The mental game: playing your best when it goes badly

Take a tournament player with a strong edge: an ROI of 20% in 500-player fields, playing about 80 tournaments a month. The trainer's variance simulator plays out 1,000 possible versions of their results over each stretch of time and counts how many finish behind. These are illustrative payouts with a fixed skill advantage and independent results, not observations of a player pool.

A single month finishes behind 48% of the time, close to a coin flip, for a player who wins in the long run. Even after a full year, about one run in 7 is still behind. Cash games swing less, but the pattern is the same.

Tilt is any emotion that pulls your decisions away from your best play. Anger after a bad beat is a familiar example, but the coach Jared Tendler, in The Mental Game of Poker, describes several, among them the feeling that the game is unfair, the urge for revenge on one player and the sense that you deserve to win because you are the better player.

One of the few studies of tilt asked 60 Finnish online players to write about a large loss. Their stories followed a common sequence. First came disbelief, a sense that what happened was not real. Then moral indignation: the loss was unfair. Then chasing, playing on to restore what the players saw as a fair balance between wins and losses. Afterwards came disappointment, low mood or anxiety and poor sleep. The more experienced players described a calmer attitude to bad luck.

Chasing losses can make the next hands expensive too. Playing more hands, calling raises you would fold, and making bigger bluffs all feel like taking action, and each one hands chips to the players who stayed calm.

Tilt is hard to see from the inside, so it helps to watch for behaviour instead of feelings. At the trainer's cash and tournament tables a tilt check looks for three signs in the hands you have just played. Its thresholds are app heuristics, not clinically validated measures of tilt:

• Faster decisions. Your typical decision time over the last 10 decisions falls below 60% of your earlier pace. Snap decisions after a loss are often made before you have thought about the hand.
• Looser play after a big loss. After losing 30 big blinds or more in one hand, the share of hands you play (VPIP) rises by 12 percentage points or more.
• Bigger mistakes. The average cost of your last 15 graded decisions is at least 2 times what it was earlier in the session.

None of these proves you are tilted, and you can switch the check off. Each is a prompt to stop for a minute and ask whether the next decision is the one you would make fresh.

Tilt feeds on a common habit: judging decisions by their results. Psychologists call it outcome bias. In a 1988 study, Jonathan Baron and John Hershey gave people the same description of a surgeon's choice to operate. Some were told the patient lived and some that the patient died, and those told about the death rated the decision itself as worse, though the surgeon knew the same things in both versions.

Poker invites the same mistake on every hand. A call with the best of it that loses to a two-outer was still a good call, and a loose call that hits was still a loose call. The trainer's lesson same decisions, different results plays one decision out many times to show the difference between results and decisions.

The best time to decide how to handle a bad session is before it starts, while you are calm. A short routine does most of the work:

1. Check in. Before you play, rate your energy and focus. Tired or upset is a reason to play less or not at all.
2. Set one goal and a stop-loss. For example: fold more often to river raises, and stop after losing three buy-ins or after 90 minutes.
3. Keep the rule. A stop-loss does not change what each hand is worth. It ends the session before your worst play starts.
4. Review without the scoreboard. Afterwards, note the hands that confused you and how you felt, not how much you won.

The mental game page covers each of these as a short lesson with graded questions: tilt, your A-game and C-game, the routine and stop rules.