Poker Articles - Psychology

Staying off Tilt in Poker with Zen

Ok, I have to admit, I stole this idea from Zen and the Art of Poker, which is supposed to be a very good book on well - Zen and Poker. For those of you who don't know, Zen is basically the idea that you can attain peace through understanding and self-control. Now, based on what I just said, if it sounds like I didn't actually read this book - you would be right, I haven't. That said, I feel that I have a very good idea what the book is all about, because I personally found the 'Zen' poker principle before hearing about this book.

So what in the world does poker have to do with zen anyways? Besides weird esoteric images of far-east meditation or religion pop-up, you'll probably be (annoyingly) reminded of all the 'Zen in X' books that you keep hearing about:

Zen in Cooking! Zen in Gardening! Zen in Accounting! Zen in Underwater Basket Weaving .. and well you get the idea, yeah?

So Zen, poker and tilt, how does it all fit?

It all fits because unless you are extremely well balanced (mentally) or are an emotional zombie, you will go on tilt at some time playing poker. For beginning players especially, when you are learning correct poker only to have people beat you with incorrect poker, tilt can be a major factor in your game.

Zen comes in, because learning to deal with tilt, or rather, the cause of tilt is an exercise in self-control coupled with mental understanding of the situation. You can either learn to control your tilt or learn to stop tilt at the root - which is where Zen comes into play.

Tilt: Is it in you?

One misconception people have is that tilt is turning into the Hulk and smashing things to itty bitty pieces when you get angry:

"HULK RIVERED? HULK AAAAANGRY!! HULK SMAAAAASH!!!" (as the tilt-o-wheel goes off)

But the thing about tilt is that even if you don't show anything on the outside, you can still be suffering on tilt from the inside. What this means is that even if you're not acting like the hulk, if you feel like you want to be smashing things, you still have major tilt issues - but just don't show it.

The problem with tilt of course is that it distracts you from optimal play - which most of players are NOT doing even when they aren't on tilt. Even when players are fully aware of what they are doing, they'll call down a hand when they know they are beat - but they just can't bear to laydown their hand.

What tilt does is amplify your hasty decision making and put you in a "I want to get him back", "Fuck it, I don't care" or "I'm going to push my way around" attitude. So, even if you're not smashing things on the table, you're pushing yourself to make wrong plays in crucial situations. You don't have to be a pot splashing maniac to be on tilt - because if you make any play that costs you a bet that you could have saved, that's good enough to be on tilt.

Identify the cause of tilt?

Here is where Zen comes in. When I ask you to identify the cause of tilt, what is your response?

• 1. Losing a lot of money on a big hand
• 2. Being rivered by a fish
• 3. Losing a hand where I was the winner
• 4. Playing correctly and still losing

All of these are reasons for going on tilt, but only #4 really addresses the issue of the cause of tilt. The reason you go on tilt is because even though you played to the best of your abilities and played what you thought was correct poker, someone else managed to beat you. Of course, that's quite unfair when you think about it, right? Which in turn, makes you angry. "He was a 7:1 underdog and he should have known by the way you were betting, but called anyways!" you tell yourself. But if you re-think through your point, you'll realize that: Yes, your opponent had no idea he was the underdog, otherwise he wouldn't have made the call!

Zen Lesson #1: Understand your opponent instead of blaming him

Let's say ou were a History major and asked your friend what year Columbus founded America, you wouldn't smack him in the head if he replied "Uh... 1812" would you? No you wouldn't! Why? Because he's not a history major and doesn't have the foggiest on the correct answer. This very simple concept in empathy (looking at things through the eyes of someone else) should help you understand why you shouldn't get angry at your opponent.

To hit the point home again, imagine if YOU are doing something that you enjoy only as a hobby - let's say golf. You're swinging away on the greens and make a lucky hole in one. You're really happy, but a pro-golfer comes by and tells you that your swing was awful, your clubs are second rate and that you don't deserve to be playing golf. You'd get pissed in a hurry and tell them to go shove it - and for good reason, you're just here to have fun! You don't give a rats ass about good form, because dropping $20 for a weekend of golf is your idea of a good time.

So, before berating other players at a table, stop and remember that almost everyone at the table is just looking to have fun. You're one of the few serious ones or aspiring pros. So, act like a professional and realize that it's completely pointless to blame people for mistakes they A) don't realize and B) don't care about. They are here to have fun and it's not your right to spoil it.

Zen Lesson #2: There is no revenge in poker, just karma

Most of the advice you will get about tilt is to remember that it's a long term game. If you read inbetween the lines, what the advice is really saying is either: that bastard will bust out eventually or you will win eventually. What's wrong about both of these modes of thinking is that it still implies feeling sorry over the fact that you had a bad beat.

The problem however, is that line of thinking (however logical) is flawed in terms of controlling tilt. As long as you keep thinking that you should be sorry for yourself after every bad beat - you'll still be tilting. You don't want to be feeling sorry for yourself period if you want to get off tilt.

To illustrate, if you just had your car stolen and the policeman told you "Oh don't worry, he'll eventually be caught down the road." That doesn't make you feel better, does it? No it doesn't, because you still want to catch that punk and give him some five-fingered medicine. But the fact is, you can't.

You just simply have to man up to the fact that your car is gone and no line of wishy-washy "oh but he'll pay in the future!" thinking is going to make you feel better, even if it is true. You need to face it now and get over it. Man up. You lost. Suck it up and move on.

Zen Lesson #3: Give up control

Before you watch Rounders for the umpteeth time and convince yourself that poker is a skill only game, remember that it wouldn't be gambling if there wasn't luck involved. World Series of Poker champions have been made by the river, so don't think that you're special when it comes to getting a bad beat. You lost $20, $50, $100 big ones? Boo hoo. Try losing $400,000 and a bracelet. It's still a game that is dicated by luck - and don't you forget it.

