Originally posted by Dendra
Hello Jared, I have a question regarding your classification of tilts and its causes.
You don't seem to include overly positive feelings as a source of tilting and I feel like you are missing one piece of the puzzle here. To my current knowledge, you define tilt as "anger+bad play" and claim that a winning tilt is actually being overconfident - which you put into a different category.
I haven't read your book so I can't say for sure if this is true and I also can't say if you didn't cover what I'm about to say, but given the list of your tilts, I'll make a safe guess that you didn't.
When people talk about tilts, they generally think about losing big pots and other negative causes for tilting. However, winning big pots and being overwhelmed by other positive feelings can cause a deviation from your standard play just as well.
I'm not even talking about overconfidence here - I'm talking about the fear of losing your recent winnings. The source of tilt is not the fear, it is the ecstatic feeling of winning something extraordinary, unexpected, etc.
In some cases fear is a too strong word, as we primarily feel very happy and don't want to lose that feeling.
This pretty much puts people into two categories, those who tighten up their game and wish to avoid losses after a big win and those who are encouraged by big wins to go for more (overconfidence or call it what you like - I say it's greed more often than not).
Either way you are deviating from your optimal play and therefore you are tilting. I am unsure why does only negative deviation from standard play count as tilt whereas a "positive" deviation does not?
Maybe it just comes down to defining tilt and in that aspect I feel it's wrong to separate negative and positive reasons as if they are completely different topics - they in fact fall under the same category.
It would be the same to say hatred is an emotion and love is not.
On that note - you say revenge is a form of tilt, how about compassion then? It just occurred to me that in odd scenarios, a player could practically donate his money to an opponent due to feeling pity for him - indeed a rare case, especially in poker, but it is still a plausible one.
Anyway, I'd be interested to hear your reasons for separating positive emotions from causes of tilts and if you indeed did overlook it, what do you think about the emotional changes when a player is on a winning tilt (overconfidence excluded since you mentioned that).
Hey Dendra,
I just posted an answer for you in the comments of my last article, responding to your post. Overconfidence is the most common positive emotion that can cause a deviation in play, but protecting a win, or as you say protecting the good feelings that come with a win are definitely another one. I agree that fear of losing is too strong of a word/phrase, but all emotions exist along a spectrum of intensity, and protection is a much smaller version of fear.
The major reason for defining tilt as being just caused by anger is because it narrows down those types of issues so we can better analyze them, and come up with a solution. If we're just dealing with this huge all encompassing definition of tilt as being anything less than optimal play, it becomes MUCH harder to properly analyze the cause of that deviation. Lack of focus, fatigue, doubt, not trusting your gut, internet problems, boredom, low confidence, are just a few quick examples of reason people can play poorly and each example has a different solution.
One thing I didn't fully understand from your post is this: I am unsure why does only negative deviation from standard play count as tilt whereas a "positive" deviation does not? When you say "positive" deviation do you mean positive emotion - such as excitement? or do you mean positive deviation where you're playing better than ever? If the latter, I think the conversation is shifting to an entirely different topic around performance that doesn't relate to tilt. Either way, please explain more of what you mean.
I'm not separating negative and positive reasons for what causes tilt or deviation in play. Anything that causes a decrease in a players game is negative, whether that reason is excessive anger or excessive confidence or excitement. Too much positive emotion is just as negative as too much negative emotion because it shuts down a person's ability to think clearly. But, the reason I separate them out from causes of tilt is because to properly correct the excessive emotion requires different advice than anger, because they are different, even though they're all emotion. A person who is overconfident may believe that they're in total control of the action, owning souls, and believe that winning is just going to continue happening like printing money. This player is likely, overestimating the degree to which they've mastered areas of their game, ignoring the realities of variance, ignoring real weaknesses that remain in their game that aren't currently being exposed, and/or believe that what they see in their mind or feel is an actuality of what will happen in the future (aka: shitty psychics). One or many of these causes are not entirely different than some of the causes of tilt, ie, these same issues will cause anger when this player is running bad. However, for the sake of clarity, organizing the issues this way makes it clearer to people the dangers of overconfidence and can help to highlight underlying issues that may not exist when running bad.
Make sense? What do you think?
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