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Increasing Your Edge by Avoiding Tilt


So you’ve got money in your poker account. You can’t wait to dive into the fish pond and start making some cash- you’ve read up on starting hands, and you know your pot odds. This is all fine and good, to be sure. You have an edge over enough players in the pool to scrape a few bucks profit, in the long run. But truth be told, anybody can learn odds.  In order to rise above the pack of grinders squeezing minimum profits, in cash games or tournaments, you need to know more than just math and common sense. You need to know yourself. One often overlooked (but absolutely critical) part of becoming a successful, profitable poker player is learning to condition your mind to the harsh nature of the game.

Here’s a situation I’m sure you know all too well- you flop the nut straight. Rainbow board. You want to extract maximum value from your opponent, so you throw a weak bet out- about half-pot, hoping for a raise. You get your raise, and you push all-in. Your opponent calls, and turns over top pair, suited in his hand. You feel ecstatic, your blood pumping and head thumping, knowing you’re a huge favourite to win this pot. The turn comes in your opponent’s suit. That’s okay, you’re still a favourite, there’s no way the river could come suited too, right?

Wrong.

The river does comes suited, and your opponent takes down the pot with his runner-runner flush. Your feeling of confidence and elation subside as you start to feel your blood boiling. It’s true, that the above situation is the essence of a bad beat- most players would experience madness beyond description being on the losing end of it. But, in order to make the profits we want in this game, we can’t act as most players do. We can never let hands like this bother us, because they do happen. Just because you were a 92% favourite to win the hand on the flop does not mean the other 8% of the time will never pan out for your opponent. You will lose with your straight 8% of the time, and you need to be able to deal with it. Your money was in ahead, and for that you should be glad.

A mediocre player in this situation will whine, complain and flood the chat with all sorts of mundane ramblings after these sorts of hands. He will remember it, and it will continue to affect his play for longer than he even realizes- sometimes for many sessions to come. He will start to call down lighter, and show up with worse hands. He will start to stack off with hands he never would have previously dreamed of even playing preflop, the thought process being that if other players can suck out on him, he must be due for a lucky streak himself. This kind of thinking is what we call this being ‘on tilt,’ and the dividing line between marginal winners and true professionals is how well it can be controlled.

Coming to terms with the fact that poker is simply a numbers game is essential to your success. The sooner you realize that suckouts and bad beats happen (mathematically, they are supposed to) the sooner you will be able to play detached from emotion, and based on skill alone. Great players always remember the cards their opponents play in certain situations, not the emotions they felt when a certain result came to fruition at the end of a hand. This is how they maintain their edge- they play with skill all the time, as opposed to break-even grinders, who often let their emotions get the better of their playing prowess.