WHAT MAKES YOU TILT?

Recently I've found my biggest tilt problem. It's not the name calling or the donkeys and bad beats, oddly. It's when I fold a hand and it hits the flop big, the turn brings me the nuts, and 3 people are all in. Had a 6-2 suited, would have made a str8 flush, but didn't feel right calling a big raise. Then two hands later, i fold 59 offsuit under the gun, and would have flopped a set of 9's. Then I get AK suited and nothing. Now I'm steaming and confused about what hands to play. I know everyone folds winners, any advice on how you cool your jets after this kind of action? And whats your worst tilt scenario?

Well, really all you can do is shrug your shoulders and ignore it. Bad hands are bound to hit sometimes, that doesn't make folding them wrong. So knowing it has to happen, and sometimes it will happen in streaks, you just don't think about it, otherwise yes it will get to you. It's like rabbiting, don't do it, what card would have come next is irrrelevant, you made a correct fold and that is all you need to know.

Well said RD. I've come to roll with the ebbs and flows. You're going to get sucked out and your going to fold hands that could have won. That's what makes poker interesting. The light bulb came on one day when I realized that if you're going to win a particular hand 85% of the time you have to lose it 15% of the time. No reason to sweat the 15% because the 85% is coming.

There is one scenerio that puts me on tilt though. There are times when I'm in a big hand and I flop top pair or something. I bet and get reraised all-in for my entire stack. I think it through and determine that they're bluffing and make the call to see them on a semi-bluff flush draw. They hit the flush every friggin time!

What frustrates me the most is when you make the right read. The right call and still lose! I just hate being bullied around, call them on it and still lose.

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Funny story about getting bad beats, the odds not going your way, etc.

Tonight I was rather bored, so I decided I'd simulate AKs versus 22, 20 times. Now, statistics show that AK should win approximately 10 times. Well, I decided to predict that if either hand won more than the other, it would be AK. As it turns out, AK only won 7 out of the 20 hands (I shuffled the deck 5+ times between each deal, it WAS random). A little more curious, I made up a quick program that would simulate coinflip situations such as this one, and determine how unlucky I was there. (For those who aren't into programming, you may want to skip the next paragraph).

Anyways, I ran a loop, one million times. Inside this loop, I calculated a coinflip scenario, Random.nextBoolean(), 20 times. I kept track of the number of times this function returned true (representing the number of times AK would win). Now, while this is not an exact calculation of the odds, when you calculate something over a million times, it certainly gives you a good idea of what those odds are. Here are the results I got:

Number of times AK won	Occurrence over 1 million trials	Occurence (%)	AK should win more than this how many times(%)
0	1	1.0E-4	99.9999
1	18	0.0018	99.9981
2	189	0.0189	99.9792
3	1048	0.1048	99.874405
4	4608	0.4608	99.413605
5	14583	1.4583	97.95531
6	36615	3.6615	94.29381
7	74396	7.4396	86.85421
8	119992	11.9992	74.85501
9	160193	16.0193	58.83571
10	176278	17.6278	41.20791
11	160100	16.01	25.197908
12	120158	12.0158	13.182108
13	73949	7.3949	5.787208
14	37167	3.7167	2.070508
15	14817	1.4817	0.58880806
16	4642	0.4642	0.12460807
17	1047	0.1047	0.01990807
18	181	0.0181	0.0018080696
19	18	0.0018	8.069677E-6
20	0	0.0	8.069677E-6

The extremely small number at the bottom is caused by runoff error.

Now, it's one thing to be bad beat here and there, I believe any poker player should expect it. However, I believe it's runs such as the one I simulated (AK won only 7 times out of 20, it should win 8 or more times 86% of the time) that truly puts people on tilt, and takes the fun out of the game.

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1st place, March/April 2008 Sunday League

Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.

It's all about patience and percentages. Be patient and the percentages will swing. I love the AK vs. 22 program. That is just awesome and shows that numbers can lie sometimes, so don't let it freak you out when the chaos therory comes in.

What makes me tilt is when I do something I know I shouldnt have.I can handle bad beats up to a point,but when Im doing stupid things my tolerance is lower.

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It doesn't take much for me to tilt anymore...2 or 3 martinis will do it!

Just goes to show the power of statistical variance Mars - I think it comes down to having an expectation of what "should" happen...it is about "being right" but variance has a way of making us look like idiots sometimes, especially when we "should" win and the fish "should" lose....but the reverse happens.

Ultimately, we want to get in the same spot with +EV countless times so that variance will no longer be a factor (but when you play as few hands as I do, this is impossible).

xXcRaZyBiRdXx - when you have played a LOT more hands, I bet that you will not feel the same way as you will have developed strong beliefs around what starting hands to play in specif conditions so the Flop becomes irrellevant when you are not in a hand.

Wow! I thought I was a nerd. Mars, you take it to a whole new level...

So I guess the moral of the story is, Long Term means LONG Term. 20 is obviously far from Long Term. It's really impossible for any of us to truely realize long term playing on a day to day basis. All you can do is, get your chips in when you're ahead, buy a few when you're not and be patient as hell.

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