Crazy things always happen at the poker table. Sometimes you work for hours to get the right situation to cash in on your opponents mistakes. Now you’ve got him, or do you?
You call a raise from a loose player with pocket eights. The flop comes A83. He bets the pot, and you call.
The turn is a 5. He bets the pot again. You re-raise, and put him all in. He calls instantly and turns over A4. When a 2 hits the river, you are left pulling your hair out.
It’s after hands like these that we see what we are really made of. Do we keep our cool? Or, is it time to get crazy.
If you find yourself going all in by coming over the top of a raise and a re-raise with pocket nines, you have gone on tilt. Something like QQ will be calling and taking your stack most of the time.
The key is to avoid this knee jerk reaction to the bad beat you took. The bad beat was unavoidable, nothing you could do about it. We all tend to try to quickly get these chips back. We force the action. This is tilting.
If you find yourself steaming after a bad beat, be smart. Stop playing for a bit. Get away from the table for a few minutes. Then come back stronger than ever.
The best thing you can do is know that you played well, and that this is just part of the “variance” of poker. Variance in poker results from the fact that, in almost all of these situations, you will only have some statistical advantage when all the chips go in. Variance defines the skew of these numbers at times. In the long run the variance will flatten out, and you will get what you deserve.
When you are getting unlucky, the statistics are skewed against you. This creates an even tougher environment to avoid tilting. Every play you make starts to feel hopeless. Your opponents make bad plays, and beat you anyway.
Your priced in draws don’t hit. You push with KK only to meet AA. Then, your AA gets cracked by some maniac who goes all in with J10 suited.
You haven’t made one single mistake, and you’re getting killed. Poker is a tough way to make an easy living. In the long run, this will come back to you. It never feels like it, but you must believe and understand this.
To profit at the tables, you need to play good poker when things are going bad. Things will go bad. If you don’t play well when they are, you give away your profits. Don’t tilt, stay cool and keep your bank roll growing.
