It is difficult to cope with a tilt spell once it has started because it is the nature of a tilt to disable control. Like aggression in everyday life – it is genetically coded into us and is often beyond our control. But nobody runs amuck without reason – catalysts always precede a fit of aggression: an insult, bad news, a bruise, and other like unbearable “fardles,” as Prince of Denmark would say, playing with his bare bodkin. The main catalyst which triggers direct aggression is the organism’s discomfort, like hunger or pain.

As we go through our day, we do not think about the causes of our immediate aggression. So we are not able to cope with the triggers of our aggression because we do not understand which buttons are pushed to cause such raging behavior, so we pound our heads against the wall. In poker you must understand what throws you into an instant rage. To be a well-controlled, disciplined, cool player, you must know well the situations leading to your reactions. It is a requirement for the cool player to identify his triggers, from the smallest to the largest.

Once you learn to do this regularly, you will be able to effectively say to yourself, even aloud: “Alright, this is precisely the kind of dumb good luck on the part of an aggressive “moron” which starts inching me ever closer to a tilt – look out. When that happens again, I will not tilt; I will recognize it and relax; I will play cool straightforward poker for some minutes.”

You will be able to admit even as you maintain control that in poker you do not have full control and that you, a good poker player, play poker not because you expect to win no matter what – precisely the kind of blind ideals which lead to disillusionment and despair when they collapse in any field of human endeavor – but because you enjoy the challenge of doing your best against the specific odds of the game: a combination of chance and your opponents’ skill.

By behaving as in the above example, your energy will be spent in a positive manner and you will have less to expend in the negative behavior of building up an uncontrollable aggression. You will have more energy to put toward the task of maintaining your equilibrium so even if you feel a tilt coming on, you can keep your cool and be in control of yourself and your game.

Some of the common triggers are:

Overall discomfort such as hunger or lack of sleep. Because these are not really instances of extreme torture, these can be overcome with introspection about the problem and how it is related to the emotions.

Really bad poker mistakes. As you know, poker is one of the most competitive games around, which adds to the self-flagellation resulting from playing a hand badly, when you knew better. Be like the writer or painter who have performed so many rough drafts and sketches and thrown them all away, or rewrote or repainted, that they are accustomed to rejection and are much less hard on themselves because of it. They know that success is waiting for them if they just keep striving to write a better novel or paint a better picture. Either of these artists would gladly tell you that they threw out wads and wads of paper while finally achieving what they knew they had in them all along – a best seller and a painting that hangs in a fine gallery.

There are plenty of others, any of which, if you only take the time to think about them, you can learn how to deal with on your own: stupid (as opposed to bad) mistakes, quickened pace (as sign of early phase of a tilt), loss to a maniac fish who then goes on to lose everything to another regular, bluffing against nuts, fatigue, boredom, inability to concentrate, a series of undesirable and otherwise unlikely events, too much or too little alcohol, etc.

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