Miscellaneous Ramblings

Bankroll Builder. As part of the online education of e-pal (who resides Down Under, btw), I asked him to create his own pregame checklist of things to focus-on/remember during an upcoming session of poker. Number one on his list was:

"Gap Concept - If there is any doubt: FOLD!"

To which I immediately nodded my head and thought:

"Wow. My work here is nearly done."

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Tilt Hills. Am still fine-tuning my tilt hill and, specifically, the eight major categories of tilt. For instance, this morning I renamed the "anguish" tilt category to a more general category of "frustration." The mildest form of this would be mild irritation or annoyance. The most severe would be what Mike Caro once labeled "Despondent Tilt," or "The Point of No Return."  It's been a long, long time since I felt that one, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. I don't care anymore, just take my money....

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Side Glances. The title in today's post comes from one of my favorite columnists of all time: the incomparable Peter Egan of Road and Track fame. For years and years I subscribed to R&T, even through the dark days, primarily for Egan's monthly column. Hell, I even subscribed to Cycle World for a while because he penned an awesome monthly there, too. If you're into the internal combustion engine at all, this is a writer to search out.

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Work. I currently hate my job. I've been assigned what is effectively a second full-time undertaking, which is essentially me being asked to step in and "fix" a dysfunctional, out-of-control group of engineers and scientists. I know very little about the subject matter of the group (high-level science related), the personalities are either very strong minded with their own agendas, or weak/timid folk, and most of the work has already left the station (on uncertain paths). Oh, and I get to double my travel away from home. Joy.

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Big Bad Government. Still haven't received my Full Tilt remission. I must be on some sort of blacklist. Grrr.

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All-in for now...

-Bug

Another View of the Tilt Hill

In following on to my categorization of the eight major tilts (here and here), here is a combined pictorial view of how I envision Tilt:

I'm a big believer in that old saying, "you can't fix a problem unless/until you can define it." For tilt, I believe I've started that process by identifying the eight primary definitions, or types of tilt that hit most poker players. Said another way, these are the ways one can slide off the felt-covered tilt hill and lose all their money playing poker.

So, now that we've identified these eight, we can start to work on constructing eight corresponding segments of "emotional guard rails" at the top of the A-Zone summit to keep you from slipping off in the various directions. To do that, we have to first identify the stimuli that causes a negative cognitive (and hence emotional) response. In future installments, I'll try to tackle each of these eight tilt directions, focusing on these stimuli and responses (which I first mentioned here).

I'm kind of unraveling/learning this as I go, so I'm just as interested as you to see where this takes us...

All-in for now...
-Bug

Bug Gutts and Tilt Hills

In my last post (here), I said I was going to retool my overall thinking on the subject of Tilt. The plan is to combine and refine the collective wisdom of experts like Tommy Angelo, Jared Tendler, Robert Plutchik, Alan Schoonmaker, Lou Krieger, et al into one big simple, cohesive, digestible lump; i.e., a unified way of describing, recognizing, and controlling tilt. Call it Bug's Grand Unified Theory of Tilt, or GUTT.*

To begin this process, let's start with Angelo's definition of Tilt, which states that any time you deviate from playing your best possible "A-Game," or let your thinking deviate from it's ideal "A-Mindset,"  you're Tilting.

Let's also bring in Tendler's main topic of his second book and combine it with Angelo's definition. In the second volume of Mental Game of Poker, Tendler focuses on getting into--and staying in--a so-called "Zone" of ideal play. In other words, I propose conflating Tendler's "Zone" with Angelo's "A-Game" and "A-Mindset." Let's call the result the A-Zone.

For illustration purposes, let's visualize a player's mental state as a location of a ball on a performance hill or cone. When you're playing poorly, you're off the hill, floundering around at the base, frustrated and losing money. As you get your act together and start playing better, the higher up the flanks of the hill you move. At the very top of the hill is a flattened summit called, surprise surprise, the A-Zone. When you're playing perfect poker you're crushing the game up here on top.

Ah, but then you get distracted and begin to slip away from your A-game-- and you roll toward the edge and fall off the A-Zone summit and begin sliding down the flanks of the hill into the abyss called Tilt, where you're back to losing your money. Lots of internal and external stimuli can push you toward and off the A-Zone edge and down into this abyss. Bad beats, coolers, mistakes you can't shake, trying to get unstuck by gambling, losing your patience, letting your ego dictate your play, etc, etc, etc... all manner of negative things can shove you toward the edge:

Back in the day, my old poker coach, the Guru, used to say Tilt was nothing more than 1+1+1. A bad beat pushes you toward tilt. You know you played the hand perfectly, but losing that big pot still stings. Then a few hands later you fold what would have been a winner to a big stupid bluff that a villain shows and gloats about. Then on the very next play your Aces get cracked by Kings... one plus one plus one equals tilt... and suddenly you're rolling down the tilt hill like a snowball gathering momentum on its way to hell.

Everyone's tilt hill is different. Some have wide A-zone summits, others are narrower. Some are dished at top, while others are crowned. Some have the equivalent of guard rails around the top, while others have crumbly edges ready to collapse at a moments notice. Some players only need "1" to get pushed over their edge, while others need 1+1+1+1+1... well, you get the idea.

In the next installment on this topic, I want to discuss a bit more about the different directions you can be shoved off the hill. And to help visualize that, we'll return to our old friend Robert Plutchik and his Wheel of Emotions.

All-in for now...
-Bug
*The real Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is in fact one of the holy grails of modern physics, and often seen as the necessary stepping stone between our current understandings of physics (i.e., general relativity, quantum physics, and good old Newtonian physics), and the quest for a Theory of Everything (TOE). Seriously. Look it up.