"Good Hand" Tilt in $4/$8 HE

During my trip to Foxwoods last week, I was fortunate enough to get some insight into my typical "tilt" scenario. It was during a $4/$8 session very early in the morning (around 03:30 - 05:00) after the $1/$2 game in which Nick and I were playing seemed to have dried up. (nick_marden stayed, although I am not sure why.)

For those of you poker newbies not familiar with "tilt", it can be loosely defined as "a state of mind that causes a poker player, due to frustration or external factors, to make poor decisions and fail to play his/her best game". The etymology of the word is generally believed to be from knocking a pinball machine to "cheat", which causes it to "tilt" and makes you lose.

( I discovered during this session what I typically do when I tilt, which hopefully will assist me when it happens again. )

Toward the end of the session, I got the opportunity to see how bad tilt can be. A ruckus erupted over at the $5/$5 no-maximum-buy-in NL HE game across the room. A very large man began screaming: "What were you doing in there with that!?!?" and throwing and kicking his chair. I ran over to see what the hand was before it mucked, and saw about $4,000 in the pot being shipped to a player who seemed to have turned the nut straight. The angry fellow seemed to have flopped top set (queens) and all the money got in at some point. I thought again about the fact that if you have that strong of a reaction to losing, you shouldn't be playing at the stakes you are playing at. Security descended on the table and calmed the guy down, but I wonder if he spent some time to learn a lesson from his tilt; I hope he did.

Phone Post

Profitable $5/$10 HE Session Finishes Up Foxwoods Visit

My last Foxwoods session was the best, by far. I recovered nearly all the losses from my $1/$2 no limit HE sessions. In one four hour session, I won $544 playing $5/$10 limit HE with a full kill. ( Mostly, it was straight-forward play against opponents who made a lot of mistakes. But, there were a few interesting hands. )

So, this is the last of my recent Foxwoods trip posts. While I did play some O/8 while there, too, it was a short session and not much happened. I have a partially drafted post about about Greg's game last Tuesday. I've already put up a phone post about the California games, and I expect to do more in the next 48 hours.