Super Bowl XLVIII and Passive Tilt

I mentioned when I signed off on the last of my travel reports from Deauville how I was eyeing a long travel day on Sunday with a schedule getting me home about an hour before Super Bowl XLVIII was set to kickoff. It’s about a 45-minute drive from the airport to the farm, and so if all went as planned I’d make it home just in time to watch the sucker get started.

There were a number of odd little moments and weird delays going from Deauville to Paris to Philadelphia to Charlotte to the farm, plus one fun coincidence running into fellow tourney reporter Mo Nuwwarah in the Philly airport (also on his way home from a reporting gig, his being at the Borgata). But I ran well enough to stay mostly on pace and only a lengthy wait on the tarmac at CLT for an open gate made me late getting home. I walked in the door about halfway through the first quarter, glad to reunite with Vera and our cats and horses, and after 18-plus hours of traveling was almost giddy just to plop down on the couch and tune in.

I’d listened to the start on the radio, and so knew about the safety and how things had begun less than ideally for Denver. It was 5-0 when I turned it on, then 8-0, then quickly 15-0 and 22-0, and I just had to laugh about having wanted to get home in a hurry to watch such a stinker.

Had been so busy during the week I hadn’t really thought too much about how the game might go, but I can’t imagine any thought process that would have led me to suspect an outcome such as the one that occurred.

Easy in retrospect to point back to the last time a top-rated offense clashed with a top-rated defense in Super Bowl XXXVII, to note how the defensive power (Tampa Bay) crushed the offensive one (Oakland) by 27 (forcing five turnovers along the way), and perhaps to use that to support a thesis that Seattle might do something similar, thereby proving the maxim about defense winning championships, regardless of the sport.

But I doubt I’d have gotten around to that idea on my own, and I know most didn’t. Indeed, it sounds like the sportsbooks did well as the majority of bettors leaned Denver’s way -- two of every three, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

I was vaguely rooting for Denver, although was reminded by my mother over the last week how as a kid I was a Seahawks fan, mostly because they were new, had cool colors and a menacing logo I could draw in my notebooks, and a quarterback whose first name started with a “Z” (Jim Zorn). Also, no one else liked them. But since the Panthers arrived that’s where my allegiance has been, and so wasn’t all that committed either way last night.

And, of course, not too long after I got home, there wasn’t much to root about once the game had gotten out of hand. Was a little like watching a poker player take a hit early in a session and then start making bad play after bad play in a tilty effort to right the ship. Although John Fox’s conservative tendencies -- something that we Panthers fans well remember and which came up last year in that AFC Championship game versus the Ravens -- made Denver seem less like a player betting too much when he shouldn’t, but rather one who had tightened up too much after losing early.

I like John Fox and was sorry to see him leave Carolina. And while coaching hardly decided yesterday’s game (as Bill Barnwell notes at the start of the “Thank You For Not Coaching” section of his column today), it definitely felt like Denver’s lack of readiness to take any risks at all yesterday made it essentially impossible for them to put up any sort of fight after getting knocked down early.

Any doubt about the outcome was erased once Seattle returned the kickoff for a TD to start the second half and go up 29-0. But then Denver got the ball back, marched to the Seattle 38-yard-line, and on 3rd-and-10 called a draw. I flashed back to Fox’s Panthers days, when the 3rd-and-long draws routinely drove us insane. Then after losing a yard they punted down four scores, which definitely seemed the equivalent of a beaten-down poker player folding again, clearly not able anymore to give himself a chance even to get lucky.

I liked Fox at Carolina and still pull for him, but talk about “passive tilt”...!

Speaking of “passive tilt,” one of the great thinkers about tilt, Tommy Angelo, has a new contribution over a Learn.PokerNews today, another installment in his “Tilt for Beginners” series, this one titled “Writhing Over Rules” -- check it out.

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.

Laurel, Hardy & Me

The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker wrapped up yesterday, as did my work helping cover the sucker. As was the case last September with WCOOP, it was again a lot of fun to be scribblin’ alongside and collaboratin’ with a good group of folks. Am glad to have it in the rearview, though, as the frequent late nights (sometimes ’til sunrise) screwed with the sleep schedule a bit more than yr cranky gumshoe would’ve liked (or had necessarily anticipated). Goes with the territory, of course.

Have been so busy with SCOOPing I haven’t had a lot of time to think about this here Vegas trip I have coming up this week. Will say a little more about that tomorrow, which is the day Vera Valmore and I will be flying out. Have a lot of stuff planned, though, including meeting up with various blogger types and others. Like I say, stay tuned.

Wanted to write just a little today about my recent online play. Had built up the online roll a bit and moved to $1/$2 limit hold’em a while back where things were going just swimmingly for three weeks or so. Too swimmingly, really, as my win rate had climbed to a gawdy 6 BB/100 hands or something there for a while before finally settling back down into a more realistic range. Then came a nasty little crash over the last few days which ended yesterday with me doing what I did back in December and just cashing out a big chunk o’ change in disgust.

So I’m back to just a few hundy to play with online, meaning I’ll have to head back down in stakes again in order to manage the bankroll correctly. I might even get away from LHE a bit and explore some other games and tourneys in an effort to try to keep poker fun here in the near term. Try some of that change I was yapping about in my last post.

