Don’t Tilt
June 26, 2008 – 12:47 amCrazy things always happen at the poker table. Sometimes you work for hours to get the right situation to cash in on your opponents mistakes. Now you’ve got him, or do you?
You’re sitting with pocket eights and a very loose aggressive player has just raised the pot in front of you. You call, and the flop comes A83. He fires out a pot-sized bet, so you just call.
The turn is a 5. He bets the pot again. You re-raise, and put him all in. He calls instantly and turns over A4. When a 2 hits the river, you are left pulling your hair out.
It’s after hands like these that we see what we are really made of. Do we keep our cool? Or, is it time to get crazy.
The classic follow up is getting a good, but not great, hand and overplaying it. Like, you have AJ on an A94 board, against a super tight player. He bets the flop, and you go all in, only to get called by his AA, and find yourself drawing dead. Yo top it off, you knew better.
The key is to avoid this knee jerk reaction to the bad beat you took. The bad beat was unavoidable, nothing you could do about it. We all tend to try to quickly get these chips back. We force the action. This is tilting.
If you find yourself steaming after a bad beat, be smart. Stop playing for a bit. Get away from the table for a few minutes. Then come back stronger than ever.
Eventually, you need to become numb to these events. If you played the situation correctly, you did all you could. The bad beats and lucky wins will even themselves out over time. When they do, the best players will have the money.
When you are getting unlucky, the statistics are skewed against you. This creates an even tougher environment to avoid tilting. Every play you make starts to feel hopeless. Your opponents make bad plays, and beat you anyway.
Your good hands run into better ones. Your opponents make bad calls, and hit their draws. Then, you finally get all you chips in with AA versus 99, only to see two nines hit the flop.
It starts to feel rigged. If you play online, you really know what I mean. The numbers will even out over time. This has to be true. Stop playing if you don’t agree with this statement.
To profit at the tables, you need to play good poker when things are going bad. Things will go bad. If you don’t play well when they are, you give away your profits. Don’t tilt, stay cool and keep your bank roll growing.
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