 live, when you are down 3k in 2 5, that's 60 online buy-ins (half a year's worth of grinding?) that you are down. No wonder that tilts you.

I generally use a 3-buy-in stop loss. It's really hard to play your best live when you're down more than this. At least it is for me. Call it a night, and go back the next day when your mind and emotions are centered again.

You will get desensitized to swings after a while. Beyond that good bankroll management will help of course.

You can also adjust your playing style to choose lower variance paths and avoid thin edges, if you really hate the swings. This would mean stuff like not auto 4 betting ak, playing draws more passively etc. It does lose ev, but it also lowers your variance.

That being said, if you can get comfortable with variance, you will have an edge over most players. No one likes losing, literally no one. So if you are less afraid of losing than your opponent, that is an edge in a game that is increasingly harder to beat.

Losing money sucks. I haven’t found that it gets easier.

We are humans. We are emotional.

How to get over feelings? Become a robot.

Figure out what works best for you by trial an error.

Ive learned by trial an error ( personally ) playing live poker these rules:

If i short buy; i can buy in 3x and play without letting my feelings dictate action
If i max buy; 1 buy- in only.
If i have a drink, i stop playing.

These are my rules. Everyone’s different, and i learned these lessons expensively.

Practical matter would be to make sure you're rolled enough. If you aren't and losing that money could significantly affect your life or your career (by significant I mean having to move down stakes, making less money for a while etc., not stuff like losing your house and so on), it's impossible (and not functional either) not to be affected by results. It might be that this is your issue, as otherwise you seem to be in the right mindset.

What you can work on is accepting your emotions: if it feels frustrating, that's fine. We aren't and shouldn't be super humans. What you can control is how you react to that frustration - do you let it affect your game and your life, or not? That's probably the only factor you can control in this equation (assuming you're properly rolled)

Just leave if you are down more than a buy in and you won't have those problems.

It is said that true freedom lies only in our ability to choose how we react to a thing.

That's rarely available to us in the moment. In order to give ourselves the biggest chances of reacting the way we want to react, we choose, ahead of time, to want a different thing than we currently want. We currently want to win money. We should want to play well. Part of the work is to be conscious in our choices.

That, be well-rolled, study hard, have pieces in other people and sell pieces in yourself to lower variance.

My first trip to Vegas, I remember very clearly one guy who took beat after beat in big pot in one disastrous session, and just kept smiling like a pro and pulling up. Everyone else at the table - me included - was celebrating the wins and bemoaning the losses. This guy just took it all in stride like a champ. I found it intimidating. I decided to take on that attitude, at least as a weapon in my toolkit. So I don't celebrate the wins either, now, because my bottom line is more important to me than a physical expression of feeling the rush of winning a big pot. And losing a big pot is no biggie too.

I got to put it in play in glorious fashion as soon as I got back to London. Spun up and played a £15k pot at £2/5 6card PLO against Man @ Aspers, got it in as a big favourite ~85%, lost, and just pulled out a couple of £1k chips to buy back in, with a smile on my face, like an unfased pro. I don't know if that intimidated anyone, as such, but it feels badass, definitely better than moaning about my luck.

A lot of it is just being mature and realistic.

Barry Greenstien has a whole story in his book.

Short version is that you are playing 2/5. Run it up. See drunk whales playing 10/20. They are going all in blind and stuff like that. You take a shot. Run it up to a huge sum. Time to go after this orbit.

They both go in blind, covering you. Uh oh, you have aces. You have to do it.

Scenario 1. You win. Down payment on a house. All debt gone. Whatever. You have sex w/ wife. Father a drug addict who makes you and others miserable for decades, costs you way more, before they finally OD.

Scenario 2 you lose. Dejected, no sex. Later, you father a brilliant doctor.

Yeah, it's just the butterfly effect. But it's obviously true. Your life is a chain of events and you have no clue at all how something like a poker session will factor in. Try to really get it through your head.

temporary solution is to move down to 1-3/1-2 where you're less tilted by the amount at stake

otherwise stick with it and you'll get that dead inside empty numbness where we're wondering if we're actually alive or not because we find ourselves relatively indifferent to +20k or -20k days trusting it'll all workout in the long run

If you acquire a terminal illness, the stakes won't matter all that much. Just make sure that it's terminal and that a few buy-ins won't affect access to treatment. If they do, tilt may continue to be an issue.

I struggle with this as well. I'm on the verge of retiring, I have plenty of money, and $500 is basically like loose change under the sofa cushions.

Nonetheless, I definitely don't like getting stacked for $500, and I've lately been consciously working on not overfolding in large, messy pots when I have significant equity.

Im no "cash game expert". But i try an remember if im losing a few buy ins. Starting to Tilt a bit, I try and remember the biggest two elements that make a juicy game is calling machines and me on tilt. Because both are basically just ATMs for big pots. If you can just kinda look at it in a humourous manner kinda like do you wanna be the ATM or are you looking for a ATM because as we all know ATMs pay out,

The following is from my book Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition. To understand how to solve tilt problems you need to understand what causes you to lose the ability to think rationally. All comments are welcome.

