The Meltdown

Anyone with any experience in online-poker play knows that it’s easier to lose money fast than to win money fast. In order to win, you need to grind it out for hour after hour, making thoughtful decisions, evading traps, avoiding reckless adventures, and not getting unlucky when it counts. Successful online play, then, is a matter of rigor and focus over the long haul. A single lapse in concentration, discipline, or will can lead to a meltdown of catastrophic proportions. In a matter of moments, you can undo the hard work (and profit) of weeks and weeks of excellent online play. Let’s examine the meltdown, break it down into its component parts, and see if there’s a way to stop this train wreck before it happens — or at least before it gets too bad.

There you are in the middle of your productive and profitable online session. You’ve been playing well for hours, making strong moves and good laydowns against whomever you happen to face. You’re in a good game against opponents you can beat at a buy-in level that’s appropriate to your bankroll. You’ve got it going on. Perhaps you even know how well you’re doing. You’re confident without being arrogant; you’ve got your skills dialed in.

Now comes a hand that you hadn’t anticipated. You start with a strong holding, flop a monster, build a big pot, get all of your money in with much the best of it — and lose. In an instant, your original buy-in and all of your profit vanish into the mist. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just got sucked out on. No big deal: You know and I know that this happens every day.

The critical moment, however, is now at hand. Having experienced an expensive setback, you set your sights on what you consider to be a corrective course of action: the quick comeback. What you need to understand is that in this moment, you are no longer motivated by profit, and you’re not motivated by the desire to play perfect poker. Rather, you’re motivated by the strong and immediate need to ease your psychic pain. A bad thing has happened to you, and now you’re feeling grim. If you can make a quick recovery, you reckon, you can erase the bad feeling associated with your setback, and all will be right with the world. In other words, you want to get well.

You will recognize this state of mind, of course, as garden-variety tilt. Anyone who’s ever played poker has experienced it. The problem is that online play magnifies the negative effect of tilt and makes this bad situation worse — much worse — than it would be in a real-world cardroom environment. In the real world, some time must pass before you get back into the game. Having busted out at one table, you might migrate to another table, or to another cardroom altogether. Even if you stay at the same table and rebuy right away, the time that it takes to get back in action is measured in minutes — precious minutes that you can use to cool down and find your equilibrium again. Online, this same transaction can take mere seconds. Hit the buy chips button, and you’re good to go. Even if you decide to change tables, or change sites, it will take you almost no time to find another game — certainly not enough time to purge yourself of the need to ease your psychic pain.

In the worst possible manifestation of this, you not only choose another game, you choose one at a much higher buy-in than the game you were just playing. The (il)logic of this is sickly seductive. Let’s say that you started out playing in a $1-$2 blinds no-limit hold’em game. You bought in for $100, ran it up to $500, then lost it all on that one nightmare hand. Now, you race to the lobby, looking for a game in which you can get well. You see one with $2-$4 blinds (or $3-$6 or $5-$10), and figure that if you play that much higher, you can win that much more, that much quicker.

The problem is, you’re still on tilt! You won’t play correctly in the bigger game. You’ll rush, push, press, and do everything in your power, again, to erase the bad feeling that burdens you. The next thing you know, you’ve turned the loss of one buy-in into a loss of three, five, 10 … who knows? In the worst case, you’ve crippled your bankroll, so not only have you lost a lot of money, you’ve also lost the ability to win it back at your usual limits. Now, you’ll have to drop down to much lower levels and grind it out with patient play over the space of weeks or months, just to get back to where you were before the meltdown.

Can this be avoided? Sure. Of course it can. The first step is to recognize that tilt is taking place. Recognize when your motivation has shifted from playing perfect poker to easing psychic pain. Be open and honest with yourself, and simply say, “My goal has changed. This now isn’t about playing well, it’s about getting well, and I am at risk.” The next part is the hard part: Quit. Get away from the game. This is tough, because it requires that you carry a bitter feeling of loss with you when you go. But it’s much easier to cope with a small loss than a big one, and it’s the small loss, inevitably, that triggers the potential for a big one.

The meltdown, then, is a two-part process. First, a bad thing happens. Second, we make the bad situation worse. While we can’t always avoid the initial bad beat, we can always avoid making the bad situation worse. You’ve dug yourself a small hole. Simply stop digging before it gets big. If you do this one thing right — if you avoid turning average losses into catastrophic bankroll busters — you can play profitable online poker for a long, long time to come.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series and the poker novel Under the Gun. He resides in cyberspace at radarenterprizes.com. Photo: Gerard Brewer.