THE SIX PROBLEMS OF TILTING

Do you often get frustrated when things don’t go as you expected at the poker tables?

What do you do when you get angry? Do you bang the table? Shout? Practice breathing exercises?

Experiencing TILT is part of any Poker player’s journey, and I want us to discuss it. But first, let’s understand what it means to be TILTED:

“Tilting is defined as a strong negative emotional state elicited by elements of the poker game (e.g., “bad beats” or a prolonged “losing streak”) that is characterized by loss of control, and due to which the quality of decision-making in poker decreases"(Palomäki et al., 2014, p. 10).

Now let’s reformulate: Do you often find yourself in negative emotional states during your gaming sessions? Do you notice that besides these negative states, your gameplay also worsens?

As TILT is an emotional state, the following rules apply:

• We cannot avoid our emotions

• Denying or ignoring them worsens the symptoms

• Understanding how our emotions work is a fundamental step to managing them

Remember these three keywords: Avoid, Deny, and Manage. Why? Today it is much more common to avoid emotional states, which allows us to deny them and thus not manage them, leading us to a dead end where we do not resolve our problems and, in many cases, make them worse.

In the past, talking about emotions or how we felt generated much fear. Being vulnerable was not an option because it was believed that showing vulnerability meant being weak.

Fortunately, this has changed significantly over the past few years, and it is now socially accepted and seen as necessary to talk about our feelings for good mental health.

I know that many of you may still feel some resistance to opening up about these issues or feel vulnerable, so at the end of this blog, I will share an exercise that may be useful as a first step to learning about your emotions. The truth is, the less we know about our emotions, the more work we need to do on them.

Think about it this way: Is it possible for you to read another player in Poker? Well, if reading other players within the game is extremely important, imagine how crucial it is to be able to read yourself. Understand why certain emotions are triggered and how you can manage them.

I know that many of you are looking for a fast solution to deal with TILT, but no matter what option you choose, you will eventually come to realize the following:

• You need to learn to understand yourself

• We have to learn to deal with emotions we don’t like

• Learning to manage our emotions requires practice and time

And what does it mean to learn to deal with emotions we don’t like? Well, let’s understand that not all emotions make us feel comfortable; in fact, many cause discomfort. TILT is one of them. Dealing with this discomfort is precisely what we need to do, not avoid it or deny it.

Now let’s talk a bit about the main problems TILT has on our game:

1-Impoverishment in Decision Making

As we’ve discussed in other blogs, emotions affect our perception of reality. This is reinforced by the idea that emotions are activated when something critical to our well-being triggers them. Consider that our mind has finite resources and must decide where to allocate them. When we are in a state of calm and tranquility, it is easier for our minds to know where to allocate these resources. Now, when an emotion is triggered, it acts like a firefighter’s siren, and the more intense the emotion, the more resources are allocated to it. So what happens? Our mind starts to run out of resources for rational decision-making as it has to allocate them to emotional decision-making. Later, we will see that we can make decisions while experiencing some emotional states, but this requires work and self-awareness.

2-Impoverishment in Motivation

Motivation is a phenomenon that we need to nourish. And when we TILT, we can end up doing just the opposite. While many can use TILT to work harder to improve their game, many others face the fact of not wanting to deal with emotional discomfort, or they feel frustrated because they don’t see progress or good results in their game. That’s when our motivations can change and we start to make much more impulsive decisions to “recover what we lost” or because we are sure that “we can win the next tournament”. We start to tunnel vision and want to play more until we tire out and start to feel a very strong rejection of playing Poker. We lose the ability to manage what is happening to us. If you feel that you are in this situation, it’s an important time for a STOP. Pause, give ourselves time to recover, and start again by working in your performance mindset.

3-Increased focus on Result Mindset

A heavily discussed topic in Poker is MINDSET. Well, there are two mindsets we can develop as competitors: the result mindset and the performance mindset. More result-oriented people tend to experience more emotional swings because their expectations and energies are focused on a variable that does not 100% depend on them. That’s right, the more we lose and the angrier we get, the more obsessed we become with winning. This distracts us from working on improving our most important weapon: PERFORMANCE. What will guarantee good results in the future is the consistency of your performance. This is a topic that comes up a lot in sessions with my players: Poker is fair in the long run. In the short term, it can not only be unfair but also cause a lot of frustration. That’s why our most important weapon is our performance, and that’s what we should work on when managing our TILT. The more focus and attention we put on what depends 100% on us, the more we will feed a performance mindset.

4-Activation of maladaptive coping mechanisms

Whenever we experience emotions that cause discomfort, we seek a strategy to soothe them. If the strategy is healthy, we have an adaptive coping mechanism; if it’s not healthy, we have a maladaptive coping mechanism. If, after a gaming session, when TILTED, instead of seeking a strategy to calm down and go to rest, we start playing video games, watching YouTube, or Netflix, or distracting ourselves with any activity that pleasures in a very short period, then we are probably facing a maladaptive coping mechanism. And this is extremely relevant because we generally execute strategies that we have internalized. Another example could be if after a session we smoke a marijuana cigarette or consume alcohol, this will not improve the situation either. In particular, these two substances can worsen it quite a lot because if we do it just before sleeping, our sleep quality will be affected and the next day, being poorly rested, our TILT will be worse. Here we have a great opportunity to get to know ourselves: What do we do when we experience emotions that cause discomfort? Or what do we do to avoid that discomfort?

5-Negative Performance

Well, we’ve mentioned bad decision-making, drops in motivation levels, result mindset, and behaviors that distract us and solve nothing. Who is the main one affected? Well, the player's well-being. Next, the second one to be affected is PERFORMANCE, and it may be on a large scale. In general, when people experience TILT, our PERFORMANCE takes a back seat. And if we have a result mindset, it’s even worse. With low motivation, because things aren’t going our way, we also lower our study levels and stop paying attention to what we need. We only think about wanting to win and the frustration of not being able to achieve it. Earlier I mentioned the STOP. Yes, often we need to stop and replan, set some performance objectives and build from less to more.

6-Negative Impact outside the Tables

So far we have talked about what happens when we play. But frequent episodes of TILT can also affect our life outside the tables. The people we live with can be affected by our frequent bouts of RAGE.

Well, obviously, after mentioning all these problems, what we want to read is how to solve them, right?

Yes, I’m going to bring a blog about tools, but before that, I want to propose a challenge.

The challenge is to create awareness about what happens to us. Three conditions are important to meet to work on TILT:

• Awareness

• Accept the emotion

• Willing to do better

There’s something important I want to emphasize here. Not everyone may want to change. Maybe they are satisfied with the life they have and don’t wish to make any changes to it. And that’s perfectly fine. It’s a question everyone should ask themselves: am I willing to make the necessary effort to change? That’s what “Willing to do better” is all about. It’s also true that if the answer is NO, we have to accept the consequences of that. This is something I always discuss in my sessions. It doesn’t matter what you want; what matters is that you are honest with yourself and act accordingly.

Well, in case you want to work on your TILT, I want to leave you with a tool to start using when you experience an episode. Ideally, we want to complete it as soon as we experience the episode, but if we don’t manage that, let’s try to do it as soon as possible.

The idea of this exercise is the first tool that I’m going to share in the TILT TOOLS blog, is that we work on it conscientiously and take the job of UNDERSTANDING ourselves. In the same way, you do a hand review, this exercise will serve to do a self-review.

In the titles of each column, you will be able to find the comments to know what to complete in each space. Click here.

Thank you very much for sharing your time with me! See you in the next blog.