The 20-Year Rule

People get bent out of shape when playing poker. Really, they do. I’m sure that you’ve noticed it. Some people freak out altogether at the first sign of adversity. They manifest this through bad play, bad vibes, bad attitude, or what have you. Online, you see the most egregious examples of this, where some clown without self-restraint takes a bad beat and immediately launches into a vitriolic chat-box rant, something on the order of, “I hate you, I hope you die.” Every now and then, of course, we find someone representing this attitude while actually maintaining a pretty cool head. It’s called faux tilt, and it’s not a bad strategy — if you can manage it — for there’s nothing so powerful as a big hand in harmony with a seemingly bad attitude. Faux tilt is rare, though; more often than not, the player who thinks he’s just representing tilt is, in fact, actually on tilt, desperately hoping to get lucky and reverse recent setbacks. And, “I hate you, I hope you die” means, actually, “I hate you, I hope you die.”

You see this in live play, too, and while the verbal abuse is more muted because you know that you could get (A) banned from the table or (B) beaten up, the fact of tilt being present is just the same. Starting requirements loosen. Bets become bigger. Bluffs become more daring (that is, suicidal). And why? Because psychic pain is present, and nothing will cure that psychic pain, it seems, save the quick accumulation of chips. Players call this “getting well,” but no one stops to consider that the only reason you need to get well is, well, you’ve gotten sick. So, let’s examine this illness of tilt and see if we can find a long-term cure.

The thing of poker is that it involves money. Even when we’re playing for chips (or, online, numbers on a screen), we know that we’re playing for real money, and money has a powerful hold on us all. Remember that money was originally invented as a convenient means of assigning a barter value to things like food, clothing, and shelter. Food, clothing, and shelter, of course, are things that we need to survive. Money, then, in representing these things, is really representing survival itself. And all of us, save the most psychologically well-guarded, will have a strong negative reaction — a gut reaction — to threats to survival. This is natural — necessary, in fact — for if humans did not strive to survive, we’d still be living in trees, wondering where our next banana was coming from. And although we try to distance ourselves psychologically from this deep limbic connection, it’s still there. Chips equal money; money equals food, clothing, and shelter; food, clothing, and shelter equal survival. To lose chips, then, is to die.

It’s no wonder that people get so upset.

Lest you think I’m preaching from a mountaintop, please understand that I’m as much at risk for tilt as anyone else. I experience mine as righteous indignation, as when, for example, I get my money in great (A-K versus A-2, say) and the other guy hits a ridiculous three-outer to felt me. I feel like I’m a pretty smart guy, and it grieves me — physically, psychically, and emotionally grieves me — to fall victim to some mirplo whom I’ve clearly outthought and outplayed. But I know enough about tilt, and I know enough about me, to know that one bad beat can trigger a cascade of bad play, and if I don’t want that to happen, I’d better have a defensive response ready. Here’s one of my favorites — the 20-year rule.

The 20-year rule states, pretty simply, that if it won’t matter in 20 years, it doesn’t matter now. So, I’ve dropped a $100 pot. So what? Will my bottom line be noticeably changed by that lost “Big Ben”? Maybe today, yes. Next month? Doubtful. In 20 years? Certainly not. So, when I take a bad beat (especially at the hands of some mirplo’s crushing stupidity), I just quietly invoke the 20-year rule. My survival is not imperiled. In 20 years, I will have forgotten about this hand. Or, maybe I’ll be dead in 20 years — from causes entirely unrelated to poker, of course — and then I won’t have a worry in the world.

There are other ways to defeat tilt. You know many of them, and use some of them. You get up and go for a walk, or screw down your starting requirements; you return to basic, solid poker, or even just quit the game. All of these approaches are strategically useful, but they don’t address the deepest underlying psychology of tilt. They don’t address the underlying feeling that I’m sick and I need to get well.

So, the next time you go on tilt, I want you to do more than just invoke your strategies. I want you to do more, even, than invoke my 20-year rule. What I want you to do is open up your awareness to your own state of mind and ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” Exploring that question, addressing and answering it, will do more to return you to a state of tranquility than any other tilt-busting actions I can think of. You don’t need to punish yourself for going on tilt — it’s as natural as striving to survive — but you also don’t need to punish yourself further by making a bad situation worse. Ideally, tilt should end the moment you recognize its presence and accept that it’s happened to you.

If that doesn’t help, this might. It’s a quote from Alan Wykes in The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling. Wykes wrote:

Gambling is a way of buying hope on credit. We are all bonded slaves of the management that issues the credit cards. To realize the completeness of our bondage we have only to remember that each of us owes our existence to the chancy collaboration of two small fertile organisms; while an apparently chancy distribution of chromosomes, genes, and hormones influence our sex, coloring, and disposition. We press on through life toward a death whose manner and date depend entirely on chance. During our womb-to-tomb progress we never stop gambling, for we cannot know the outcome of each of the many decisions we have to make every day; we can only hope for the best.

Every time we play poker — hell, every time we do anything — we’re channeling and cherishing the precious gift of life, a gift that we were profoundly lucky to have received in the first place. Bad beat? Amazing suckout? Egregious misfortune? None of that can compare to the great good fortune of having been born. Remember this the next time that you take a bad beat and want to go on tilt: Seen from the perspective of the luck of being alive, not only won’t it matter in 20 years, it truly and gloriously doesn’t matter now.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series and the new poker novel Under the Gun, in bookstores now. He resides in cyberspace at vorza.com, and blogs the world from somnifer.typepad.com. John Vorhaus’ photo: Gerard Brewer.