____________________A Mathematical Model of “Tilt” — Cause and Cure

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 it’s my conviction that tilt follows the same pathways with one major difference. However, for those who don’t know, let’s describe tilt at a poker table:

Generally, what happens is that a player, after sustaining a series of losses will begin to play in a sub-optimal manner, and sometimes this can appear to be, and truly is, quite irrational. Usually it manifests itself by the tilted player playing far too many hands, meaning many hands for which the expectation would be negative. Thus, this player will tend to have results much worse than what he would normally expect.

However, by playing too many hands, the tilted player can occasionally get lucky and actually do quite well in the short run. When this happens, the tilting will often stop and the steamer will calm down and return to their normal game.

Other characteristics can also be seen. This can include yelling at the dealer, demanding that new cards be brought to the table, getting upset at other players, and playing in an extremely aggressive manner.

In addition, I have even noticed that on occasion tilt can carry over from one day to another. On several occasions I have observed a new player sitting down in my game, and after announcing that he was a big loser from the day before, immediately begin to play in a tilted fashion. So it’s clear to me that tilt can last a long time.

Now that we have the definition of tilt out of the way, and a short way of stating this is that a player goes on tilt when he loses the ability to think rationally, 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’s 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 I read many years ago, it then argued that humor was simply points of discontinuity in the logic presented that your brain had to process. And it gave this example which to the best of my ability is repeated below:

There was a young lady who wanted to have a boyfriend. 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.

Notice that this little joke is funny and it contains a point of discontinuity which we’ll call a logic disconnect. While a penguin is certainly short, and they do appear to be well dressed, this is obviously not an appropriate boyfriend. But the brain processes this discontinuity, understands it, and finds it funny. And it’s my contention that the fact that the brain can understand what has happened is what causes it to be funny.

Put another way, the brain has figured it out or solved the puzzle, and we’ll come back to this important idea below. But as long as the puzzle is solved, humor appears and we find the experience enjoyable.

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.

It should be obvious, as in the penguin example that was in the original article I read many years ago, what the logic disconnects are. We see the logic discontinuity and also understand the error of the logic. Thus we laugh.

But what happens when a logic disconnect happens and we don’t understand the error in the logic. That is, our brain is unable to solve the puzzle that has been presented to it. Do we still find it funny?

It’s my contention that instead of humor, 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.

Recently, I was sent a paper titled “‘This is just so unfair!:’ A qualitative analysis of loss-induced emotions and tilting in on-line poker” by Jussi Paloma, Michael Laakasuoa, and Mikko Salmela from the University of Helsinki in Finland. One of the things that they pointed out is tilted players often don’t sleep well. Could this disruption in sleep be caused by the infinite logic loop that our brain is stuck in still being active? I believe so.

When playing poker, despite what some others have claimed, 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 this is an activity that has been part of my life 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 miss several shots in a row when I shouldn’t miss any of them, or my service toss isn’t straight when trying to serve, etc. And my mind will view these things as simply being impossible. That is, there is no logical way that any of this can happen and a logic disconnect that I can’t solve has been created.

Also, 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 and it’s time to deal with it.

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 supposed 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 it’s my opinion the same problem occurs for many people. When they lose several hands in a row, or can’t understand how their aces were cracked, or have trouble dealing with running bad, it’s again a logic disconnect (for them). 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, and they begin to lose the ability to think rationally.

So, what’s the solution? It’s simple. Understand poker and the probabilistic events that govern it better. Once you get a grasp of the fact that your aces can be beat, it’s very possible, and eventually quite likely, to lose several hands in a row, and running bad for long periods of time can and will happen, tilt goes away. And the reason for this is that you’ve solved the logic disconnect that was created.

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.

On the other hand, you’ll occasionally hear about a player, usually because he has won a tournament or two, who claims to have never read a poker book. While this may be literally true, it’s also my observation that many of these people are steamers and do poorly in the cash games. I also don’t think their poor results here and lack of studying is coincidental, and suspect that their constant tilting is from an incomplete knowledge of poker, and an unwillingness to gain that knowledge.

On the forums at twoplustwo.com, 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 “fight or flight” experience as some people have proposed. (If it were, we would see lots of fights in the poker room, and a poker room fight is something that only happens on very rare occasions.) It’s actually something humorous where the logic that your mind requires gets hung up. And once you acquire enough information that your mind can solve the problem and won’t get hung up in an infinite logic loop, tilt, at least for the large majority of people, should be a thing of the past.

Final Comment: Since the above was first written as well as the original publication of this book in 2015, I’ve still read many pieces of advice from some of the poker mental coaches that were much different from this. Much of their advice has to do with learning to control your emotions which of course leads to “fight or flight.” Can this be correct? And is what I’ve written above not accurate?

I think the way to answer these two questions is to decide on how well the mathematical model described above represents tilt. I think the answer is that it does a very good job. In addition, notice that things like learning to control emotions or “fight or flight” have no place in the model. Thus, it’s quite unlikely that either of these or some of the other things that the poker mental coaches advocate have anything to do with tilt and its cause or cure.