Hi Luigi: Zen Fish just posted a really good reply to a similar post by another member that might be helpful

http://www.runitonce.com/chatter/going-through-my-toughest-downswing-i-s/

I see these posts regularly and am experiencing something similar.....nothing severe but have times after a session where I actually question myself out loud "why do I play this f..ing game??" It's not fun being on a downswing and it starts to seem irrational to keep depositing I know. I almost never tilted before but you can only take so much

Thanks for the reply. Times are tough... almost unbearable. Played again today. Run in to toprange every single hand I played. Don't know if I can take this anymore.

I watched Jens vid and also a few earlier plo essential vids and when I played today tried to concentrate on quality opening hands IP folding in bad 3 bet situations and strangely enough picking good bluff spots. 3 bet a little more instead of being so passive and just calling behind IP. Short session but ended up a couple of BI which feels like a major victory given how things have been going. Because I play micros I tried to fold when tight players bet into me in situations where bluffing seemed unlikely. I think most of my bad decisions involve making large bad calls.

I dropped back a level too to get some confidence.

Also last night I played some NLHE cash as it's a game a know better and to break things up. I think PLO has improved my NLHE game. Saw a lot of the same regs from the PLO tables. It helped to break up the grind.

There were times where poker was a hell and I used to be a huge tilter myself too. But poker also teached me so many things you can't imagine. I think if your goal is just to win the money you should quit given there is less and less of it in poker and games are getting progressively worse.
So what is the point of playing?
For me it is about challenging myself and trying to become the best possible version of myself rather than just having the so called good life.
In a way at least for me there is the realisation that we are all going to die so I would like my life to be a story and on that part poker delivers. And yeah it might be easier for me because I have had success in the game and I am a very big winner at small stakes but man I remember in 2010 it took me like 4 failed attempts and 7-8? months o get to nl25 and I would be a rakeback whore there on boss media and the games were really good.

You see I was bad. I think I am still bad. But I get better and for the last couple of years I have been getting better and better. I travel around the world and make decent money. You ask how I did it? I just didn't quit and just tried to get little bit better every day. Imagine how good you could get if you improve just 0.5%/day. It would be massive.

One simple advice: One step at a time. Work on just one leak the rest is just noise. It is a journey and a process and it requires time.

Thanks for the post. I have also watched Jen's videos. It was really good.

I've had similar problems and I still have to a some degree. One thing I can say is that you should not think about your current situation or where you should be at poker and how much you should be winning or how much you should not have lost. All you have to do is have a simple plan, learn and play and have faith to the process. Forget everything else.

Here's a quote from Barack Obama, not sure if this is related to your current situation but this was an a-ha moment for me:

“When is the time you felt most broken?”

“I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ --- then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”

Hi,

This is a reminder post to myself in case I get carried away in the future.

I've been doing quite a bit of studying lately. Mostly by watching videos here in RIO and really implementing into my game what I've learnt. Also, I've reduced the number of tables that I play down to 4-6. This has made me realize what a horrendous multitabler I am, and that my autopilot is somewhere close to my C-game. I know the OP was originally more about the mental game, but IMO studying the game gives me confidence and thus helps the tilting problem.

So, notetoself:
Quality over quantity, make no excuses, remember what is important and KEEP LEARNING.

PS. Not giving up!

PPS. Graph of last 10k hands:

That's quite amazing Luigi......GG

Quick update.

Have been taking shots to higher limit and started running like aids...Tilting again. Story of my life. See you in six months when I start to run like a human again.

Every time I try to move up I get slammed .....funny thing is it doesn't seem like the players are that much better, I just run horribly too. I want to stay and ride it out but I also don't want to dig myself into a really deep hole. Guess I don't buy the "cost of learning the game" theory. Think I just have to plug away at the micros and keep learning then figure out how to adjust to slightly different strategy at higher stakes. If I have the patience to build a roll where i can win at least if I move up and lose it again it will be won money not out of pocket

Hi. I also have tilt problems but find myself to very near tiltlesness when I watched Tommy Angelo's series The eightfoldpath to poker enlightment on DC. Have you watched those series? But I kinda get it when I watched them for 2nd 3rd time. You should watch specially episode 2 (which is based for Goals&Targets) and episode 3 (Mindfullness).

