12.01.2023
7 min read

What is tilt and why is it important to be able to control your emotions? How to recognize that you are losing your temper?

Poker at some moments is very similar to driving on a busy road. When you do the right things and eat in a calm state, it seems that you are in complete control of the situation. However, an accidentally lost hand or an unsuccessful maneuver of the car driving in front can take you out of your mental balance. This can lead to terrible consequences. We tell you what tilt is in poker, why it is important to learn to control your emotions, and also how a card game helps you better experience various nervous situations in life.

The concept of tilt and the reasons for its appearance

Every psychologist will tell you that people are characterized by situations when you lose control of yourself. In the world of gambling, as well as in the gaming environment, this condition is called tilt. For example, in poker, you try to recoup after a frustratingly lost hand, putting everything on the line with a weak combination and not thinking about the consequences. You can also feel what tilt is while driving, when you start to get nervous, worry and make rash maneuvers and actions. Each driver has its own factors that can disrupt the emotional balance:

  • A car moving slowly ahead.
  • A driver performing unexplained actions on the road.
  • Extraneous factors (unpleasant conversation with the boss, quarrel with his wife), etc.

You can't influence so many external factors. This means that you need to learn to control your emotions, not letting them accumulate inside, and then break out, seizing control of your consciousness.

How to understand that you are in tilt?

Every person has felt at least once in his life on his own experience what a tilt is. This applies not only to poker players, but to everyone. At the poker table online or offline, there are several factors that indicate that you are losing control of yourself.

  • A keen desire to recoup. You won't win every first hand — it's an axiom of poker. However, some poker players are particularly sensitive to defeats, trying to immediately replenish the stock of lost chips. As a rule, such actions do not lead to anything good.
  • Deviation from the optimal strategy. Professionalism in poker is manifested in the ability to follow the optimal strategy in any game situations. As soon as you start playing more starting hands, commit more aggressive actions — you are in a tilt.
  • Strange behavior. The misconception is that this can only be noticed when you see an opponent in live poker. Online, too, you can behave inappropriately: start writing all sorts of nonsense in a chat, send a huge number of emoticons or throw virtual objects at rivals without stopping.
  • Elevated temperature. Tilt is a kind of stress. And a person is arranged in such a way that at such moments our body temperature rises. Conduct an experiment — after losing several hands, when you feel anger rising, measure your body temperature. It will be several tenths higher than normal.

Poker is a game of masks. It is not always a smile or a laugh that really means positive emotions. A regular poker game is an opportunity to turn a hobby into a source of basic or additional income, as well as a kind of hardening of your personality. The game is built in such a way that you will have quite a lot of joyful and not so happy moments — won and lost hands. Each such event tempers you, allowing you to meet good luck and failures in life more calmly, controlling your emotions.

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