Deep rooted tilt

That deep rooted tilt is probably because you believe you deserve to win every time you sit down at the table. Not sure, just guessing.

Tilt is just a word poker players assign to a natural emotion every human being faces whenever their expectation pattern gets interrupted by reality. In poker, we all know it's possible for even big winners to take massive downswings or breakeven stretches, yet very, very few people genuinely accept this. Some people's problem is they don't think it can or should happen to them. They look at the variance graph and think that run would suck without thinking what they should be thinking which is 'that is just as or more likely to happen to me as anyone else. So when they finally do hit a bad stretch, and they haven't accepted poker for what it is which is a long-term game punctuated by short-term luck, it hits them hard.

It usually hits so hard that the brain attempts to force reality to conform to its expectations by doing caveman ****, like PFRing 50% or running huge bluffs. In some cases, the brain will even come up with alternative explanations for why reality didn't conform to its expectations such as "I'm being cheated," "This site is rigged," or "I'm the worst running card player of all time." This is like a denial phase I suppose. If the stretch is long enough, the brain will attempt to develop a new pattern, this time a negative one. It sees monsters under the bed, it predicts the worst possible runout, the worst possible result. When that spade hits on the river again, "I knew it was coming."

It takes a lot of really hard work, and a lot of humbling and self-honesty, but the only way out of this is to accept reality.
So let's get real:
1. You don't know your true winrate, and it's actually impossible to know your true winrate
2. You very likely aren't as good at poker as you think you are
3. You're almost certainly not as good at poker as you could be
4. Every winning session and streak you've ever had contained a large element of good luck
5. It's possible you are a losing or breakeven player, and that all your winnings were the result of good luck, and now you are winning at your true winrate (0 or below)
6. Even very strong players can lose or breakeven for a long, long time.
7. You cannot expect to win at poker, ever
8. You do not deserve to win at poker

Since emotions (negative and positive) are caused by false expectations conflicting with reality, radical acceptance of the reality of poker (or quitting and ignoring reality) is the only way to deal with your emotions about it. I'll end this post with a question:

If you knew beforehand that you were in the middle of a two-year breakeven stretch, would you continue to play?

And so the bad play associated with tilt is about frustration tolerance, right? As in: "my expectation (laced heavily with desire) is being thwarted, and that frustrates the hell out of me. So I lose my equilibrium, my patience, my discipline, my 'rationality' etc."

I think people lash out due to frustration yes, it's sort of a primal, toddler response to things not going 'your way.' Deeper than that though, if you truly accept poker (or anything) for what it is, it's impossible to be frustrated. Meditation works sometimes because it trains people to take a pause, but it's just a bandaid imo and tends to make people emotionally stunted. The true growth comes when you practice radical acceptance of reality. You don't have positive or negative reactions to the runout or the last 100k hands or whatever. You're there to practice your thought process of making the most +ev decision, not to make $.

I mean just think about it. How stupid is it to have an expectation of $ over x hands when you can't even know what your true winrate is? I'm at the point now where I kind of roll my eyes when people get all pumped about winning a hand or a pot or a tournament. The game isn't about that to me, it's about execution over a long ass period of time.

Well, Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance isn't on my shortlist of all-time favorite titles for nothing. 😀 Most people are there for the money, the excitement, the diversion, the addiction all mixed in with the intent to ply the +ev thought process. Few achieve any semblance of "so I don't care if I win" attitude. So when it doesn't go their way, there is an element of frustration along with being okay with the variance of it.

It's less "I don't care if I win" and more "I will focus on this, and that drastically increases the chance that after I long time I will have won," which sort of necessarily means you care about winning a lot, and in my opinion the only way to properly think about it.

Imagine a casino owner. Does he get angry when 4 jackpot slots pay out on the same day? Hell no. He rests on the edge he knows he has, and is patient in it manifesting itself, which, if his edge is real, it will. The only way he'd really be worried was if he didn't have the liquidity to pay out multiple jackpots. Poker is the same. Focus on what gives you an edge, practice the application of that edge to the ignorance of results, and eventually it manifests itself. And make sure you have a big enough bankroll to absorb the swings.

Having expectations about the way it manifests in the short term is really silly and actually bizarre when you have a proper grasp on what the game is.

A few people in this thread have mentioned expectations - the difference between expectation and results as being the driver of tilt.

