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Different Shades Of Tilt
By Annie Duke
Recently a player approached me and asked if I had any explanation for his dismal losing streak. He’s generally a winning player at relatively high limits on the internet, but for two weeks, he said, he had done nothing but lose. I asked if he was tilting and thereby creating a higher likelihood of booking a loss – generally my first explanation for an otherwise winning player losing consistently all of a sudden. He was emphatic that he was not. He insisted that he wasn’t playing looser or more wildly; on the contrary, he vehemently asserted that since he’d started losing, he had tightened up considerably. He was adamant that he was not on tilt.
But what does tilting really mean? If you ask 100 people, 99 of them will tell you that tilting is when you get emotionally upset and start betting wildly at the table, playing almost every hand, raising like a maniac. But this is only one form of tilting. There is a far more insidious kind and that is when you play as if you are going to lose every hand.
Tilting merely means that the decisions you make at the poker table are affected by your emotional state. For most people, this means taking their anger or frustration out on their chips, and playing almost any hand that comes their way. But some players express their tilt by playing solely to minimize losses. When things are going badly, these players decide that they are obviously going to lose every hand. They get it into their head that even if they have aces they will lose. So these players will play to save bets rather than to win pots.
Why is this so bad? Well, poker is about winning pots, not saving bets. When you play to save a bet, you are often costing yourself whole pots, which is never a good decision for your bankroll or results. As an example, let’s say you have a hand like J-10o in a $10/$20 Hold’em game. You raise before the flop from the button and the big blind calls. The board comes K.10.3. and your opponent checks to you. You bet and are called. The turn is the 9. and, again, your opponent checks, you bet, and get called. Now for the river. There is $105 in the pot. The river is the A., a terrible card for your hand. Your opponent checks to the A.K.T.9.3. board. On a winning streak, you would bet here, trying to get your opponent to fold a bad king or better ten. And let’s say that 60% of the time your opponent will fold these two hands and you will win the pot with the worst hand. That means that 40% of the time you lose the $20 bet, but 60% of the time you win the $105. Most players make the correct assumption that, if the A. made your opponent’s hand here, he or she would bet to get paid off.
But when on a huge losing streak, some players will be much more likely to check here. Their thinking has now become completely negative. “Wow,” they think, “that was a terrible card. Why can’t I ever get a blank on the river? Why does it have to be the worst card in the deck? Obviously I just got beat, so I better check here and at least save my $20.”
But in trying to save $20, that player is costing himself a whole pot. Poker is not about making bet-saving decisions so much as it is about making decisions that pick up whole pots. In balancing the two, pot decisions always win. Of course, I am simplifying here, but the basic idea should be clear.
Another example of how playing to save bets can cost you whole pots is to do with the concept of hand protection. Protecting your hand is one of the key concepts in poker. When you hold a hand that’s vulnerable to the turn or river card, it’s extremely important to raise and protect your hand. Raising knocks out opponents who might otherwise draw out on you and, even if they call, gives them a much worse mathematical price to draw.
Let’s say you have a hand like A.Q. and the board is Q.6.5.. An opponent bets into you and there are two players left to act behind you. The correct play here is to raise and try to knock out straight draws or underpairs and make those hands pay more to draw out on you. For example, let’s say an opponent behind you has a 9-8o. If you raise, this hand will fold almost 100% of the time. If the hand does call, he is now paying twice the price to hit his gutshot. The same with a hand like AKo. Even a hand that will almost surely call, such as a flush draw, is mathematically punished by the raise. Raising to increase the likelihood of locking a pot up with a hand that is vulnerable is generally a much better strategy than slowplaying.
When some players are on a losing streak, they will often stop raising in situations like this. Their thinking goes: “Well, I have top pair, but I just know a king or a heart or some other awful card is going to hit on the turn and someone is going to suck out on me; so I am going to just call and wait to see what hits on the turn or the river to screw me.” The irony is that by just calling to try to save money you have just created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you drastically increase the likelihood of being sucked out on. Now when your opponent hits that gutshot seven to complete his straight, you can’t really complain about the bad beat; since you, in essence, created the bad beat by giving him a mathematically favorable call instead of raising him out of the pot. Anytime you make your opponents pay more to draw, the better for you.
When I asked my friend who insisted he wasn’t tilting if any of this applied to him, he realized that this was exactly what he was doing. He had stopped protecting his hands. He had stopped making those pot-winning bets on the river with marginal hands. He had stopped pushing his mathematical edge. He was playing as if he were going to lose every pot, so he was playing each pot to minimize his loss on the hand rather than to maximize his earn.
I just heard that he has been back to his winning ways again, having just come off a two-week $40k winning streak. I’m glad that I might have played a small part in his return to form by pointing out the non-obvious way he was tilting. The maniacal form of tilting is so easy to spot and then control. The insidious, playing-like-you-are-going-to-lose variety is so much more difficult to stop. Your friends could watch you all night and not even see it, so it is much harder to fix. Make sure to consider this more subtle explanation of your losing streak whenever you’re running bad. Tilting comes in many flavors. Make sure you consider them all.
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