Tilt after a bad beat: a routine that stops the next three hands

A bad beat is not a leak. It is the price of having been ahead, and over enough hands it is paid for by the hands where you were behind. The leak is what happens in the three or four hands immediately afterwards, and we think it is worth putting a number on before describing the routine, because the number is larger than most players expect.

What the next three hands are worth

Take a winning cash player at five big blinds per hundred hands — a respectable rate. Over a thousand-hand session that is fifty big blinds of expectation. At £1/£2 the session is worth about £100 before variance.

Now add one tilt episode: three hands played too fast, one of them a stack-off that should have been a fold. Call it twenty-five big blinds. That single episode removes half the session’s expectation, and it took about ninety seconds. Two episodes and the session is break-even; one per session and the rate drops from five big blinds per hundred to two and a half, which is the difference between a winning player and a hobby. Nothing in that calculation is about the cooler itself.

The routine, in five steps

It is deliberately mechanical, because the point is to have something to do that does not require judgement from a brain that has temporarily stopped supplying it.

1. Sit out one orbit. Not a break, not a walk — press the button, fold nothing, and watch. One orbit is nine hands at a full table and costs you one small blind and one big blind in a cash game. That is the cheapest insurance in poker.
2. Count the stack and say the number. Out loud if you are alone. The purpose is to replace a feeling about how much you have lost with a figure, because the feeling is always bigger than the figure.
3. State the hand as a decision, not an outcome. “I raised, he called, the turn gave him four outs and one of them came.” If the decisions were right, the hand is finished and there is nothing to recover. If one of them was wrong, that is a note for later, not a reason to play the next hand differently.
4. Check the stop-loss. Set in buy-ins before the session starts, not during it. Two buy-ins down is a common figure; what matters is that it was chosen by a calm person. If you are at it, the session is over — and the decision has already been made, so it does not need making now.
5. Restart the first hand deliberately. When you come back in, play the first hand slowly on purpose, whatever it is, including the fold. The object is to re-establish that you are choosing, which is the thing tilt takes away.

Why the orbit works

Tilt is not primarily anger; it is a shortened time horizon. Immediately after a loss the hand in front of you feels like the chance to settle the account, and settling the account is not a strategy — it is a reason to put money in without a reason. Sitting out for nine hands does not calm you down, and it is not supposed to. It removes the opportunity to act for long enough that the horizon comes back. Our older columns on going on tilt and staying off tilt describe the same shortening from inside the hand.

The version nobody notices

The loud tilt — raising everything, chasing a player who beat you — is the one with a name, and it is the less expensive of the two, because it is obvious enough to stop. The expensive version is passive: calling raises with hands you would normally fold, checking down a hand you would normally bet, playing on for another hour because stopping feels like admitting something. It does not feel like tilt at all. It feels like being tired, and it costs the same five big blinds per hundred. Our piece on passive tilt and the importance of focus is the longer version of this paragraph.

The two rules worth setting in advance

A stop-loss in buy-ins and a session length in minutes, both decided before you sit down. Written down, if that helps. Everything in the routine above is an attempt to buy ninety seconds of distance, and everything decided in advance is ninety seconds you do not have to buy. The discipline of pushing chips forward only when there is a reason to is the oldest subject on this site, and our column on chasing the game and discipline has not needed revising.