Keeping Your Balance

If you’ve never gone on tilt and made stupid mistakes, don’t read this column. If you’re one of the other 99 percent of poker players, keep reading.

Why did I start so provocatively? Because tilt costs players lots of money, but too many players won’t admit that they sometimes “lose it.” You’ve certainly seen players who were obviously on tilt, but insisted they were playing well.

Perhaps you were the one off balance, but didn’t realize it until much later. You took a heavy loss and had no idea why it happened. You probably blamed bad luck, but you know that’s just part of poker. And your luck wasn’t that bad. After reviewing your play, you realized that you made some mistakes you wouldn’t usually make.

You may never go on highly visible tilt. Perhaps you don’t raise or three-bet with trash or chase with hopeless hands, but you occasionally react to your emotions, not your rational brain, and these reactions cost you dearly.

In 2004 I wrote a series about tilt. Then I saw it as primarily an emotional reaction to the usual causes: alcohol, bad beats, large losses, losing streaks, and so on. Studying Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow convinced me that poor thinking can be a subtle, nearly invisible, cause for tilt.

There’s a circular relationship between thoughts and feelings. We may react emotionally because we think poorly, and these emotional reactions can make us think and act even more poorly.

Definition

My previous columns used a broad definition of tilt: “‘Tilt’ means that someone is playing … much more poorly than usual, and most people use the term only for playing too many hands too aggressively. If someone is always wildly aggressive, he’s not on tilt. He’s just acting in his usual, maniacal way.

“I’ll use a broader definition: ‘Tilt’ means that someone is making plays for emotional reasons that he would not normally make. Wild aggression is just its most visible form.”

If you make less visible mistakes, you probably won’t have large short-term losses, but — because it’s harder to recognize — this form of tilt can last much longer, slowly destroying your bankroll. You should understand how, when, and why your thinking deteriorates.

Overconfidence

It’s the title of this book’s Part III. Countless authors have written that you need confidence to play well. I agree, but overconfidence can cause or increase tilt: If you’re overconfident, you’ll expect too much. When you don’t get the expected results, you may become upset, and that feeling can causes mistakes you wouldn’t normally make.

You don’t need a large loss or bad beat to go on tilt. You can get upset if you don’t win as much as you expected. You’re frustrated because you haven’t won as much as you think your superior skills “deserve.”

Even if you’re winning nicely, you may still be frustrated if a player you regard as inferior is winning more than you are. If any frustration causes you to play sub-optimally, you’re at least slightly on tilt. It can damage your play, worsen your results, and increase your frustration, which can increase your tilt. It’s a vicious and common cycle.

To keep your balance, analyze your own thinking processes. When and why do you become overconfident? How does it distort your thinking and cause bad decisions? If you don’t understand these mistakes, you’ll keep making them.

Kahneman gives an excellent example of this type of self-analysis. He commanded a unit that conducted tests to predict how well candidates would perform as army officers. The candidates’ actual performance clearly indicated that these predictions were almost useless, “but we continued to feel and act as if each of our specific predictions was valid… I had discovered my first cognitive illusion… our knowledge of the general rule—that we could not predict—had no effect on our confidence in individual cases.”

What’s the relationship to poker? You probably think you can read other players and predict what they will do, even if you’ve been wrong again and again. Unfortunately, instead of admitting it and analyzing why you misread people, you may just get mad at “those idiots.” You blame them and think, “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Scientists vs Poker Experts

Because Kahneman is a great scientist, he cared more about understanding the truth than about protecting his ego. He very publicly admitted his mistake and worked hard to learn why he made it.

Poker experts rarely report this type of critical self-analysis. They usually tell us about their brilliant plays and don’t admit their mistakes.

Roy Cooke is an exception. Not only does he admit his mistakes; he tells us why he made them. He carefully analyzes his thinking processes, identifies where and why he went wrong, and reports how he will prevent similar mistakes.

One of Card Player’s most helpful columns is “When I Was a Donk.” Instead of telling us about their brilliant moves, famous players report their stupid mistakes. When our readers learn that great players were donks, they may become more open-minded and self-critical about their own mistakes.

They may recognize that they made the same mistake as the expert, or just become a little more self-critical. Either result will improve their feelings, thinking, playing, and results.

The Illusion of Understanding

That’s the title of the first chapter of Part III. It reports how and why we think we understand people better than we really do.

“We humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true. Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people’s actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits— causes that you can readily match to effects.” (p. 199)

We think we understand complicated situations, but we just believe an illusion. This illusion makes us feel better, but causes bad decisions.

Prescriptive vs Descriptive Writing

Kahneman, Simon, and Thaler (all non-economists) won Nobel Prizes in Economics for breaking the traditional pattern of economic writing. For centuries economists told us how we should make decisions. We should carefully analyze all our options and select only the one that maximized our utility.

They ignored the obvious fact that nobody always follows their rules, and most people hardly ever follow them. Nearly every poker author applies the same principle: They insist that we should carefully analyze the situation and make the decision that maximizes our EV.

Good players violate that rule less often than bad ones, but everyone violates it. And Kahneman’s book explains some of the reasons we do it.

The Bottom Line

To reach your potential as a player and person, you have to be brutally honest about yourself. If a Nobel Laureate can admit he had an illusion, so can you.

If you study this book and analyze yourself critically, you may become: (1) less vulnerable to either general overconfidence or the illusion of understanding and (2) more aware of why you make mistakes and get upset. These changes will help you to keep your balance and win more money.

Dr-Al-Schoonmaker.net. After publishing five expensive poker books, Dr. Al, [email protected], now writes inexpensive eBooks. How to Beat Small Poker Games, Stay Young; Play Poker, How to Beat Killed Hold’em Games, and Competitive Edge Strategies For Poker And Business Winners cost only $2.99 at Amazon.com. Please visit my website, Dr-Al-Schoonmaker.net