Why tilting ain't money & 3 misses and you're out

if you play the game for a while and you pay attention to what's going on in the game instead of multi tasking watching tv, listening to music and chatting with your friends on IM, you might notice that sometimes people starts to play aggressively with very weird hands. A guy in first position raise, the second guy reraise, the third guy shove all in and the first guy insta call with KK or AA. And what does the other guy have, something weak or funny, and the range varies.

Now if you think that xmas have come early, you might be right. Is this guy some sort of a billionaire doing micro charity at the table or is he just really bad? Or, could it be that this guy is just tilting?

Why we tilt?
It could be due to many reasons, you could be having a bad day, like the song, you could be having a bad breakup, or maybe you just shove all in with AA vs villain's KK and somehow he manage to crack you aces. Shit happens, that's normal. But playing poker when you're not right in the head for whatever reason is plain dumb. Sure you might think, if i played some hands won some stacks against some fishes, that would make things better. Guess what, it usually doesn't unless you're playing at nosebleed stakes and just won enough to buy your dream home, a Porsche and a small island to be named after you.

And what usually do happens is that your game drops, suddenly you're playing hands that you normally wouldn't be playing, calling in position that you normally would have folded and basically find it hard to lay down whatever hands that you have even when a super tight player is showing aggressions on each street and you can't even beat top pair on the board.

So learn to recognize when you're on a tilt, and no matter what you do, just stay the heck away from the poker tables and do something constructive, like listening to the Carpenter's End of the world. And come back when you can start to bob your head up and down to MC Hammer's You can't touch this song.

Stop Loss
So let's say you're tilting and you're leaking money like a torn pocket when do you call it a night and start sobbing in your sleep? A simple rule of thumb that i use is 3 stacks. If you lose three stacks regardless of the reason and you're feeling jumpy waiting to get AA and shove all in on every hand and get frustrated each time that you don't make a pair and still manage to shove your stack by the river card, that's it.

Luck matters in the short run in this game, and sometimes you just get dealt cooler hands and there's no avoiding going all in. Like hitting middle set on the flop and villain getting top set on a wet board. Money are just going to fly. But if you can lost up to three stacks in succession even if you did nothing wrong, it's hard not to be affected mentally by the losses and still keeping your A game on.

At night like those, your time can better be spent doing something else. So go do that something else, at least just for one night :)

If you can avoid playing when you tilt and you call it quits when it's just not your day, you would have avoided the biggest leak in your game and is well on your way to become a winning poker player.