Entitlement

I know about entitlement. I was born a white male in the United States of America. By sheer luck of birth, I’ve been granted an almost limitless ability to walk freely on the streets, advance to the highest heights in almost any chosen career, and just exist in any way that I see fit without the interference of other people on a regular basis. It is not an ability that all possess.

In addition, I play poker for a living. It’s one of the few careers in life that is a true meritocracy. Given time and opportunity, the best players will make the most money at any given game and stake. Both lead to a feeling of entitlement. A feeling that the best players deserve to win in any and every given situation. This can lead to problems at the poker table.

Just the other day, I was playing in a Big O game. One of the biggest winners over the past month or two was having a bit of a rough day. He lost or chopped a few decent sized pots and was starting to feel it. Yeah, he had the best hand or best draw in almost every situation. It wasn’t hard to do, considering the hands he was up against.

Sometimes his opponents had less than 25 percent equity in Big O, something that is pretty tough to do. Some of the time, he and his opponent had the same hand and he had a redraw that didn’t get there. Whatever the hands and situations were, he lost a few buy-ins. No big deal, especially considering that I had personally seen him win several buy-ins every session we played together for the last month. Not only that, but earlier in the session, he escaped for half the pot with top set and the fourth nut low on the turn against someone with the nut flush and the nut low. He called a pot-sized bet and the board paired on the river to give him half, so he definitely had his share of good fortune, even on this day where he was losing some tough hands.

Not having seen him really lose much since joining this game, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when he started losing. I certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened. He started criticizing his opponents’ plays and swearing at the dealers. He pulled the old, “How much longer are you dealing?” barb after asking to be dealt out. Then, after a particularly pristine bad beat, he did two more things I wasn’t expecting. First, he knocked an opponent’s chips over in a clearly non-playful manner while protesting that he was just joking. Then, in a complete surprise to me, he went on full blown tilt.

He had previously reacted to losing pots by getting dealt out or playing even tighter than he usually does. One particular hand where a guy called in a multi-way pot all in for five times the pot with a double gutshot, an eight-high flush draw, and no real discernible low draw on J-5-4 flop, and got there for half of a 450-big blind pot set him off. (I’ll admit that I was also perplexed at the hand.) He started raising blind, potting almost every street that got checked to him, and just generally playing terribly including calling off a pretty big turn bet on K-10-7-6 with Q-J-J and a flush draw in a very uncharacteristic play.

I’ll admit to getting frustrated in this game. Pot-limit Omaha is already a swingy game, and Big O can really make you rack your brain attempting to figure out what exactly makes you play a game that can torture you so badly. However, the hallmark of a professional player is being able to play well when frustrated, running badly, not feeling well, etc. The thing I try not to do when I get frustrated, is let it affect my play. I’m not always successful, but I don’t think I’ve quite gotten to the point where I’m playing like this.

It took me a while to figure out why this was happening to him. It wasn’t just because he was losing. He’d been winning so much every day that I played with him that it couldn’t have been a money issue. In fact, the room where I play is small and gossipy and people like to let you know how someone else has been doing in the game, even when you’re not there. Everybody had been talking about how well he was doing, so it’s not like I missed some session where he fired off ten buy-ins. It hit me though, that he had grown accustomed to winning. That he felt entitled to win. He had been doing so well, hitting on every freeroll, dodging his opponents’ freerolls, weird hands holding up for scoops in spots where they really shouldn’t, that he felt that winning was his right. How dare the poker gods make him endure a losing session such as this one?

I’ve been guilty of this type of tilt in the past as well. It’s good to differentiate the types of tilt you’re prone to. Winning tilt, losing tilt, entitlement tilt, “not-this-guy” tilt. They’re all real and they’re all damaging. One of the best resources for this is The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler. Pick it up, read it, get a good idea of what sort of tilt you go through and why and learn how to never be the person who feels entitled to win every day and tilts when you don’t. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG