Semitilt

Have you ever gone home from the cardroom and written a result in your poker log that didn't match the feel of the session you just played? Sure you have. You've probably had days when you recorded a midsized loss and then scratched your head, wondering why it wasn't a tiny one. Heck, you were dealt so few starting hands that it didn't even feel like you played cards that day, and at the same time, you didn't take any bad beats, either. Considering that you did drag a couple of decent pots, shouldn't you have broken even, or maybe lost just a little? What happened?

Likewise, you've probably had a day when a modest win felt like it should have been much larger. Despite several bona fide rushes, your bottom line was strangely unimpressive. It just didn't seem to add up - or rather, it didn't add up to enough. Your opponents obliged you with too many deposits and too few withdrawals for you to have finished with a profit so small. Yet, you couldn't put your finger on the reason for the discrepancy.

In both cases, what contributed to your confusion was the certainty that you had played your usual, disciplined game, and that tilt was never a factor. After all, if you'd gone on tilt, you'd know it, right? Such a lapse would stand out in your mind, given how rare an occurrence it is for you - which is why you're a consistent winner. So, what gives?

Before addressing this, let's change the subject for a moment. Imagine two individuals, both of whom have been drinking alcohol. The first one has been swilling the stuff for hours, and he's plastered; his speech is heavily slurred, his senses are reeling, and he staggers when he tries to walk. The second person, on the other hand, is just ever-so-slightly buzzed; in fact, there are no outward indications of his fractionally diminished capacity. Question: Which one of these folks poses a greater danger to himself?

Oftentimes, it's the second one. The first guy is so stewed that he'd be hard-pressed to locate his keys, never mind his car, and anyone who saw him attempting to enter the driver's side of an automobile would probably tackle him. What's more, on some dim level of awareness, he knows he's pickled. (There are, of course, tragic exceptions.) By contrast, the second person often fails to recognize that his powers of perception have been compromised. And that's the real danger, for even though his reflexes and judgment have been impaired only marginally, that impairment becomes amplified by his unawareness of his own reduced capacities.

It's similar with poker. Although "tilt" is often defined as the loss of emotional self-control at the table, the problem with such a bare-boned definition is its implication that control is an all-or-nothing kind of thing. It isn't. Self-control has degrees. We can be fully in command or tilting full-throttle, but most of the time we're somewhere in between. Self-control exists in a continuum, and when we lose control in tiny, incremental steps, the loss can be virtually imperceptible.

If you're a serious player, "semitilt" poses a more dangerous threat than tilt, precisely because its symptoms are more subtle. Full-blown tilters generally know that they've lost it; indeed, one of the classic symptoms of tilt is that you know you're on tilt and just don't care anymore. But like the fellow who's only slightly tipsy, the semitilter is largely unaware of his condition. If that's you, the deterioration of your play may occur so gradually as to go undetected for a lengthy period, during which time your bankroll can suffer substantially.

Of course, disciplined players are in the habit of monitoring their own play, but if you're already on semitilt, the tendency may be to apply the wrong standards to that diagnostic process. You apply the standards of tilt. You look around and watch bad players making stupid decisions that buck the percentages, and you say to yourself: "I haven't done anything like that." But you don't need to make a horrendously poor decision for your poker results to suffer - a series of marginally poor decisions will do the trick. As a winning player, your profit comes from the cumulative sum of many small edges, so you should be thinking small as you attempt to diagnose your problem. You need to be on the lookout for little mistakes and venial lapses.

Perhaps the most insidious feature of semitilt is that sometimes it is caused by the very same sense of discipline that keeps successful players off full tilt. If that sounds counterintuitive, let me explain. Whereas the full-blown tilter is a slave to his emotions, the disciplined player strives to manage them. But poker is a battle waged on several fronts; it is a series of battles, really, some fought outwardly and some inwardly. If a player has to commit more resources than usual to the inward front, striving to maintain his perspective and emotional equilibrium while wounded and under heavy attack, he has fewer resources available to direct outwardly - toward his opponents. Also, in his attempt to "manage" the pain of losing, the disciplined player will sometimes administer a kind of emotional anesthetic to himself. Just as a bluffer will try to steel himself inwardly when attempting a theft, the player striving for self-control in the face of heavy losses may try to numb himself. Unfortunately, our pain-pleasure perception mechanism is pretty much a package deal, and to deaden some senses is to deaden them all. The irony here is that at the crossroads marked "Give In to Tilt" and "Try to Stay in Control," it is possible for the strong-willed player to choose a different road than his undisciplined counterpart - yet arrive at the same destination.

What, then, can be done to avoid the trap of semitilt? Well, like many human problems, the first and best step is simply to be aware of it. And one of the best ways to test for it is to regularly ask yourself the following question: "This hand that I'm playing right now - am I playing it exactly the same way I would if it were the first hand of my day?"

Don't get me wrong - I am not for one moment suggesting that the answer to that question should always be "yes." That would be preposterous. Poker is not a game for robots, and those who rigidly adhere to a formulaic approach, ignoring the subjective texture of the game and the nuances of individual situations, will never be successful. But as a starting point, the question can be a useful gauge, because if the answer is no, the next question is: Why not? In the process of answering that question, you should be able to identify an actual reason for your deviation. If there isn't one, you need to be honest about that, and face up to the fact that you may have already begun a slide - down the slippery slope of semitilt.