Tilting

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Tilting

Hi guys,

I'm an Micro/Low MTT reg currently facing a downswing. I have a pre-session routine, a study schedule and have already watched some mindset content. I've been playing for more than 3 years and but I have never faced a bad run like this.

This month I've played 20k hands already and I'm currently winning 2bb/100 when all-in adjusted BB is 8bb/100. Today my session started pretty well, then I simply busted out in 20 tournaments in a 90 minutes interval, facing a bunch of bad beats (graph). That really pissed me off, I broke a mouse and I stopped registering in tournaments, something I had never done before.

I'm really disappointed with me, cause after all this time I thought I was tilt-prove and had a descent mindset.

Should I move down stakes? I know I can beat my current stakes, I've been doing this for 2 years, but I'm afraid that I might deviate from my A-game at the moment. How about an 1-week break? I mean, I know I should accept variance and stick to plan or simply slow down and someway restore confidence? Do you guys have any trick to avoid tilt in this kind of scenario?

8 Comments

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Adam Raulli 7 years ago

Usually a “vacation” from the game can come in handy. Taking some time off, like a week or so, to clear your mind and take your focus off poker for a little can be refreshing. Seems like variance is getting the best of you at the moment so a little break would be healthy in my opinion. They can be beneficial for me at least. Hope this helps and best of luck!

Daniel Dvoress 6 years, 11 months ago

Moving down in stakes doesn't do anything to tackle your actual tilt issue, so that is not going to be a solution. You are better off taking a break. I would recommend Jared Tendler's books as a starting point for working on your mental game.

Chris Pimmer 6 years, 11 months ago

You certainly need to address the tilt issue in any way you can, there are a few underlying things, like you talk about results and 20k hands, yes 20k hands is already something, but very strong players can just by pure bad luck hit much longer dry spells, the fact that we don't read about those as much is either because they don't care about talking of super long stretches or a number of other factors. Often it also has to do with survivorship bias, meaning, we only hear of the great stories and even if we know about the bad stuff within it, we subconsciously ignore it.

Working on the mental game is absolutely crucial, because poker is a very unforgiving game, that will show you the best and the worst of you. 20k Hands is really very little, even 100k hands is not a ton, though admittedly it probably will already show certain things for most people.

A break is probably a good start and when you come back, I would work hard on my mental game, what is it that drives you to check results? What is it that drives you to mad tilt, are there underlying factors, are you too concerned with results and obsess over some adjusted BB/100 or what not...?
I don't mean this to sound rude, just putting out ideas on what to think about and then you write down the issues that you think you have and try to gather material on how to tackle them.
You also need to think about the things that you don't know to think about yet, you can do that for example with the help of others.

The only way to be free, is when you don't care about winning or losing anymore, but care about the process of your craft. If your attention is fully and completely on doing your best and thinking about each hand, situation and the complete strategy, there is no time left to think about winning or losing, you will be absorbed by thinking about the game.

Now, what I said there is easy to write and really not all that easy to do, but it is not just a way of thinking, it is a way of life. When you play a hand and you handread, go through all the actions, think about previous hands by this player and so on, during that time, zero time is devoted to thinking about a downswing or upswing or anything like that, you are completely lost in the game and the strategy. The result that you in theory are looking for, will then come as a by product.

Only when you always care about your wins or losses after a session or a couple times per day; week, you get absorbed by how you lost to bad luck and it gets harder to think about what you really should think about.

Sorry for the lengthy answer, just a couple thoughts

Solarius92 6 years, 11 months ago

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and also for your patience in Cristoph. There's also a video from Bradley Chalupski - Motivation, that covers essentially this, the fact that we should focus on the process instead of results.
I really admire you guys for being at this level; I admit it's not been easy to reshape my mindset in such way and I’m pretty sure that’s something that doesn’t come easily.

Chris Pimmer 6 years, 11 months ago

You are most welcome !
Maybe it does, don't put a barrier out before you even get started. Just put your attention to where it should be at every moment. Sure you will forget to do so at times or habit will have you not pay attention to what you should pay attention to, but you can rehearse this in anything in your life if you continually check or ask yourself, is my attention really where it should be. Ideally you should not ask yourself that, because when your attention is directed to where it should be, then you will not be aware of the time that is passing you by, because you are fully immersed in your craft. That's what we want !
Another way that I would suggest is, rehearse often during each day to fully pay attention to the thing that you are doing. This is something that, in the beginning can usually not be done for hours at a time, but you can set aside shorter periods to get good at this in small doses !
Say for example. You do a review, you focus solely on the review and non of the results. Or for the next 20k hands you don't even look at results at all, just doing reviews on a tab of pt4, that does not show any results.
Meditation is another way of learning to not focus on results, because meditation is all about the process of immersing yourself in it and not about the great outcome you will have.

  • Small doses
  • Not looking at any results
  • Attention to being in the moment over short periods of time, then rest and repeat

Maybe write down what the best version of you is like, what he might think and do in different situations. Then write down what differenntiates the two of you and stray away from any results, just facts of what you might think or do differently, then try to get at the root of why that is so, be slow with conclusions and continually ask yourself, is there maybe more? What if what I have found is wrong, why would it be wrong and where am I getting it wrong?

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