In episode 2 he explains the difference between goals and target. Goals are something you set and reach it, and then you set yourself new goal. Targets are something you wanna hit over and over again (like throwing a little rock in a lake if you wanna them to jump on surface). And one comment which helped me a lot was Wayne's post in which he said: "going from mindset I wanna play 40k hands a month to a mindset "I wanna play this hand, this time as best as possible, saved himself a lot of emotional turmoil. Targets have no pass/future/fail but are all in present. Also in some other video he discussed that there is no losing or winning streak that it's our mind which creates an illusion that we lost/won some amount of money. If you look it at present time you'll see that you always have x - amount of money and you neither lost or win it :)

Episode 3 is all about the mindfulness. Mindfulness is intentional awareness. Training mindfulness you extract your emotional capacity and get mental thoughness. You'd never realized how many times you got angry without even realising it. Mindfulness is all about being aware of your emotions and actions at all times instead being mindlessnes or on autopilot your whole life.
There are some great videos on youtube like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz384dqU0XQ (a poker player who suffered from depression in life and tilt in poker) or this one which I'm watching right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TeWvf-nfpA
Also my friend told me about pokerplayer Boywonder (don't know if you heard of him, search him on twoplustwo). He's highstakes player and one of the first players that said how important mental game is. According to him mental game is 80%-90% of his success and 10% due to technical game and he's made like a million in poker or more... I don't know.

Being mindfull you'll need also to be aware which emotions are present when playing poker. Acording to Jared Tendler tilt is all about being angry. But what is anger? Anger is emotions that represent conflict. Conflict is between how you want poker to turn out (i wanna win 5bb/100 at NL200) and what actually happens (you run like a shit and lose 10 buyins in a session). But if you won 10bb/100 you'd never tilt because you wanted that :) So point is you tilt because you lost money. Jared Tendler cause it Hate-losing tilt. It's the same conflict if you were arguing with your brother for ex. what you'll be watching on TV. You want sport your brother movie. You'd be angry. But when you resolve problem (friend invited you to watch TV at his house) anger would be gone. Same with poker.

But if you say I wanna TRY play as best poker as I can you'd never be in conflict with yourself. I think major reason for tilt is MONEY!!! It's about how money in our society is important or about how YOU think is important. I also helped me a LOOOOT to watch some great documentaries about our society and economy like - Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. There's a great intro in this movie: Grandmother tought him to play monopoly, at first he was bad didn't know how to play. Then he got better and won more money. Then he figured out how to cheat, how to beat his grandmother. He was on top of the world, he tought he sucsseded, he was on top of the world. Then know what happened?.................................................................................................................................His grandmother told him to put it all back to the box :) It's really never yours what you gain.

So my advice to you would be NEVER have monetary goals and set yourself only process oriented goals like playing this hand well as well is I can play. Maybe you'll be still losing player but you won't tilt as much. And also search like crazy for mental game... I've been searching like crazy for two years now I found many interesting things. The problem was I didn't know where to search until I found Tommy Angelo videos (for 3rd time not for 1st time I watched it), boywonder and mindfulness.

Hope this helps. Sorry for long post and mediocre English :)

This is an excellent post, Luigi. From what I gathered reading it, just seems like variance is getting the best of you for the current time period. Variance can be terrific at times and absolutely depressing at times. Seems like you have a well-balanced life and treat poker as a profitable side income, which is great because it definitely can be. All you have to do is keep doing what you're doing, maybe practice some tilt strategies to prevent it from occurring, and the reward will eventually come. As said so many times before, the game of poker is for the long run, not the short. You know this. Variance will eventually balance itself out and the time you dedicate to playing/studying will pay off. I'll use my own current situation for an example. 3 weeks ago, playing live cash 1/2 NL and a little 2/5 NL, I ran $200 up to a little over $4,300 in a little over 2 weeks. I put together a 12 straight session win streak and felt unstoppable. To be perfectly honest, some sessions I wasn't playing my A-game but the cards were still falling in my favor. After those fun 2 weeks, the downswing started to happen due to my own actions really. I was playing against players who were much better than me, playing higher stakes when I really shouldn't have been and bringing my entire roll with me to the poker room and not setting limits for myself. Low and behold, after 1 week I busted myself and now back to square one. Now, even though this happened and it really felt awful when it did, I'm not giving up. It really has nothing to do with addiction or anything, even though I do like playing a lot, but I'm passionate about this game. I love it. I love it even when I lose, later on thinking about it that is, because it teaches me right from wrong in ways I find appealing. Anytime I do lose, I just wanna get better. When your passionate about anything, it takes a real, real lot of bad stuff to say your done because that fire inside you only burns stronger when you wanna accomplish something you care about doing. All and all, I believe both of us will be fine and any player who happens to read this, just realize that each day we're granted is a new beginning. You have 2 choices when you wake up: To be better or to be worse, and I'm pretty sure everyone here at RIO wants to be better. Take care man and best of luck on the felt.

