Tilt..

by Excession

1. Discipline leaks (continued)

B) PT and Going on Tilt (or re-living those disaster sessions as therapy)

Tilt is basically any scenario where you make a sub-optimum decision due to emotion clouding your reasoning processes.

The most common manifestation of tilt is over-aggression after a bad beat. We've all seen it (and done it). You get sucked out on the river when you got your money in 4:1 ahead. You reload. Next hand the fish who sucked you out puts in a minimum raise, you look down to see JJ or whatever, and push it all-in. This time he has KK, he calls and before you know it you are down another buy-in.

This actually isn't too hard to spot and control. If I lose my entire stack (or virtually my entire stack) due to a bad beat, I tend not to reload if I feel the slightest bit angry or upset (whether at myself, the other player or the Poker Gods). Sometimes I'm so calm (perhaps I'm already five buy-ins up on my other tables) that it's not an issue. But mostly it is an issue and I find it a good time to take a break.

These are online games. There are plenty other tables and plenty of games around 24/7. So I go off and do some exercise or slaughter some Gauls in Rome Total War for half an hour, browse the web or watch some TV until my Zen-like state of calm returns (personally I recommend the exercise or the Gaul-slaughter though – nothing like working pent-up aggression out of your system J )

Players on these sorts of ‘maniac’ tilts are easy to spot at your table and usually pretty easy to take money off when you do hit a hand (especially if you are in the hand along with the tilter’s ‘target’)
The other point about this is that if you do reload and get a monster hand I would push it all in pre-flop – you are ‘faking’ tilt and so much more likely to get a caller.

But there are other more subtle tilts to watch out for. Here are a few:

You are in a hole (down money in the session) and trying too hard to make things happen.
You are up big and have loosened up pre-flop a lot because flops are ‘so cheap’.

You are 'hunting' one bad player (whether because you know he is bad or because he has just lucked out on you) – what happens here is that you are far too overaggressive in any pots he is in (and either he or more likely another player nails you badly).

You are too keen to play when you first sit down (especially on tables where you don't have solid reads).

You are too loose in your final round (after you have clicked the auto-post blinds button and are waiting for the BB to rotate back to you).

You ‘know’ you are the best player on the table but the ‘fish’ just keep escaping, so you try to push it.

You have tried to dominate a maniac and come out second best – now your confidence is shot and you have mutated into ‘Weak-Tight Man’ with just no idea of where you stand in hands…

You are uncomfortable for any reason (tired, short of time, had a row with your partner, getting frustrated by having your limps raised pre-flop, just seeing no cards of any value, getting flamed in table talk etc.)

People ask when should you get up and leave a table. For me the number one answer is ‘when you feel uncomfortable’. The reason doesn’t matter. This is online Ring – in an SnG or MTT you are stuck with the table you are at. In online Ring you can just shift to another one or take a 30 min break at any time – and if you are Party or UB you’re not even losing out on info as you can data mine some new tables while you are away.

How do we use PT to spot tilt?

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sessions are often fairly short (say a couple of hundred hands) and in perfectly normal non-tilt play I can win or lose money and have a wide range of stats. 40% Vp$iP might be a good indicator of tilt, or it might just mean that I’ve had a good rush of starting hands or that I have found myself on a particularly passive table.

Losing a lot of money is more likely to put me on tilt, but you can also lose some of your profit when overconfident and up big – and $10 lost when you are +$150 up counts just as much as $10 lost when you are $20 down in the long run.

Nevertheless – good early indicators of the most common forms of tilt are likely to be:

Losing Sessions
High Vp$iP
High PFR%
Extreme Post Flop Aggression (‘PFA’)
High WtSD% (as in ‘I can’t believe he has me beat again!’)
Extremely Low WtSD% (weak-tight?)

The basic session info screen shows money won and lost at each table and Vp$iP, but not PFR%, PFA or WtSD%.

Let’s look at some of my session results for the last few week on some $50 and $100 NL tables:


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Now let’s have a closer look at the stats for 2 tables – Shiraz (-$24.70) & Sepulvada (+122.15) and see if we can spot any ‘tilty’ behaviour.

Prime suspect must be Shiraz (-102 PTBB/100 is never a sign of a fun time and it came at the end of a long winning streak) so let’s see what happened:

double click on that session (to filter out all other hands) and
click the general info tab..then
click twice on the ‘Net’ tab to bring up the biggest losing hands in order..


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Ugly - $46 lost with 96o in the blinds and for some unknown reason I also managed to lose $8.50 when not in a blind with K6s !!

ViP$iP of 37.5% (my usual is about 25%) and PFR% or 12.50% (usual about 9%). WtSD% is 40% (normal is 25%). These stats, and the fact that I was playing junk like K^s outside the blinds, look pretty suspicious to me.

Let’s pop the more details tab to check PFA:


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Not much to see there except a rather odd falling off of aggression at the turn with it rising again on the river. Normally my PFA starts at about 3-4 on the flop and falls to between 1.5-2 for the other streets. Turn aggression of .3 is passive and it either indicates I’m in hands where I don’t know where I stand or I’m getting tricky and slowplaying – neither are very good usually (and if it was slowplay it didn’t work too well obviously).

