Oh, To Be Able to Go Back and Screw Up Again

Excited today to point everyone to a new piece on the Learn.PokerNews site by our friend Tommy Angelo, poker player, coach, and author of Elements of Poker (reviewed here) and A Rubber Band Story and Other Tales.

Tommy has started what will be a new monthly series on the site titled “Tilt for Beginners,” the idea of which is explained in this first installment, called “Where There’s Poker, There’s Tilt.”

Click the title and read and you’ll see Tommy incorporating into the article the conversation we had about his possibly becoming a contributor, including his circling around to the topic of addressing the subject of tilt as it is experienced by relatively new players. It’s an interesting point he’s introducing -- namely, that even brand new poker players can experience certain kinds of tilt even without having acquired an “A-game” yet, despite the fact that tilt is often defined as something that takes one away from one’s A-game.

Those who click through to read will see Tommy inviting readers to share their own tilt stories and questions via comments or by sending email to Learn. If you do happen to have any tilt-related stories or questions to share, by all means send them along!

This initial article and the idea of the upcoming series has gotten me thinking back to first starting out at poker -- that is, to that first wave of becoming genuinely immersed in the game and building upon an initial knowledge base to try to become a better player. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but back then even getting “tilted” was kind of fun, in a strange way, because like everything else there was a kind of novelty associated with it that made experiencing tilt intriguing (in addition, of course, to the negative feelings and memories associated with playing poorly after letting emotion affect one’s play).

Can you remember the first time you genuinely suffered a bad beat or some other sequence occurred in a hand or session to cause you to tilt -- that is, really tilt -- for the first time? I would guess most don’t, actually, because we probably have to endure a few instances of tilting before realizing what’s happening. (And I suppose there are a select few who never are able to recognize fully that they’ve tilted.)

Almost makes me want to go back and relive that first bad beat and/or tilty session. It’s a well-worn cliché to wish one could go back to one’s earlier days and relive them with the knowledge one has accumulated since. But it wouldn’t be so bad to go back and learn it all over again, too, so to speak, and relive what it was like to make those mistakes for the first time.

Anyhow, I’m curious to read where Tommy takes this series, as well as perhaps to read some accounts of early experiences with tilt.