What happened yesterday was another quick, painful sequence of bad timing, misfortune, and a bit of what Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger in The Poker Mindset refer to as “passive tilt.” That’s when you react to a bad session by starting to expect the worst (e.g., believing your opponent will always hit that draw), and thus go into “check/call mode when faced with any aggression from your opponents unless you have an extremely strong hand.”

The authors explain how unlike other, more obvious forms of tilt (when you know you’re tilting), passive tilt can often operate somewhere below conscious thought, and thus “can go undetected for a considerable period of time, especially when triggered by simply running badly.” I’m pretty sure this is what I have been dealing with the last few days, and I’m going to point to one moment in particular from yesterday’s session that kind of woke me up to what was going on.

I came to a new table and within a few hands immediately recognized the player on my left to be an especially weak opponent, doing a lot of limping and calling, showing down subpar hands, and being exploited by a couple of other, more tutored players at the table. I ended up getting into at least three hands with this player in which I lost big pots after he hit unlikely draws on the end (e.g., rivering five-outers to make two pair, filling gutshots, etc.). Then, as often happens in this situation, the guy ended up giving it all back very quickly to the rest of the table, went busto, then left.

So my mood wasn’t ideal. There were at least two very good players at the table, and since we were six-handed that meant I probably should’ve just left, too, and found an easier spot. But being down, I was stubborn about it and so stuck around.

That’s when I noticed the guy on my right was three-betting preflop every single time the player two to my left open-raised. I kept picking up winners like 7-4-offsuit, so I was folding out of those hands, of course. But it was getting obvious: the guy on my right for some reason had decided to try to isolate the other player whenever possible.

Finally those two started going at it in the chat box as well, and the gist of their conversation was that each believed the other to be a terrible player. I won’t rehearse the whole debate, other than to say there was a lot of rancor over a two-outer or nine-outer (they couldn’t decide) which one had hit against the other some time earlier. Silly stuff.

Then comes a hand in which I pick up in the cutoff. Player to my right, Laurel, raises. I three-bet. Folds to Hardy in the big blind who cold-calls, and Laurel calls as well. Flop comes a worrisome . Laurel checks, Hardy bets, I raise, and both call. The turn is the , and when both check I overcome my passive-tilty-what-if-I’m-beat fretting and bet. Both call.

The river is the . Passive tilt or not, I ain’t gonna be raising anymore on this one, I don’t think. Laurel checks, Hardy bets, I call, and Laurel check-raises. Ugh. Hardy just calls, though, so I only have to sacrifice one more bet to see this through, which I do.

Laurel shows . A boat on the river. Hardy shows . A straight. Neat. I’ve finished the hand in third place. I don’t bother to figure out what-outer it took to beat me. Neither do they.

Apologies for the bad beat story (or SIGH), but I share it mainly to say that the hand -- along with the two players’ bickering beforehand -- woke me up out of my listless, unprofitable funk and got me to the Cashier’s page. In that hand, from beginning to end, I was essentially overwhelmed by the feeling that there was no way I was gonna win it. Which is no way to operate, fer damn sure.

As was the case in December, cashing out a big chunk had an immediately beneficial effect on my overall mood. Time to regroup once again.

But first, Vegas! More tomorrow on that.

(EDIT [added 11:00 a.m.]: Just happened to notice Barry Tanenbaum posted something yesterday on a related topic, “Passive Play When Tired.”)

The Worst Hand Ever

Had a weird little session of pot-limit Omaha yesterday toward the end of which I believe I might have played my Worst Hand of Poker Ever. We’re talking major league stinker. Just horrific.

Oh, I won the hand. Of course I did. Why else would I bring it up?

I generally keep a level head at the tables. (Heck, just yesterday I was writing about I wasn’t prone to taking too much risk at the tables.) I’ll make mistakes, of course, but usually am able to avoid any real serious blunders. Looking back on yesterday’s session, I can see how a combination of factors led to my slipping into a wild little haze of irrational play right near the end of the session that led to the Worst Hand. Yes, I was most definitely on tilt.

In Your Worst Poker Enemy (2007), Al Schoonmaker includes a terrific chapter about “Preventing and Handling Tilt.” I’m rereading it again today, and am finding myself appreciating it even more after yesterday’s incident. He gives a list of tips for avoiding tilt, including keeping good records, identifying “your triggers and warning signals,” asking yourself questions about your motives as you “constantly scrutinize both your play and your emotional state,” avoiding the impulse to try to get even, and, of course, leaving the game at the first signs of tilt.

Running through the entire chapter is the general notion that the player who is on tilt frequently doesn’t realize it -- thus is it very difficult to leave the game at the first signs, since by definition tilt is a condition generally unrecognizable by the person suffering from it. Writes Schoonmaker, “Some people have even called a brief period of tilt ‘alien-hand syndrome.’ They feel that their brains have lost control over their hands. They watch, almost helplessly, while their hand does something stupid with their chips or cards.”

Man, that was me all right.

