Avoiding Happy Tilt

You sit down in a 10-handed $1-$2 no-limit hold’em game at your local casino. The game has been going for a while. Two players have stacks and stacks of red in front of them, and another two are down to their last few chips. On average, how many of your nine opponents are, at this moment, on tilt?

My best guess would be that all nine are on tilt. Yup. In your everyday small-stakes no-limit game, I’d guess that everyone who’s played for half an hour or more is on tilt.

Think that’s ridiculous? If you define tilt narrowly as losing a big pot and then going nuts over it, sure, it’s ridiculous to think that everyone is on tilt. But I define tilt more broadly. I think you’re on tilt if you are allowing your decisions to be shaded significantly by your emotional state. By that standard, nearly everyone playing poker right now is on tilt.

Here’s why. Anyone who has lost a significant amount of money can be assumed to be on tilt. The number of poker players who can lose and truly shake it off completely is very small. I wouldn’t expect to find one in a randomly selected $1-$2 game.

Then there are the people who are about even for the session. There are two ways to be roughly even for a session. You can be card-dead and be folding, folding, folding; or, you can be playing pots and be on an up-and-down roller coaster that’s left you, for the time being, back where you started. Folding and folding is frustrating, and so is the roller coaster. The longer someone stays around even in a poker game, the more frustrated I would expect him to get. Frustrated players tend to try to force the action rather than wait for opportunities to come naturally.

Finally, there are the winners. Winners can’t be on tilt, can they? Of course they can, and they usually are. Winners tend to go on what I call “happy tilt.” They’re so giddy from stacking all of those chips that they stop thinking clearly about their decisions. Here are the signs of happy tilt:

Players on happy tilt start playing many more hands than they usually would. If you’ve played live poker, you’ve seen it happen. A guy wins a pot so big that he plays the next five hands with a huge, half-stacked mound of chips in front of him. During this period, it takes him three times longer to act on his hand than normal. He’s got to stop stacking chips, fish the cards out from under his haul, and then make a decision.

Does he fold? Never. I could probably count on one hand the number of times in my life that I’ve seen a casual player drag a monster pot and then fold the next hand preflop. (Regulars tend to be a bit better about this.) This guy is much more likely to call without looking at his hand than to look at his hand and then fold.

It’s happy tilt. These players have just won an enormous mound of chips, so it feels like nothing to toss one chip back in the pot to play the next hand … and the next … and the next.

These guys also tend to call raises and reraises more loosely. The euphoria of a big win encourages them to stay in the action as much as they can.

A good way to exploit this tendency is to loosen your raising and, particularly, reraising standards against this player when you have position. If he’s willing to play most hands for $80-$100 in a $2-$5 game, I’m reraising him with high and medium pocket pairs, aces down to A-10, and K-Q. If I’m on the button (and therefore have a relatively low chance of running into someone yet to act who’s holding a big hand), I’ll go down another notch or two on these standards. You may not be entirely comfortable with playing K-Q in a $200 preflop pot, but when a guy is willing to call you from out of position with K-4 offsuit or Q-2 suited, you definitely should put the money in.

Players on happy tilt tend to take their normal post-flop strategy to more of an extreme. Let’s say that a generally bad player just won an enormous pot by calling a huge river bluff with second pair. For the rest of the night, I’d expect the guy to call even more than he usually does. He’ll call the flop with anything. He’ll call big turn bets with a pair of deuces. He won’t necessarily call every hand to the river, but if he gets that “feeling” again that someone is bluffing, he won’t hesitate to call a shove with any meager pair. After all, a big call was what made it happy time in the first place, so he’s hardly going to shy away from another one.

It’s not just calling that “happy tilters” can do more of. If they like to bluff, they will start bluffing more, often in ridiculous, hopeless situations. If they like to overvalue hands like top pairs and overpairs on coordinated boards, they will do so even more. In situations in which they might have just called with, say, pocket queens on a three-straight/three-flush board before their happy tilt, they’ll now raise and try to get the money in.

Exploit these changes in the obvious ways. If they’re calling more, value-bet with weaker hands than you normally would. If they’re bluffing more, check good hands to them and call down. If they’re getting it in too light, play your big hands fast. And in all of these cases, reduce your bluffing frequency. Players on happy tilt are the worst ones to try to bluff.

Happy tilt can be insidious. If you’re up a good chunk of change, you feel good. You feel sharp. You don’t feel like you’re off your game. But you may very well be. I used to have some problems with happy tilt, and this is how I fixed it. I did exactly the opposite of all of the things that happy tilters do. I tightened up slightly preflop. Then, I played a more ABC game than I normally would; more check-folding on missed flops; less continuation-betting; less bluffing; fewer hero-calls. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, players seem to expect a guy with a huge mound of chips to be splashing around. By snugging up after winning big, I’d avoid the pitfalls of happy tilt while still being able to get paid off on my good hands. If you suffer from happy tilt, I highly recommend trying these adjustments.

Now, back to that 10-handed game in which everyone is on tilt. The losers are steamed, frustrated, and afraid that they’ll never survive another river card. The players who are even are bored and frustrated, and want to force the action. And the winners feel bulletproof, and start throwing chips around like it’s nothing. Nobody’s sober except perhaps the guy who just sat down.

Poker. It’s one hell of a drug. ♠

Ed’s latest book, Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em, is available for purchase at smallstakesnolimit-holdem.com. Find him on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor, and you also can check out his online poker advice column, notedpokerauthority.com.