Someone once told me something that at first seemed outrageously simplistic, yet on contemplation seemed undeniably true and quite wise. He said:

"All unhappiness in life comes from unmet expectations, undelivered communications, or some combination thereof."

I wanted to argue, but thinking back on my own experience and observations, I couldn't find a single example of my own or anyone else's unhappiness being the result of anything else.

That led to a very practical realization - a critical component to achieving happiness is setting and maintaining realistic expectations, then putting the effort into realizing them.

Setting aside any specific underlying psychological conditions, if it's assumed that tilt is just the result of results falling short of expectations, the only remedies would seem to be lowering our expectations, or putting effort into improving our decisions / actions necessary to achieve the expectations we've already set.

That said, it may also help to realize that the cards don't break even for everyone eventually. Half of all people will experience better than average card distribution / results, resulting in running above EV, and half will experience worse than average, resulting in running below EV.

We may need to simply accept the reality that we could just be in the below EV half of the population, and adjust expectations accordingly.

Well I agree but I think you're just barely missing something profoundly important. Expectations in poker cannot be about anything outside your control. You can't control how you run, you can't control your bb/100 (you can't even know what your true winrate is), you can't control how much $ you make in a day, a month, a year, or even 10 years. You can't control any of that stuff, yet that's where 99% of emotions (positive and negative) about the game come from. There are no 'realistic expectations' about any of this stuff, because like you said you could be that guy that is in the bottom 10% of variance. Good thing is, you'll never know it!

So instead of having 'realistic expectations' about results, just get rid of results-oriented expectations altogether. Throw them all in the garbage. Change your expectations to be 1. Expectations about how you execute your daily routine, 2. Expectations about how your opponents are going to play, 3. Expectations about how your strategy is going to be executed and adjustments you are going to make 4. Expectations about how long you're going to play a session, a day, etc--->expectations you can control.

Doing anything else is literal insanity, so it's no wonder we lose our minds when we focus on things we can't control and they don't go how we want them to. They're basically guaranteed not to go how we want them to, so why the surprise? Just imagine an investment, and you're expecting the stock to go up tomorrow, or next week, or next month, and it goes down instead. How are you going to feel, bad right? But that shouldn't be relevant, because when you picked the stock it should have been because it was from a business that was going to return your investment in the long term. If you picked it for any other reason, it was a bad investment, or at the very least a bad decision. Same is true in poker. You made a +ev play, that's where it ends, doesn't matter if you 'won' that hand or that week or not. And if you sniff out a spot where you may have made a mistake, it's like solid gold--an opportunity to improve. The rest is noise.

All that's fair. But I think you may have misunderstood something about my post you quoted.

We can and do measure our results, and compare those to our expectations, which is what leads to tilt. We may not be able to control the outcomes, but we can certainly manage our own expectations regarding the outcomes. Part of managing the expectations involves building some less-expected outcomes into our expectations set.

For example, in a specific hand, we might default to thinking that we're going to win 80% of the time when we jam with AA and get called. If we're having a bad session or been on a downswing, we might occasionally get tilted if we lose to KK, but we might be and probably are capable of consciously thinking that we want KK to call when we jam, and that we already built the expectation of losing 20% of time into our thought process before we jammed, so we can avoid tilting when we lose AA vs KK.

But, we might get REALLY tilted if we lose to some whale who jammed into us with 72 and sucked out. That might be harder for us to accept if we want to avoid tilt. We may need to build some "random BS hand sucking out on us" into our set of expectations before we jam or call a jam. We can justifiably go on tilt there, when the possibility of that happening isn't built into our expectations. If it is built in beforehand, we'll be more likely to shake our head and laugh it off as the least likely outcome, yet still one we considered before we acted.

I don't see as many players tilting when they get their money in good and lose to a worse hand that made a reasonable call. That possibility of loss is built into our standard expectation set. The tilt happens when an opponent does something ridiculous and gets rewarded for it, or something extreme happens, like someone catching perfectly, runner-runner, when we were a >99% favorite to win.

So, my point was that even though we cannot control the outcomes / results, we can certainly manage our expectations, and include some ridiculous outcomes that are more likely to put us on tilt.

I try to think in terms of hope for the best but prepare for the worst. That means expecting to get worse than average card distribution and results, so that I'm less likely to be disappointed, and more likely to be pleasantly surprised, no matter what my actual card distribution or my results are.