Have another book here on my shelf called The Poker Mindset by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger (also published in 2007) which features a chapter on tilt. The authors talk about how “tilt has many layers and nuances” and “can lead to the deterioration of a player’s game into a loose uncontrolled mess.” They also do a good job identifying different types of tilt, including loose tilt (playing too many hands), passive tilt (checking and calling, checking and calling), formulaic tilt (too much “by the book”), aggressive tilt (betting and raising, betting and raising), tight tilt (losing confidence), and FPS tilt (where becomes overly affected by Mike Caro’s “Fancy Play Syndrome”).

During my little tilty period yesterday, I did spend a few hands in the “passive tilt” phase, then had one hand where I probably demonstrated “FPS tilt,” then, in the Worst Hand Ever, it was pure “aggressive tilt.”

The session had begun with two fairly rough beats that took most of my original $50 buy-in. The first came on the very first hand. I’d been dealt A-A-x-x single-suited and raised preflop, getting a caller from a short stack who had about $15 to start. Flopped an ace and bet it, and my opponent called me with a gutshot to a wheel. He’d get there on the turn, at which time we got the rest of his chips in the middle. So a quick hit down to $35. About four hands later I lost most of that (about $30) after flopping a straight, then trapping a different opponent into putting his entire stack in on the turn with bottom set. He filled up on the river, and I was gonna be playing uphill for a while.

Managed to battle back (thanks largely to the very poor play of the short-stacker who’d won that first hand), and was close to even for a long stretch. Then I tumbled back down after losing three or four hands against a new, crafty player who’d come to the table. There was some misfortune involved in those hands, but really the guy just plain outplayed me (repeatedly), basically earning the maximum from me on his made hands.

So I was losing, but really was doing just fine mentally. Then came a weird succession of unlikely -- and costly -- bad beats. Not gonna recount them in detail, but there were no less than three hands, each against different players, in which my opponent rivered me with three, four, and eight outs respectively.

That’s what unhinged me. Might’ve been different if all of the beats had come from one player, but it seemed like the whole table was full of lucky SOBs who’d managed to pilfer my chips unfairly (so went my irrational train of thought). That’s when I passed through a short period of “passive tilt,” had a dumb blind-vs.-blind hand in which I’d flopped trips then mangled it (my “FPS tilt” hand), then cruised seemlessly into that scary “aggressive tilt” that led to the Worst Hand Ever.

Actually won and lost a couple of big pots first before getting to the hand, including receiving one absolute gift of a hand when my overpair of kings somehow was good against two other players who checked down a fairly big pot. Then came the hand. For those who are squeamish or easily upset, I ask you now to look away.

I had just about exactly $50 when the hand began (having rebought). I’d had a second table going for some of the session -- where things had been going better -- and so overall was only down about $25 at this point.

The hand started with me limping UTG with . (Already suspect, I know.) The fellow in the cutoff raised pot to $2.25, the button called, then a player in the small blind who only had $2.55 to start the hand reraised all in. It folded to me and as I knew the betting was no longer open to further reraises, I went ahead and made the call, as did the cutoff and button. So there are four players in the hand vying for the main pot of $10 or so, three of whom would be playing for a possible side pot.

The flop came . No flush draws. Not much in the way of straight draws, although someone could have a Broadway wrap. I have top and bottom pair. I checked, and the cutoff -- the original raiser -- checked as well. Then the button bet $6 into the dry side pot.

I’d seen the button make a couple of stabs at orphaned pots before, as well as some other cheeky plays, and so in my unreasoning state decided this must also be a similarly insincere bet. So what did I do? Reraise pot! (Channelling Jamie Pickering, there.) I pumped it to $28.20, it folded back to the button, and without hesitation he reraised me pot right back.

Oof. I have just $18 left, the pot has swelled to $80, and I know, know, know I am beat (by a set of jacks, probably). Well, I say that now. At the time I had no idea what was happening. My brain had lost control of my hands. So I called.

What did my opponent have? A set of aces, actually. He’d just called the preflop raise rather than reveal his hand with a reraise, and had trapped me fairly soundly. He held to my . So with an flop, what are my chances?

Exactly 7%.

Well, you know already how the story ends. The came on the turn, improving me to a whopping 10%. And the came on the river, giving me the straight and the entire three-digit pot.

Suddenly up for the session, I left immediately, almost frightened by my actions and the redonkulous good fortune of that undeserved runner-runner miracle.

As I said at the start, the Worst Hand Ever. Which I’m sure I wouldn’t be writing about today had it turned out the way it was supposed to.

But I did win, and so am therefore able to share it with all of you as an object lesson. Watch for the signs of tilt! Don’t put yourself in these spots. Just because someone else hits that three-outer on you, don’t make that an excuse to go for your own three-outers!

I feel like some sort of penance is definitely in order here. Think I might just have to take a day or two off from playing altogether after that applesauce. Maybe longer. Give me a chance to reread these chapters. Anyhow, I hope sharing my embarrassing play helps someone out there.

Now that I think about it, though, the fact that I won the hand doesn’t really help that much in the lesson-learnin’ department, does it? Ignore that last part of the story, everyone! Wipe it from yr minds, if you know what’s good for you!

(I am a crazy person.)