Try to think of poker in this way: Luck is a mountain, poker is a big boulder and you are skill, running along the boulder trying to move it to avoid smashing into trees as it rolls down the mountain. No matter how hard you try, you can only adjust the boulder so much to avoid hitting trees. Sometimes the trees are just ahead and there's nothing you can do, while other times you can barely avoid a hit if you try with all your might.

If you finally mastered this boulder game, you would eventually realize that there is only so much you can do, while the rest is up to fate. It's futile to try and control that which you can't. All you can do is position yourself in the best spot possible and hope for the best. Accept it. Really.

Just. Let. Go.

Zen Lesson #4: Using Zen to find your source of anger

This is the most important lesson. When you try to get over tilt, you are basically forcing your left brain (logic) to tell your right brain (emotion) why it shouldn't be pissed off. But no matter how much you mentally fight yourself, you're trying to surpress emotions instead of addressing them. What you really need to be doing is stopping your emotions at the source.

Your emotional center acts up as a response to a need. If someone punches you in the face for example, your reaction goes along the line of:

1. Physical: Flinch, close your eyes
2. Subconscious: Recognize a threat
3. Mental: Analyze how to respond to threat
4. Emotional: Become angry or fearful
5. Biological: Adrenaline rush, get ready to fight or run

The way this applies to tilting is poker, is by understanding the order in which tilt takes place. By taking time to examine your own thoughts (thinking about how you think), you can use Zen principles to break down exactly what you are going through during tilt:

1. Mental: Observe opponent rivering you
2. Mental: Realize you had a better hand than your opponent before the river
3. Mental: Realize you played correctly, while your opponent played incorrectly
4. Subconscious: You are accustomed to being rewarded when you do things correctly
5. Subconscious: You were not rewarded
6. Subconscious: This is not normal
7. Subconscious: This is not 'fair'
8. Subconscious: Unfairness is resolved through conflict
9. Emotional: You need to prepare for conflict
10. Emotional: You need to become aggressive
11. Biological: Increase heart rate, release adrenaline, tense up the body
12. Mental: TILT
13. Mental: Recognize that you are getting angry
14. Mental: Realize that you need to stop getting angry
15. Mental: Fight against emotion and subconscious for control

We can see by this deconstruction that tilt comes up because of how an your subconscious reacts to an 'unfair' situation. This reaction is literally ingrained in most of us, as our biology, society and economy is based on reward conditioning. Everytime you are rewarded, our brain maps out a path on how to receive that reward, so it's really inescapable. So, when you don't get rewarded when you expect to, the brian sees this as an uncertain situation or situation that appears to violate the mental rules you have in place. Thus, the brain sees this uncertainty as confusion, which leads to a reaction of anger or fear.

To make yet another analogy, if your work suddenly decided to dock your pay for no reason, you would be up in arms because it's obviously uncalled for (unfair). Unless you are a weak or timid person, your body will react in the appropriate way to deal with the situation. Just like most guys need a beer or two before hitting on a hottie at the bar, you need to get a bit riled up before you go mouthing off at your boss.

So, they key point here is that by analyzing your own mental train of thought and subconscious train of thought, you will realize that your body is reacting in a way that it is designed to. What you need to do, is intercept your thought processes at #4 and realize that you will not be rewarded in the same way in poker as other activities in your life. By reworking your thought processes at steps #4 and #6, you will stop the progression toward tilt and keep the game solely mental, instead of emotional.

To deal with #4 - you need to toss out the window your expectations of being rewarded in poker. You need to realize that there is no guarantee of being rewarded when you do things correctly in poker. Lose that mental hump you have where you are actually expecting something for doing things the right way. It doesn't happen in poker. So dig deep... and go back to that inner child in you where you were rewarded a cookie by your teacher for reciting the entire alphabet in front of the class. Now replace that cookie with a solid smack to the head. That's poker. Get it?

Zen Lesson #5: Learn from your defeats

On another note, many players will find themselves blaming their opponent for their own bad plays and go on tilt as a result. I see this often on the forums, with people blasting other players for outdrawing them when their opponent had the pot odds to do so. So some things you should ask yourself about each 'bad beat' you have should be:

• Did I completely count how many outs my opponent had?
• Did I make it incorrect pot odds for him to call?
• Did I try to bluff out a calling station?
• Was this really a bad beat?

In any game, you will find that the best players get angry just like everyone else from time to time. The thing that is different from the elite players however, is that they will always analyze their own play over and over, asking themselves "What did I do wrong?" or "How do I prevent that from happening again?". It's a different mentality than the average player, because the top players always put the blame to themselves first, rather than their opponent. The reason they do this is because you can't improve on yourself if you're not willing to admit fault first.

In many cases, you will find that you did play correctly of course. But in those times where you played incorrectly, if you cannot figure out that the problem lies with you, then you will never be able to mature as a poker player (or in any other of life's endeavors) for that matter. Self-reflection is one of the key principles to Zen.

Conclusion and Summary

So to summarize:

1. Do not blame your opponents for things they do not know - that is wrong
2. Accept your bad beats straight up and don't mull over them
3. Give up control and let fate run it's course
4. There are no cookies in poker
5. Learn from your mistakes to make yourself a better player

Lastly, if you liked this article, then you should read more about Zen or meditation sometime. You can solve a lot of your own problems just by using this same process of internal dialogue; which comes naturally through meditation. Accessing your subconscious allows you to see what is really brewing under the surface of your brain. You'd be surprised at what you'll find there.