Discipline: Part I – Tilt

Discipline is essential for anyone who wants to be a professional poker player. In fact, it is a crucial quality for anyone who undertakes a profession where uncertainty and randomness play a large role in short term results, such as options trading, commodity trading, and blackjack counting.

Discipline has many elements. Here is a list of some of the most important:

• Avoiding tilt
• Finding games or situations where you have an edge
• Maintaining a bankroll
• Physical conditioning
• Mental conditioning

There is a lot of overlap between these elements. If you frequently tilt, it will be virtually impossible to maintain a bankroll. If you don’t spend time on mental conditioning, both in general and in terms of increasing your skill level in your games of choice, it will be harder to find games where you have an advantage. In this column, I am going to begin a discussion of tilt.

Everyone has some level of technical skill. If you gave them a quiz on their skills, they would get some number of questions right. My definition of tilt is making inferior plays to those someone of your technical skill level should make because of some circumstances that shouldn’t affect your decision-making. Some of the most common sources of tilt are losing, losing a particularly unlucky hand, anger at one of your opponents, or outside distractions (like a fight with your girlfriend or watching your team lose a big game). To repeat: Tilt occurs when you make a bad play that you wouldn’t make if you weren’t on tilt.

If you are subject to severe or frequent tilt, you will not be able to survive as a poker player. You will go broke regularly. This will force you to find a new starting bankroll, either by working at something else or getting someone to back you. There are many players who can’t control themselves and frequently go broke. I know that I often get ‘hit on’ by players looking for a backer. If you are disciplined and work had at developing sound fundamentals, it is harder to get tilted.

Your overall results at poker are very important. They are basically the best source of information about the skills that you have. If you are a long-term winner, then you are more skilled than your opponents. Your average win rate over a large number of hours is the best estimate of what you should win per hour. A steady increase in your win rate means your are improving, and a steady decrease means you are getting worse. (Obviously game or opponent selection has a big influence on your win rate.) It is to focus on you long term results, and not get distracted by your short-term results. One of the most frequent causes of tilt is focusing on short-term results. In communication theory, they refer to the signal (meaningful information) and the noise (random, non-useful information.)

To illustrate this, let’s assume that the numbers one through six on a die represent your hourly results. If the number is odd, you lose that number of dollars. If it is even, you win that number. If you played for six hours, and each number came up once, you lose $100 plus $300 plus $500 and win $200 plus $400 plus $600. Your net profit would be $300, or $50 per hour. Now suppose you started by rolling 5, 2, 3, 1 and 3. You’d be minus a total of $1,000 after five hours, a loss of $200 an hour, and yet it would be all noise. You know that given enough rolls, your net result will approach $50 per hour. Would you get mad at the die? Throw it harder? I hope not. You should just accept that you were the victim of a random fluctuation in the wrong direction.

Yet it is common to see a poker player who should average $50 per hour go on tilt when he is down $1,000 after five hard hours of play. He will start playing too many hands, bluffing too much, calling too much, and so on in a desperate attempt to get even. If he plays another five hours while continuing to tilt, he probably rates to lose $50 per hour! It is essential to learn how to tell when your are tilting and to develop some methods for eliminating or at least reducing the amount of time you spend on tilt. I will continue the discussion of tilt in the next column. ♠

Steve ‘Zee’ Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful gamesplayer. He has been a full-time gambler for over 35 years. With two WSOP bracelets and few million in tournament cashes, he is easing into retirement. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at some major tournaments and playing in cash games in Vegas. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A in New York City -The Library near Houston and Doc Holliday’s on 9th St. are his favorites.