We all know the feeling of going on tilt after losing a big hand, where we were the favorite but the board ended up hurting us. That is usually the most common way to enter that state. But many players can also recognize that there is another way to do it. When you are running well, winning flips and accumulating a lot of chips, at some point something makes you play worse, unfocused, fast, and erratic. Many know it as winner’s tilt and today we will explore some of its characteristics.
But running well is not the only factor. Fatigue, tough fields, playing many tables, poor sleep, and a bit of variance are usually things that affect our performance. However, precisely, the problem that appears when things are going well is the hardest to identify.
The main trigger occurs when our brain, seeing that we are winning, starts to think that we must win. We stop having the realistic thought of knowing that we will bust most tournaments and, seeing that things are going well, we start thinking “we should do well in this one”. You have been putting in effort, results start to appear, and a part of you begins to think of a great result as the only logical consequence. But, when we start thinking that poker owes us something is when we lose focus.
When you expect to lose most tournaments, as usually happens, a loss is simply part of the game. But, when you start feeling that you should win, a loss no longer feels like variance, but like an injustice. And injustice is a much stronger and deeper feeling than bad luck.
Winner’s Tilt Can Make Everything You Had Accumulated Fade Away Almost Without You Noticing
That is why we must not confuse confidence with overconfidence. The first is built based on evidence of the process. You know you are doing well because you have put in enough effort to have that understanding of the game and, when a session is bad, you know the result is not what matters.
Overconfidence, on the other hand, has a cognitive component. It is a distortion regarding how we interpret our own skills compared to others. You underestimate your advantage and dismiss that of your opponents. This causes you to start playing some spots in “automatic mode” that, at another time, you would have given a few more seconds of analysis. You start playing worse, with less thought in each spot, and at the same time, you expect better results. A bad combination.
The first step to work on this is to recognize it when it happens. We can all identify when we tilt from a bad beat, but recognizing the moment when winner’s tilt activates is a bit more complicated. If you have been running well, maybe it is time to pay a little attention, but not to the results, rather to your behavior in relation to the game. Are you still putting in effort to improve as before or have the good results made you relax? All this is important to be able to identify the problem in time and return to the winning path of effort and focus.
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