Personal Organization for Degenerates: Overcoming Tilt and Regret

In poker, the word “tilt” is used to describe a state of irritation that affects one’s play adversely. Severe tilt happens in poker, but anyone prone to it can’t last long in the game. Poker players more commonly suffer from low-level, garden-variety tilt, a minor irritation that, at the margin, impels them to make slightly suboptimal decisions about when to bet, call, raise, or fold.
Poker players, in their strange vernacular, refer not only to tilt involving suboptimal decisions at the table but also to “life tilt,” which happens when irritation and uncertainty cause them to make sustained irrational and unwise decisions in their life away from the tables. Needless to say, sometimes poker tilt fuels life tilt.
I think that there are two primary sources of tilt: regret and obviously bad choices. In poker and in life, if you attempt to operate on too little sleep, or on a substance of some sort, or while arguing with someone via text message, you’re unlikely to make good choices in a sustained way. This chapter will focus on regret tilt, which results from wishing things in the recent past had gone differently.
In my experience, poker tilt and life tilt stem from a common source: We’re aware that life is acutely path-dependent, and when things go poorly, we dwell on the fact that, had some prior event gone differently, we might have avoided our current predicament. Tilt is therefore very closely related to regret and to counterfactual thinking, the idea that had some event not happened, everything after would have been much better. Regret and the tilt it inspires are deeply anti-rational. The rational being maximizes his future welfare based on his current endowment.
Poker players, despite being highly rational, are also analytical and reflective. They are prone to counterfactual thinking and regret. Convincing yourself that regret is anti-rational will not eliminate or reduce the experience of regret. I won’t waste more space here on the irrationality of regret, because regardless of how forcefully I make that case, you will still experience it.
I’ll focus instead on practices that, in my experience, reduce the incidence of regret or its negative effects. Let me start with what doesn’t work. Focusing on the positive tends not to work. Thinking back to times when a series of events went your way on a sustained basis seems like it should work, but it doesn’t. As I’ve said, convincing yourself that regret is irrational likewise does not work. And what really, really does not work is any kind of “I just need to get back to even” action. By this I mean an extreme action that is self-justified on the grounds that, should it work, you will no longer be in a state of regret.
In dealing with tilt, in poker or in life, an option is: Do nothing. So much of success is just failing slower than other people. There’s no better way to fail quickly than to tilt, and so, when you’re tilting, you should try your best to quit all activity. If you’re playing in a poker game, quit. If it’s a tournament, fold. If you manage a hedge fund, go have a long lunch, drink some wine, and take a nap. When you’re on tilt, just quit making consequential decisions. You cannot make good decisions in a fast-moving present when you’re stuck in the past; when you’re on tilt, minimize the number and complexity of any decisions you need to make.
Journaling is a practice that is helpful for some people in managing tilt. I used to keep a journal and I found it very valuable, but I no longer do, simply because I don’t find the actual task of journaling enjoyable (no matter how short the entries). It’s time-consuming and encourages a backward-looking mode of thought. Its value as a tilt-reducer, however, is this: When you’re in a tilted emotional state, the tendency is to think that things have been bad for an extended period; but if you consult your journal, you will usually find that the “extended run” of bad times in fact started very recently. Journaling can give you a sense of perspective and balance over time. Reviewing a journal in good times serves little purpose, but in bad times it can be invaluable.
Keep an “in-session journal” by recording key poker hands that occur over time; this can help reduce tilt, in my experience. Why does it work? What happens during poker tilt is that you become stuck in the past. New hands are being dealt, but your mind is still reviewing previous hands—you’re looking for where mistakes might or might not have been made. You’re completely irritated by a backlog of previous hands that were unsatisfactory. Irritation, rather than rational thinking, starts to govern your play. During extreme tilt, the irritation is so severe that you are willing to gamble in the simple hope of changing your negative mental state. This, of course, hardly ever works out. It’s why I advise you to err in the direction of doing nothing, in poker and in life, when you’re in the tilt state.
Revert to a core of stable, value-enhancing activities. The deeper the tilt, the more certain you should be that any new activity is value-enhancing. Life tilt is often accompanied by a genuine uncertainty about whether you are making, in an overall sense, good decisions.
In the short term, you are in a negative emotional state. Things are going against you, causing you to make bad decisions. In addition to things going poorly in the short term, you are confused about the way your environment has changed, and this makes you uncertain about whether you are making good long-term decisions. Part of recovering from tilt is sitting back and untangling which of your bad results are caused by short-term factors and which are caused by long-term factors.
In poker, the skill hierarchy is constantly shifting. There is no guarantee that the best player one year will still be the best player a couple of years hence. Over the long term, many of the dominant players who are unseated by newer, more skillful players show a high tendency to not understand that the environment has changed. They continue to play the new, better players until they go broke or near broke. The difference between those who go broke and those who don’t, in my experience, is the ability to recognize a changing environment. I view this as closely related to the concept of tilt recovery, for reasons I will discuss below.
In terms of concrete advice, there are four things you can do when you’re on tilt to make sure you get back on stable footing. The key in all cases is to leave a very uncertain environment, where things are not going your way, and move to a simpler environment, where you are sure that what you are doing is value-enhancing.
So, first, gravitate toward dedicated learning. This is harder than it sounds, because when you’re on tilt, your attention span tends to go toward zero. In poker, I think a major reason that the young are always unseating the old is that the old gradually lose their appetite for learning, and their skills ossify. At no point is learning more difficult than during the tilt state, but dedicated learning is a good place to spend your time, because it’s a clear value-enhancing activity.
Second, gravitate toward easy games, broadly construed. In poker, this would mean dropping down in stakes and playing against lesser opponents, where you are sure to be a favorite. In business, it might mean cutting down on extraneous activities and focusing on a few simple things (or even one thing) that is known to be profitable. It’s important to focus on easy games when you’re on tilt, because there is an error asymmetry in activity selection. In an easy game, the upside is that you will make a little money; the downside is minimal. In a tough game, the upside is high, but the downside is potentially catastrophic.
Third, get a coach. On tilt, you are often too emotionally entrenched to take an objective view, so it can be useful to hire someone whose skills and viewpoint you respect to give you an objective opinion on where you stand. A good coach can give you a meta analysis of how your place in the larger scheme of things might have changed. He can help you understand how your poor results might be attributable to: 1) poor short-term decision making, 2) bad luck, and 3) a possible change in the environment such that people have passed you by, and your skills relative to them aren’t what you think they are.
Fourth, create structure: Try to develop some type of schedule and routine. Tilt is generated by psychic chaos that ensues when things go poorly in an environment that you don’t fully understand. A simple schedule and routine will allow you time to understand the ways your environment has changed, and will let you think about new ways to fit in. Importantly, a routine and schedule allow you to make these assessments at a time when your emotions are in the process of calming. You need to remove yourself from turbulent environments when you’re on tilt—otherwise, you risk a vicious cycle of worse and worse decisions. At some point, you have to regroup, assess the damage, and move forward.

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