Mini tilt and stack tilt

I've come to realize there are many ways and degrees of going on tilt. Last night, I succumbed to two of them. First, I went into what I'll call "mini tilt". Mini tilt is when you have the bulk of your good-decision-making machinery in place and operational, but you still find yourself hanging around in bad hands just a little too long. You don't make a major bad decision, but you make a series of small bad decisions, and they add up. Your chip stack suffers over time. