Re: Re: Inducing Tilt

There's one other thing I would like to highlight. Billy mentioned that berating a player will make the other players at the table play better. This is the conventional wisdom in the poker community. Most poker pundits believe that other players at the table will play much better in order to avoid receiving such verbal abuse themselves.

I'm not a big fan of blindly following conventional wisdom.

It was once the conventional wisdom that the world is flat, that the sun revolves around the earth, that those of African descent were a separate and sub-human species, and that applying leeches directly to the skin was the best way to cure an illness.

At some point we have to take a second look and see if certain hypotheses hold up in the face of the evidence.

We live in a world where the average casino patron is better at poker than he was twenty years ago. He's better even than the average player of five years ago. Think about it -- when was the last time you went to a casino and sat down a table full of timid, inexperienced guppies that would be afraid of your turning your wrath in their direction?

I for one, have never encountered such a scenario.

I feel lucky to be at a table with even one or two complete poker novices at a casino. Most of the tables these days are full of hungry players that have logged thousands and tens of thousands of table-hours, know a thing or two about poker theory, and are very aggressive. I may find that I'm generally a better player than most of them, but even so, they still aren't exactly easy money.

So in my opinion, the claim that the other players will start to play better if I berate a fish does not apply to the poker world of today. My theory is that the aggressive players I face at the tables will see my "tilting" as weakness. They will start to think that they can outplay me, and will begin to give me more action and less credit for having hands. They will start playing weaker hands more aggressively at me, in order to try and exploit a perceived advantage over me.

And this is exactly what happened that night.

I ended up busting out because a guy called a large bet with a gutshot. But this wasn't an isolated occurrence. This had been happening ever since I had begun to "tilt," which was why I was able to earn my way back so quickly. The players at the table thought I had lost my cool, but really they were playing right into my hands.

Like I said in my last post, Billy doesn't believe me -- that it's possible for me to feign tilt in order to gain an advantage over the opposition. I'm fine with that. But I'm telling you that I knew exactly what I was doing. I was flouting conventional wisdom, because the conventional wisdom is outdated. Players in today's poker world aren't the type to consciously improve their play in order to avoid being berated. They may begin to play more aggressively, but not necessarily better.

Remember, no limit Texas Hold 'Em is not about waiting for the good cards, raising 3-4x the big blind, and continuation betting on the flop. The people writing the poker books will tell you that, because they want to win your money! Hold 'Em -- indeed all forms of poker -- are about exploiting the tendencies of your opponents. This means exploiting the tendencies of your strong opponents as well as your weak opponents. In this case, conventional wisdom assumes you are playing against weak opponents. But as the number of fish out there dwindles, a great player must move away from what he reads in books and start thinking for himself.

Personally, I believe my theory is borne out by the real world evidence, and nothing Roy Cooke can say will change my mind. In my opinion, he's clearly living in the past, and I sincerely hope that my friend Billy does not fall into the same trap.

Unless he's playing against me.