Tilt and rabbit holes

Great that you're noticing the emotions arising during hands—self-awareness is such a powerful tool in managing tilt.

I used to experience the clouding of the judgement thing and I would often experience it in the form of fear. I wish it was something I understood earlier.

I’m curious, do you notice any particular thoughts or beliefs that are coming up before those emotions of anger start to cloud your judgment? Emotions often follow our thoughts, and understanding what’s going through your mind at those moments can help you break the cycle and manage your responses more effectively.

I recently recorded the takeaways from a masterclass I held about becoming aware of our thoughts and reframing them. It might give some insight into how your thoughts are influencing your emotions. If you're interested you can watch it here:

Was playing PLO late the other night at the Hard Rock and several players at the table were bemoaning being in a terrible run. Understandable, but a bit rare in today's environment. I was quite sure I had them beat by nearly 10 years in the experience, but remained silent. And it really was interesting to hear. I wouldn't claim to have them so toasted in number of hands played in the death run, but in the calendar sense for sure. And it is that duration of time which is so mind altering ... whereas anything for a handful of sessions is not too unexpected.

912 sessions of the routine aspects of the game utterly disappearing ... where flopping a nut flush draw, making it and winning the pot disappeared; where flopping a wrap, making it and winning the pot disappeared; where flopping top set all but disappeared and when making the nut full looking at quads a bizarre percent of the time; with enough coolers to chill Antarctica; with incredibly long runs of 4 and 5 card with no pair, no draw on the flop; all seemingly picking the coldest seat in the room every time I showed up.

I used to say that about 1% or 2% of sessions are typically the nightmare session where everything goes wrong, where every run out is whiffed or death. So I was saying suddenly every session I showed up for was a 1 percentile session with respect to that. I adjusted that to "maybe it's more like 5%" ... to try to make room for the incredible anomaly that was occurring. Maybe it's 10%.

I know I lived it. 10 years of death, playing only once or twice a week, live, short session, so somewhere just over 100K hands. But it struck me that the career run bad for each player is a real thing, and the outer limits of the bell curve are extremely anomalous results. I had a streak of about 20 sessions like this once about 40 years ago, and that was my worst before this, by far. Another one of 8. So I started to think in looking at this black hole run that maybe for many, many years, I was running over my expectation, well over it, in continually matching flops and good runouts instead of all whiffs and coolers ... and that this skewed my sense of things.

I do know that as the run unfolded I was playing hands with obscene amounts of outs -- tens of thousands of them -- and damn near zero showed up. One winner or zero winners over that whole run of sessions. Just the other night a new wrinkle: twice I had someone with no win and two outs for a split, and both pots were split.

And at the end it was another session of no nut flush, no nut straight, no full house. 5-card. Never a hand I could really take heat with on the river.