Did a long and thorough pre-session warm-up including stretching, handhistory review and wathing some coaching videos. Then I put some relaxing music on and wrote down on notepad : -SPEWING PROHIBITED and started grinding: This was the first hand vs. an unknown: https://www.weaktight.com/h/555107b4a52511b871887503 I am a somekind of a fucked up masochist. That's all for todays update.

Haven`t read much except few posts but - try and just play simple poker for a while, go back to fundamentals.Fuck the pre-session routines and all that other bs, just relax and play only when you feel like it for a while, until you regain confidence and most importantly detach yourself from monetary goals, just try and play each hand the best way in a vacuum.

Simon wrote an excellent post, however i don`t agree with him about the mental game.In my opinion besides Tommy Angelo pretty much everything i read/watched related to poker mental game is quasi psychology bs.Poker is a time consuming game so the last thing you need is to consume your life with more poker related stuff.

More socializing, training (but choose sports you like/enjoy) > less boring poker related stuff.And when you do study/play try and make the experience more organic/enjoyable rather then forceful and boring.Basically go back to whatever it was that made poker interesting to you the first time you played.Its a great game and can be very rewarding but probably not if how many BB/100 youre up or down at the end of each session is all that matters.It has to be more then that.

I`m no expert on this stuff btw, just offering my 2 cents.

edit:

TILT FML

I'm almost ready to allow myself to start believing internet poker is officially dead.

Hi,

Maybe not give up. But maybe be done with poker for a while. Take a long break. If you really love it, you will get back to it.

If I look back at poker, it has been atleast 10 years now since I played my first hand and I loved it. Then I found the on-line poker world, and before I knew it, I was an insider.

What went from an hobby I truly loved became something I needed to do to reach my goals in poker. Playing atleast x ammount of hands a week, analyzing hands, watching videos all over the place and getting information overload like a motherfucker.

I had coaching from online poker friends who did really well, from coaches from DC and then.. Life simply took over.

Life took over by having a busy job I loved, living together with my girlfriend, gym, friends, .. simply having a life.

It's been a while now since I played. I think you can find a post from me on this forum from a year back, but it wouldnt suprise me if it's longer.

Today, I installed HEM2. I opened my poker account and played some hands at 5nl. And I loved it.

Now, poker felt more like playing a sudoko. A good way for me to get my mind of things from work with a true understanding why I love this game. It's fun. Nothing more, nothing less.

I have been like a Zen monk. One of my posts about TILT has been highly recommended on 2plus2. It's still in the stickies lol. But, truth be told, I have also had my crazy downswings where poker felt pretty depressing.

Still being stuck at 50nl, seeing all your poker friends moving higher and higher, wanting to proof myself I can do it and still hear about leaks from friends while fully believing its ALL running bad.. hurts.

But once you don't see that anymore it's time to step back. Once you are not enjoying it at all anymore, its time to move away, for a while. And, truth be told, it doesn't seem you are enjoying it that much :)

About poker videos. Perhaps for now, you know enough. How many balugwhale videos can you watch that will give you an severe edge on your current state of playing to beat the micros? Fold when they raise, don't bluff too much, play in position. You know what to do.

The thing is, to get your mental game solid, you need to get the clearness back. Clearness comes from taking a breath, and to see there is more to life than this game. Poker can be a big part of your life, sure, but for most of us, it shouldn't really be that big of a part. We can't be all the Phil Galfonds of this world. But wouldn't it be great to have found a game you can get back to, to enjoy after a long day of work. With friends, or on-line, with the possibility to earn a buck or two?

Looking back, I enjoyed poker the most when it was not about the money. When it became about moving up, winrates and all that, everything went to shit. But that might be me :)

GL :)

Need motivation? Forget coaches,
Watch this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp2qjshr-r4

5 years later. I managed to climb up beating midstakes, but I am still tilting like never before.

I have this unbelievable rage within that has always been there. It's like dragging some invisible burden that is eventually draining every strength that I have. I seriously wanna give up. I hate myself. I don't know what to do anymore. No one can understand me. This is the dark sife of me. I need help.