These days when everybody seems to be playing decent poker then other areas of the game elevate in importance. One such area is emotional control and there are various names for this of which the main one is called “tilt”. This term has come into common usage in recent years with the influx of new players coming into the game of poker. But often especially in no-limit Texas Hold em cash games you can be playing break even poker for long periods of time until someone loses control to a certain extent. Many people think that “tilt” is an extreme emotion.
It can be but one thing that needs to be pointed out is that there are all different versions of tilt with many different levels. If you have failed to make your draw on three successive hands and you snap call with bad odds in a situation that is clearly well into –EV territory then you have suffered a very minor version of tilt. This may only last for one hand but you have tilted all the same. These days when players multi-table then they are more at risk from emotional instability! If you are playing live poker then tilt is more easily managed because other players can see you and there is always a level of embarrassment attached to it when your opponents can physically see you.
But online poker is a different matter and you have no one to stop you from screaming and shouting or as I have observed several times, actually committing damage to your computer equipment. I think that there is one very important reason why players tilt and it is because novice and even experienced players for that matter simply cannot accept or are aware of the level of variance within the game. This leads players to believe in their own mind that their skill advantage is more crushing than it actually is. So they simply expect too much from the game and when what they expect fails to happen then they struggle to accept it.
I often feel that keeping emotional control is perhaps the biggest weapon that a player can have in their arsenal in the modern online poker game. But tilt can be very destructive in online poker because hands come so thick and fast. If you are playing live and you tilt for thirty minutes then you may see ten hands in that time. If you are playing ten tables online and you tilt for that same thirty minutes then you may see as many as 400-500 hands in that time. This is why emotional control is so important online than it is live and because many players struggle with this side of the game then this is a huge reason why many players struggle with poker full stop when they play online. Too many players concentrate with their technical side when they should be concentrating on their mental side.
Tags: Online Poker, Poker