That would be a hard no. I would say that a succession of beats by good hands when our hero has a great hand is one of the most insidious triggers of tilt there is. It's like you're being cursed by the poker gods losing your pocket A's to AKo, JJ, and KK all in the same hour, or flopping a set of Jacks only to lose to a turned, or rivered set of queens.

Now if it happened only once, you have a point. Only that's not the case when I've seen it in a live session. It's a frustration that builds up with beat, after beat. Now, while this is slightly off-topic, if you see an otherwise good player start showing his good hands that just got beat when he didn't have to, that's a sign that he's going on tilt and you should assume his play is getting loose.

You're arguing about a scenario, going on tilt after repeated bad beats, that is different than the one I used as an example, i.e., the likelihood of going on tilt after one bad beat vs a reasonable hand compared to going on tilt after a ridiculous bad beat against a stupid hand.

The examples I gave were pretty clear, and obviously true to life. We generally get less upset when we lose once against a reasonable hand than when we lose once against an unreasonable hand.

Is it potentially tilting when we get our money in good, repeatedly, and lose, repeatedly? Of course it is. But are we going to instantly tilt if the first time it happens, against a hand that isn't outrageous? That seems less likely.

The point I was making is that in any one hand, we should build into our expectation set the possibility of our opponent doing something outrageously stupid, so that we can avoid tilting after one bad beat from an opponent who did something stupid yet was rewarded for it. I think that's a reasonable suggestion.

The point you seem to be making is that we can't or shouldn't expect to have opponents repeatedly suck out on us, over and over again, and as such, if it happens, there's no way to be mentally prepared to avoid tilt.

On the surface, that seems reasonable, as the likelihood of repeated suck-outs is very low. On the other hand, I'd say if you're arguing that it happens often enough to be concerned it might tilt us, then I'd say it's happening often enough to build that possibility into our expectation set.

Alternatively, we can have a self-governing rule, such as, more than three bad beats in a session, we end the session, in order to avoid the possibility of playing tilted.

My overall point is that tilt comes when the outcomes deviate from our expectations. Since we can't control the outcomes, but we can control our expectations, the way to avoid tilt is to have a set of expectations that includes outcomes which are likely to tilt us if we're not mentally prepared for when they happen, be that losing once against a ridiculous hand, or losing repeatedly, even against a bunch of reasonable hands.

The alternative would seem to be ignoring the possibility of something tilting happening, until it actually happens.

I seem to have struck a nerve, didn't mean to, sorry.

First off, I don't know of a single player that tilts after a single bad beat.
Second, amongst the better players, when we see a hand that shouldn't have been there suck out and win, it immediately draws their attention to bet more for value.

If by knowing yourself your including controlling yourself, okay. But that's not really how it works with people. Take the ultimate perhaps example of Stu Ungar. He certainly had great knowledge of how to win poker tournaments, and knew he was an addict, yet that didn't keep him from sacrificing his final table Main Event opportunity to binge coke, whatever year that was.

One could make the argument that psychologically speaking he didn't know why he was addicted, and therefore didn't know himself ... and that's profoundly true. But say a he was a psychologist/psychiatrist and he did understand why and how he was addicted, from his demons to the way neurotransmitters act in addiction. He, or anyone, is STILL capable of indulging the addiction compulsively and irrationally.

There are plenty of doctors who smoke, plenty of nutritionists eating junk food, plenty of pharmacists abusing drugs, plenty of psychologists emotionally unstable, plenty of cardiologists overweight ... plenty of poker players who behave against their knowledge too. Human beings are not computers, and do not execute their knowledge automatically. Expertise and self-control are two different things. And that's why the greater one's knowledge of poker, the more room there is for playing/behaving below that level of knowledge. To wit: the GOAT tourney player perhaps bingeing unconscious in his hotel room when he knows how to win it. If a GOAT is capable of that, how much more possible is it to merely play considerably below your level under the sway of emotions?

There is a breed of player whose entire approach to the game factors out this whole emotional aspect. And there are many more who don't and/or can't.

If one knows oneself, they don't seek an escape. Perhaps I should have added the caveat of being emotionally stable. But somehow, I didn't think I needed to ... still don't.

You see, when you present something simple, that works, if you also provide an out that is easy to grasp, people won't work as hard to achieve the goal, since an excuse for failure was provided for them. Also, I never said it would be easy, but then few things of value come easy.

Do you think these fish every question their decisions?

No, they are just having fun!

So they don't tilt, they just have fun.

Take a break for a while, get your mind off poker. Play in a different room. Play a tournament.

You got to get out of your head.