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

The Eight (Less than Great) Ways to Fall Off the Tilt Hill

Lots of poker authors and experts have attempted to categorize specific types of tilt.  Jared Tendler, for instance, has opined that are seven basic types of generic tilt players experience. Other writers have written that all types of tilt are nothing more than shades of anger (e.g., anger at others, at your own play, and the poker gods, at your luck, etc..). Still others talk about ill-defined things like "winners tilt" and "giving up mentally."

If we use Tommy Angelo's definition of tilt, we should also add in all the non-anger deviations from good play (e.g., boredom, distraction, playing scared above our bankroll, not concentrating, letting ego get in the way of good decisions, gambling vs. maximizing expected value, etc.). In other words, there are lots and lots and lots of types of tilt.

So... I started making a list of all these. And then I made more lists and sub-lists. And then I read more and made more lists. And then I combined and conflated and divided and re-sorted and made even more lists. And slowly things began to jell. In the end, I kept coming back to eight basic categories of tilt; everything else just seemed to be a permutation or subcategory of one of these big eight. My eight categories are:

1. Anger. This is actually a pretty wide category, including anger at yourself, the other players, your luck, etc.. but it boils down to shades of classic "steaming" tilt at the tables.
2. Desperation. This is a category that covers behaviors and emotions like trying to get unstuck by gambling it up, chasing hopeless draws, playing above your bankroll, trying to force the action, trying to get bad players to fold, hoping your hand is good instead of folding, etc.
3. Arrogance. This is nothing more than a person's Ego at play. Winners tilt, pride, arrogance, a sense of entitlement, feeling like you deserve to win because the other players aren't as good as you...
4. Distraction. Whenever you surf the web when playing online, or check your text messages or the football scores when playing live, you're distracted, and therefore not playing your A-game. Angelo says you're on Tilt. I agree.
5. Fear. Playing scared or weak-tight are the classic manifestations of this type of tilt. As tournament pros like to say, you have to be willing to die in the game. You need heart to win at poker.
6. Complacency. Call it laziness and an unwillingness to do things like put other players on hands, or put in that last bet on the river because "the pot is big enough."
7. Self-Doubt. Self esteem and trusting one's abilities and instincts are paramount to playing well. Can you pull the trigger when the time comes? Do you believe in your read on the villain, or don't you? And if not, why not?
8. Anguish. This one also covers a wide spectrum, including disgust at one's past mistakes on previous hands, frustration at your luck, grief over a big pot lost... these are all types of anguish tilt.

I will write a lot more about these eight primary tilts in a series of future posts, but first I want to discuss how these are related to each other. Enter our old friend Plutchik and his Wheel of Emotions (first mentioned here).

As I wrote previously, Plutchik charted on a color wheel what he considered to be the eight primary human emotional states:

Note that these states are arranged in so-called "bi-polar" pairs. For example, on the left side of the chart (in red) is the primary emotion of Anger. Opposite of this on the right side (in dark green) is Fear. [Even to laymen like me, it's obvious this particular pairing represents the classic primal choice between fight or flight when facing a threat.] Other primary pairings include Joy vs. Sadness, Disgust vs. Trust, and Anticipation vs. Surprise.

There are also a lot of varying "shades" of each emotion on Plutchik's wheel (e.g., Anger ranges from simple Annoyance to outright Rage). And there are also blendings between primary emotions, such as Anger + Disgust = Contempt. And so on.

Now, I'm not fully convinced that Plutchik captured all significant human emotions on his wheel (at least in terms of poker emotions). Nor do I think he got the ones he did capture necessarily located in the correct area of the wheel (e.g., "boredom" does not feel to me like a shade of disgust-- but then, my degree is in engineering, not psychology, so I could be all wet.) 

Okay, that said, I do believe laying out emotions like Plutchik did on a color wheel, arranged in bi-polar pairs, is genius. So, being a big believer in R-and-D (Rip-off and Duplicate!), I stole liberally from his approach, essentially superimposing my eight categories of tilt on a color wheel of emotions like Plutchik's wheel. Here's my resulting Tilt-a-Wheel of Emotions:

Note the eight primary tilt categories are arranged in bi-polar pairs. Anger vs. Fear, Anguish vs. Distraction, and so on. Are my pairings perfect? No. Are they aligned fully with Plutchik's emotions. Not quite, but overall this layout does seem to fit pretty well with his model. More importantly, mapping tilts like this gives us a fairly reasonable framework that we can use to cognitively work on to improve our resistance to tilt.

For example, if you can recognize that your primary emotional nemesis is one of getting angry at bad beats, then there are all manner of techniques and tactics to a) recognize the trigger stimuli; and b) combat those feeling and put them back into check. The same goes for the other seven tilt emotions; psychologists and psychiatrists have lots of tools in their kits for dealing with these all of these types of things. The trick is first identifying the problem, which I think a spoked color wheel approach lends itself to.

I'm out of time right now, but in future installments on this subject, I want to delve a little more deeply into each of the eight tilt categories, focusing on what stimuli pushes us in that particular emotional cliff direction, and what kinds of tilt resistance is available to combat those slides off the tilt hill. More to come...

 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.