(Continued from Part II)
Lesson Number 4: finding your source of anger
This is the most important lesson. When you try to get over tilt, you are basically forcing your left brain (logic) to tell your right brain (emotion) why it shouldn't be pissed off. But no matter how much you mentally fight yourself, you're trying to surpress emotions instead of addressing them. What you really need to be doing is stopping your emotions at the source.
Your emotional centre acts up as a response to a need. I was mugged once. Three guys against me and my prawn crackers (they must have been hungry)... my thought process went as follows:
1. Physical: Flinch, close your eyes
2. Subconscious: Recognise a threat
3. Mental: Analyse how to respond to threat
4. Emotional: Become angry or fearful
5. Biological: Adrenaline rush, get ready to fight or run
The way this applies to tilting in poker, is by understanding the order in which tilt takes place. By taking time to examine your own thoughts (thinking about how you think), you can break down exactly what you are going through during tilt:
1. Mental: Observe opponent rivering you
2. Mental: Realise you had a better hand than your opponent before the river
3. Mental: Realise you played correctly, while your opponent played incorrectly
4. Subconscious: You are accustomed to being rewarded when you do things correctly
5. Subconscious: You were not rewarded
6. Subconscious: This is not normal
7. Subconscious: This is not 'fair'
8. Subconscious: Unfairness is resolved through conflict
9. Emotional: You need to prepare for conflict
10. Emotional: You need to become aggressive
11. Biological: Increase heart rate, release adrenaline, tense up the body
12. Mental: TILT
13. Mental: Recognise that you are getting angry
14. Mental: Realise that you need to stop getting angry
15. Mental: Fight against emotion and subconscious for control
We can see by this deconstruction that tilt comes up because of how your subconscious reacts to an 'unfair' situation. This reaction is literally ingrained in most of us, as our biology, society and economy is based on reward conditioning. Everytime you are rewarded, our brain maps out a path on how to receive that reward, so it's really inescapable. So, when you don't get rewarded when you expect to, the brain sees this as an uncertain situation that appears to violate the mental rules you have in place. Thus, the brain sees this uncertainty as confusion, which leads to a reaction of anger or fear.
To make yet another analogy, if your work suddenly decided to dock your pay for no reason, you would be up in arms because it's obviously uncalled for (unfair). Unless you are a weak or timid person, your body will react in the appropriate way to deal with the situation. In essence you need to get a bit riled up before you go mouthing off at your boss!
So, the key point here is that by analysing your own mental and subconscious train of thought, you will realise that your body is reacting in a way that it is designed to. What you need to do, is intercept your thought processes at step 4 and realise that you will not be rewarded in the same way in poker as other activities in your life. By reworking your thought processes at steps 4 and 6, you will stop the progression toward tilt and keep the game solely mental, instead of emotional.
To deal with step 4 - you need to toss out the window your expectations of being rewarded in poker. You need to realise that there is no guarantee of being rewarded when you do things correctly. Lose that mental hump you have where you are actually expecting something for doing things the right way. It doesn't happen in poker. So dig deep... and go back to that inner child in you where you were rewarded with a gold star by your teacher for reciting the entire alphabet in front of the class. Now replace that gold star with a solid smack to the groin. That's poker.
Lesson Number 5: Learn from your defeats
On another note, many players will find themselves blaming their opponent for their own bad plays and go on tilt as a result. I see this sometimes on this forum, with people blasting other players for outdrawing them when their opponent had the pot odds to do so. So some things you should ask yourself about each 'bad beat' you have should be:
• Did I completely count how many outs my opponent had?
• Did I make it incorrect pot odds for him to call?
• Did I try to bluff out a calling station?
• Was this really a bad beat?
In any game, you will find that the best players get angry just like everyone else from time to time. The thing that I have noticed in conversations with a few top players however, is that they will always analyse their own play over and over, asking themselves "What did I do wrong?" or "How do I prevent that from happening again?". It's a different mentality than the average player, because the top players always seem to me put the blame to themselves first, rather than their opponent. The reason they do this is because you can't improve yourself if you're not willing to admit fault first.
In many cases, I for example find that in my opinion I did play correctly. But in those times where I played incorrectly, if I cannot work out that the problem lies with me, then I will never be able to mature as a poker player.
