Let’s face it, low-stack poker – or “the micros” as we refer to them online – is a bit of a jungle. There are so many bad, crazy, and tilted players that sometimes you have no idea what they’re doing.
This is one of the reasons why it is possible to beat these games with a high win rate. However, this volatility is also something that keeps many people coming back to play.
You will undoubtedly face more bad beats than at any other limits when playing against players like that because they don't give up on anything (or so it seems sometimes). You will also constantly face all sorts of coolers and stuff like that.
For new poker players, this can often be too much to handle, especially if they are facing a long losing streak where things go badly for days or weeks. In fact, one of the biggest keys to success at the lower limits is simply being able to stay calm when the uncontrollable factors don’t go your way for a while.
In this article, I'll share five mental strategies I use to minimize the effects of tilt when things aren't going so well for me at low limits.
- Take short breaks
When I'm playing online and everything gets out of control, I will go often sit out at all my desks for five minutes and cool off. If it's a good day, then I'll go out and see the day.
The point here is to give myself a break. This is really easy to get caught up in when things get tough. bad beats and the coolers are appearing at a frantic pace.
By taking short breaks like this, I can stop and think rationally about what is going on. I tell myself that I am a consistently winning player over the long term. If I feel like I am playing well, then I will continue. However, if I feel like I am too tilted, then I will take the day off.
- Accept that you make mistakes
One of the biggest reasons people tilt is because they beat themselves up over the mistakes they make. Sometimes you’ll play poorly. Sometimes you’ll read someone completely wrong and lose a big pot as a result. And sometimes you’ll even misclick a big pot in online play.
You will never be a perfect poker player. Everyone makes mistakes like these and you need to recognize that it is acceptable.
You can also learn from your mistakes. If you are playing online and using a HUD, then mark the hands where you believe you played poorly. After your session When you're done, review your hands with a relaxed mind. This way, you can avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.
If you feel really tilted by a particular hand, then leave the table and take a short break. This will allow you to mentally process what happened in a rational way and move on.
- Constantly remember the long term
I hope you are a winning poker player in the long run. If so, then just remember that despite what is happening right now, you are profitable at the tables in the long run. The short term is always just an illusion in this game.
You can even create some physical evidence to help you remember this. I usually use a long-term graph of my results as my desktop wallpaper. If you play live, then perhaps you track your results on some sort of mobile device and can reference that.
Sometimes small reminders like this can help. Make it impossible to ignore long-term successes. This helps you understand that what’s happening now isn’t real—or at least it’s not indicative of the bigger picture in any way.
If you don’t already have a successful track record, then you should work on finding, locating, and fixing the problem areas in your game. Reviewing your hands or discussing them with other winning players can be a big help. You can also improve your understanding of the game by reading poker books, watching educational videos, hiring a coach, or taking advantage of the Internet's other numerous resources.
Finally, it is important to understand that regardless of whether or not you are a winner in the long run, nothing that happens in a given session means a lot. Anything below 10,000 hands is pretty much meaningless in the long run of this game. It's a very common situation to do very badly or very well in a sample like this. It's also very common to suffer only average luck (good or bad).
To get a true sense of your actual results takes much longer. I usually recommend 10 times that number of hands to start with (i.e. 100,000). That may sound like a lot, but that’s the nature of poker. And that’s actually why it’s such a profitable game. Most people view the short term as the only reality and give away all their profits by tilting when things go wrong for them. The biggest winners are those who can see through this illusion.
- Change your thoughts
Much of the contemporary psychology of tilt revolves around the negative thoughts that start to creep into your head when things are going badly. You may start to believe them, leading to a “victim mentality,” which often leads to feelings of frustration and poor decision-making.
You might start telling yourself things like:
- “They always hit me flush.”
- “They always have pocket Aces when I have KK.”
- "Those fishes always hit their outs against me on the river.”
The problem with these statements is that none of them are true. Simple math tells us that the flush draw is always significantly underdog against a made hand, having pocket Ks when someone else has pocket A's is extremely rare, and few outs are called “few” for a reason.
A big part of reducing tilt comes from learning to challenge and then change these false statements into true ones. This will allow you to stop distorting the reality of the tables and see the bad beats and the coolers as they really are, i.e. variance.
- Take it easy on the situation
Lastly, it's important to never take the game too seriously. You probably started playing poker because you thought it was fun, right? I know I did. Well, the game should always be taken that way.
When things are going badly at the tables, ask yourself how much it really matters in the big picture. Is having a bad day/week at the tables really going to bring your world crashing down on you? Is losing 20, 50, or 100 buy-ins really that big of a deal? Probably not.
Enjoy the game. Even the best players in the world go through bad spells for many days when they play. What's the point in getting angry and frustrated about it? The only factor you can control is the quality of your own game. As long as you are making good decisions, you should always be satisfied.
If you find yourself becoming very frustrated with your day-to-day results, then it’s a good idea to step away from the tables for a while. It’s okay to be competitive and strive to win, but your short-term results will always be out of your control in this game.
Work only on the one factor you really control, which is the quality of your decision-making. Everything else will fall into place over time.
Translated and adapted from: 5 Effective Ways to Reduce Tilt at the Micros
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