Tilt

Tilt is not a bad mood; it's a measurable change in strategy. The player who opens 15% of hands starts opening 40%. The player who folds dominated hands starts calling three-bets with A-9 because "it's my turn". Revenge tilt targets the specific opponent who wronged you; winner's tilt loosens you when you're up because the money feels free. Every version costs the same thing: decisions made to manage feelings instead of money.

The arithmetic is vicious because tilt compounds losses that variance started. You lose a $300 pot as an 85% favourite — annoying, but priced into the game. The three punting hands you play over the next twenty minutes cost another $200, and those losses aren't variance at all; they're a choice. Plenty of losing sessions in everyone's history are one bad beat plus an hour of tilt, and the beat is the smaller half.

Defences that actually work are pre-committed rules, not willpower. A stop-loss ("if I'm down three buy-ins, I leave"), a trigger rule ("two bad beats and I take a walk"), or simply a hard session end time. Rabbit hunting, needle from the table, and alcohol are the common accelerants — worth knowing about yourself before you're stuck, not after. Sleep on big losses before reviewing them.

Your session tracker is the best tilt detector you own. Look for sessions where the first two hours are normal and the last hour is a cliff, or nights where you played twice as long as planned after a losing start. The pattern in the numbers is the pattern in your head. Variance you can't control; tilt you can — and the difference between the two is most of what separates winning players from talented losers.