I always think that tilt can be caused by numerous different things. Firstly one of the main reasons players tilt is that they have probably not travelled far enough down the evolutionary road to true poker expertise and are expecting their skill to dominate too much. This is a problem with poker that simply does not exist in certain games like Chess for example. In that game then the better player nearly always wins and the substantially better play always wins. There are other games and sports as well where far superior competitors nearly always win. One such game is Tennis and if Roger Federer were to play someone ranked 200 in the world then it would be a major shock if Federer lost this game.
However life isn’t like that in poker and the very best player in the world (if it is possible to identify such a player) would not be able to beat a novice all the time let alone someone who was fairly good. Backgammon is another game similar to poker where vastly inferior players can win quite often. When you play a game of backgammon then this is a bit like playing a pot in poker. If your opponent is throwing lucky dice then they will beat you irrespective of the skill level. Likewise in poker when your opponent is hitting flops or getting dealt big hands.
There is nothing that even the best poker players in the world can do if their opponents are running good! They just try to bunker down and ride out the storm losing the absolute minimum. When players start off down the road of playing poker then the ones who enjoy the game begin to start to study it by reading books and maybe joining coaching sites and so forth. The danger comes when these players skill and knowledge levels increases to such a level that they become super confident in their ability. They almost have a sense of superiority over everyone else but the dangerous part of all of this is that they are not far enough down the poker evolutionary road to realise that skill and ability is marginal in poker.
In fact it is so marginal that many people believe that games like poker and backgammon are entirely luck based. This isn’t true of course but the fact remains that knowledgeable players or players who have a lot of knowledge about the game still believe that their advantage is bigger than it really is in any one session. This goes to show that “understanding poker” goes far deeper than just being able to play poker hands well and goes into areas like accepting and truly understanding the variance within the game and being at one with it. Until you can accept that no matter how good you are that in any one hand or session that you are basically almost tossing a coin for whether or not you win or lose then you will never be at one with the game.
If we both entered a contest where we flipped coins for money and I paid you $1 every time I lost the coin toss and you paid me $1.50 every time you lost then I would make money tossing coins and if we did this often enough and you were stupid enough to continue then I could toss coins for a living. However despite this I would still lose 50% of the time and that is still a very high percentage of losses. In fact it is so high that I would go on many horrendous losing runs only having a win percentage of 50%. So despite the fact that I have a huge advantage in this coin flip example then I am still losing 50% of the time that I play and losing runs simply cannot be avoided. Poker is a lot like that, you may be good and you may know the game and be better than your opponents but you are still essentially flipping coins but doing so with +EV.
Tags: online poker strategy, Poker, poker strategy