How to prevent or reduce tilt

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How to prevent or reduce tilt

Hi

I've been playing poker on and off for a few years and never managed to get out of the micro stakes mainly due to tilt. What normally happens is I play well, understand where I am and where the villain is in hands and have a winning session. Then I make a bad call or get rivered with a cooler, and just can't handle the inevitable losses which happen in poker. Then either stop playing or start gambling loads sometimes with my whole roll at highrer stakes, not to win the money back, but just because I don't care about playing well anymore. I really think if I could always play with a cool head then I could at least beat the micros long term if not the low stakes as well. Does anyone else have this problem and can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks

7 Comments

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cold7betfold 12 years ago
Think about it this way: "The whole year is just one big session." So try not to think about daily results. And it also is important not to think about how much you lost, but to try to play any hand as good as possible.
Also try to improve on a daily basis, so you can easily fix your leaks. (Mental leaks as well)
You only find out how good you really are, if everything goes wrong and you still keep on going and keep on improving.
Tough times never last, tough people will.
thedoors 12 years ago
use a stop loss
dont play more than 2 hours
dont play more than 6 tables
use green tea:=)
use sport
dont look at win or lose during session
only look ev winnings post session
:=)
Playing for Pennies 12 years ago
I had this same problem for a while too. I found that exercising and getting good sleep to be a good remedy. Seriously. Good sleep. The kind of good sleep where "you wake up early in the morning without an alarm clock because you went to bed at 8:30pm" kind of good sleep.
mike 12 years ago
we all deal with this to some degree but you will never be a successful poker player unless you get some handle on your tilt. there is no way around this fact so you have to ask yourself how important is this to you?

all the tips above are good but you also need to figure out what works for you. i really like the Elements of Poker and i would suggest you pick it up, read it, and start working on your mental game
WM2K 12 years ago
Unfortunately tilt isnt something that there is a quick and easy solution to it. We all tilt and get frustrated for different reasons and it varies due to personality as well as elements in your life that put different pressures on you.

I agree with lots of the solutions everyone here has offered. Sleep and exercise are extremely important and I d like to add eating well. You need a good engine that s well fueled and running smoothly. Snacking on healthy sugary things helps too (apples FTW!). Also stoplosses and session times are reasonable. I ve read that even Phil Ivey keeps a strict stoploss so even some of the best of the best use that strategy.

Elements of Poker is a nice read and Tommy Angelo is certainly entertaining. However for poker tilt books I don t think you can beat Mental Game of Poker by Tendler. He recommends a lot of journal keeping which is very useful for a few reasons. First after a rough session and your head is steaming writing everything down and spewing onto the page helps calm you for some reason. Second after your calmed you now have a record of what you where thinking/feeling at the time and now you can get a better idea of what the hell what bugging you so bad. Then you can start to do something about it. It ll take some work but issues should be able to be resolved eventually.
Aleksandra ZenFish 12 years ago
One of the things that helped me is watching highstakes poker on tilt or stars
And thing that we get upset on ~ like loosing preflop 80 percent favorite to crap, losing 100 percent hand on flop to donkey runnerrunner or to someone hitting 4 outs in hige pots.....all the things we get annoyance with including i could have played this better etc..happens there as well but to much higher extent and you see best poker players lose great play and cards in enormous pots and keep playing, and to add up they happe to lose hugepot after pot over and over again to point its painful even to watch, yet they dont tilt whinne and blame badluck rigged site
Its normal not to be happy with bad runs but you got to accept that as element of poker game that you love and play
Its all same for all of us and very bad runs seeing happening to best of players will maybe help you make personal peace that its not your FAULT nor site fault nor fortune fault but order of things, so no need for anger towards urself or cards
On other hand dont mix this with not analysing your overroll general play and miss to see your mistakes and correct them, you cant blame cards for that either but time for analyse is away from table and after session

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