Poker Skills: Avoiding Tilt
Learning to Avoid Tilt Will Improve Your Game
Every player encounters tilt when they play, and it can make or break a player. Tilt management is a key skill to learn.
To develop into a good poker player, you need to learn to avoid tilt. This would seem to be one of the easiest things to do in poker but may players don't realize how easy it is to go on tilt. There are many simple things that can cause tilt.
Wild play is the most common reason players lose their bankrolls. It doesn't take very much to force someone on tilt. There are reasons for it, and when you recognize them in yourself, you can spot them in others, and use it to your advantage.
Reasons for Tilt
1. Distractions: It's Murphy's Law of Poker. Anything that can distract you from your game will happen. Whether you're at home and the kids decide to reset your computer; the waitress at the casino has a shirt that is on too tight; or the bartender is pouring the drinks a little too freely, unless you control your distractions you run the risk of tilt.
2. Table Talk: Sometimes it's hard to ignore what other players are saying at the table. It's part of their strategy and often happens when you are playing against a maniac. If you let the talk get into your head, you can easily find yourself pushing your entire stack in on a hand that you have no chance of winning, just to prove a point or try and keep your ego satisfied.
3. Bad Beats: A good measure of a player is how well they respond to a bad beat. There is a sense of failure when your full house gets beaten by four of a kind, and you usually go all in on the next hand, to either try and recover your stack or just go out in a blaze of glory.
4. Playing above your level: Nothing makes a person go on tilt faster then playing out of your league. If your bankroll can't afford the swings that come with playing poker, then you should drop a level .
Tilt Management
Tilt is all about stress, and just like stress management there are different techniques you can use to manage tilt. You can take a deep breath, and remember it's better to fold a hand or sit out then lose all of your chips. If you know the reasons for tilt, you will know how to avoid it better and you will play a better game.
You can never fully eliminate tilt, but you can affect how much it impacts your stack. Good luck.