All the signs are there – it looks like tilt to me. Now we have to move to the replayer and re-live the horror. This is actually a good thing to do but I wouldn’t recommend doing it straight after a big losing session whilst you are still steaming. You need a clear head to benefit the most.

Try putting an evening aside at the end of each week –after booking your results for that week – to analyse your play. That way the lessons will sink in. I reckon if you really want to improve you should be prepared to spent at least one day/week (or about 20% of your time) analyzing your play and reading forums/books etc (I can thoroughly recommend 2+2’s Harrington on Hold Em by the way – by some margin the best NL book I have ever read – it’s so good that even though it’s an MTT and SnG book it is still worth getting even if you only play Ring).

OK back to the replayer. The replayer is an overlooked tool in PT. In the end stats give you only the big picture – to analyse particular sessions or actual play of problems hands there is no substitute for the replayer.


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So let’s see the nightmare…what happens is that I am big stack ($66) in the 50c BB. One player in MP buys in for 50c. The small blind ($45 stack) completes. Everyone else folds. 3 of us see flop.
The flop is 8,7,5 rainbow. I just flopped the nut straight.
SB checks to me. The SB is a Tight Passive Aggressive player. I have 276 hands logged with him with an aggression rating on the flop of 10.00! At this stage he was a small loser in my DB. He is so aggressive I can’t quite understand why he checked unless he was looking to check raise. I can’t believe he won’t bet out the turn though..obviously MP is brand new and I have no read on him. I check hoping MP will bet – he doesn’t though (as you can see he is on a straight draw) and we see turn.

Turn is 2h putting two hearts on the board. I still have the nuts. SB bets the pot. I flat call (he is plenty aggressive to make lots of money off on end). MP folds (boo!)

River is 6c – no flush possible now. I lose to T9 but nothing else. SB bets the pot. I re-raise by the same amount hoping that he has to call. He re-raises all in for another $44.

Now I have the decision of whether he is bluffing, has something like a set or 2 pair, has a nine or whether he really has T9. To be honest I didn’t spend enough time thinking about this – I figured him probably for a nine but not the T9 – I was wrong and lost the $92 pot.

This was bad play on my part but not necessarily a sign of overall tilt. Obviously I got caught by the failure to release what was (on the last street) the nuts (a bit like folks who can’t let go of AA post-flop), but it doesn’t mean I was tilting before or after that hand.

The other thing to note is that apart from this hand I made decent money in this session – but that doesn’t mean I was playing well – those stats looked very dodgy as did that $8.50 loss with K8s… let’s have look at that now..


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Not quite as bad as I feared but still pretty lousy. I called one off the button 7 handed with K6s – I flopped top pair and he flopped 2nd pair top kicker. He bet 50c (I probably put him on the flush draw – I raised $3 to find out whether it was a token bluff and enough to make the flush draw an error). He flat called. Fearing a K with better kicker (any kicker will beat mine) I check down the turn. The river ace is the bad beats friend and I’m sucker enough to call down his $5 bet.

So that’s two sucker river calls this session. Had I taken a calling station pill?

Let’s look at the other significant loss – the $8 in that 88 hand …


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Ok. Although he is a bit short-stacked, calling the pre-flop raise from a Loose Aggressive Aggressive player is fine. If I hit a set he is going to get busted most likely.

Another 50c bet –this time it’sa sucker punch and I get drawn in. Quite what I think I’m doing raising $5 with 88 (worse than bottom pair with a paint board) is anyone’s guess – he flat calls, a K drops on the turn and I fold when he bets out $9. He shows his full house.

Another useful way of analyzing a session is to see where the hands fit in a session…

Go to ‘Game Notes’ window (Shiraz is still the only table selected) – pull the ‘Game#’ column wide enough so you can see the number, then click on the column heading to show the hands in the order you played them..


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At least there is no insta-tilt here – it’s 8 hands before I get involved in a pot to the tune of more than 50c…

I did play (and win) a big hand right after the $8 loss, but checking it I find it was my AQ that flopped Axx and won out over a pair of sevens so that’s OK.

Overall I think I was suffering from delusions of grandeur after a good winning streak of other tables. I was twitchy and impatient, feeling I had the ‘right’ to win and probably was tilting. The next few sessions didn’t go well for me…the default listing has the most recent sessions at the top of the table, so you read it from the bottom up to see a chronology....


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If I’d heeded the warning signs of tilt on Shiraz early rather than just putting it down to the 96o flopped nut hand, I might have stopped my tilt and cut my losses at $24. Instead I went on to drop another $90 over the next 6 tables..

Finally let’s see if we can spot any incipient warning signs in the earlier +$122 win table session:


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Vp$iP 28%, PFR 14%, WtSD% 25% - well a higher than normal PFR but not too outlandish – I might just be getting good quality hands..

Let’s quickly check the big winners:


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OK nothing surprising there. With 2x AA in 50 hands (and both out of the blinds) I should make some money.

Finally let’s check PFA:


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Certainly not overaggressive there (a bit passive if anything).

Let’s call that last one a negative tilt check and sign off until Part 5.1C – Table Selection.

--excession
02/04/05

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