This is the most important lesson. When you try to get over tilt, you are basically forcing your left brain (logic) to tell your right brain (emotion) why it shouldn't be pissed off. But no matter how much you mentally fight yourself, you're trying to surpress emotions instead of addressing them. What you really need to be doing is stopping your emotions at the source.Your emotional centre acts up as a response to a need. I was mugged once. Three guys against me and my prawn crackers (they must have been hungry)... my thought process went as follows:
1. Physical: Flinch, close your eyes
2. Subconscious: Recognise a threat
3. Mental: Analyse how to respond to threat
4. Emotional: Become angry or fearful
5. Biological: Adrenaline rush, get ready to fight or run
The way this applies to tilting in poker, is by understanding the order in which tilt takes place. By taking time to examine your own thoughts (thinking about how you think), you can break down exactly what you are going through during tilt:
1. Mental: Observe opponent rivering you
2. Mental: Realise you had a better hand than your opponent before the river
3. Mental: Realise you played correctly, while your opponent played incorrectly
4. Subconscious: You are accustomed to being rewarded when you do things correctly
5. Subconscious: You were not rewarded
6. Subconscious: This is not normal
7. Subconscious: This is not 'fair'
8. Subconscious: Unfairness is resolved through conflict
9. Emotional: You need to prepare for conflict
10. Emotional: You need to become aggressive
11. Biological: Increase heart rate, release adrenaline, tense up the body
12. Mental: TILT
13. Mental: Recognise that you are getting angry
14. Mental: Realise that you need to stop getting angry
15. Mental: Fight against emotion and subconscious for control
We can see by this deconstruction that tilt comes up because of how your subconscious reacts to an 'unfair' situation. This reaction is literally ingrained in most of us, as our biology, society and economy is based on reward conditioning. Everytime you are rewarded, our brain maps out a path on how to receive that reward, so it's really inescapable. So, when you don't get rewarded when you expect to, the brain sees this as an uncertain situation that appears to violate the mental rules you have in place. Thus, the brain sees this uncertainty as confusion, which leads to a reaction of anger or fear.To make yet another analogy, if your work suddenly decided to dock your pay for no reason, you would be up in arms because it's obviously uncalled for (unfair). Unless you are a weak or timid person, your body will react in the appropriate way to deal with the situation. In essence you need to get a bit riled up before you go mouthing off at your boss!
So, the key point here is that by analysing your own mental and subconscious train of thought, you will realise that your body is reacting in a way that it is designed to. What you need to do, is intercept your thought processes at step 4 and realise that you will not be rewarded in the same way in poker as other activities in your life. By reworking your thought processes at steps 4 and 6, you will stop the progression toward tilt and keep the game solely mental, instead of emotional.
To deal with step 4 - you need to toss out the window your expectations of being rewarded in poker. You need to realise that there is no guarantee of being rewarded when you do things correctly. Lose that mental hump you have where you are actually expecting something for doing things the right way. It doesn't happen in poker. So dig deep... and go back to that inner child in you where you were rewarded with a gold star by your teacher for reciting the entire alphabet in front of the class. Now replace that gold star with a solid smack to the groin. That's poker.
Lesson Number 5: Learn from your defeats
On another note, many players will find themselves blaming their opponent for their own bad plays and go on tilt as a result. I see this sometimes on this forum, with people blasting other players for outdrawing them when their opponent had the pot odds to do so. So some things you should ask yourself about each 'bad beat' you have should be:• Did I completely count how many outs my opponent had?
• Did I make it incorrect pot odds for him to call?
• Did I try to bluff out a calling station?
• Was this really a bad beat?
In any game, you will find that the best players get angry just like everyone else from time to time. The thing that I have noticed in conversations with a few top players however, is that they will always analyse their own play over and over, asking themselves "What did I do wrong?" or "How do I prevent that from happening again?". It's a different mentality than the average player, because the top players always seem to me put the blame to themselves first, rather than their opponent. The reason they do this is because you can't improve yourself if you're not willing to admit fault first.
In many cases, I for example find that in my opinion I did play correctly. But in those times where I played incorrectly, if I cannot work out that the problem lies with me, then I will never be able to mature as a poker player.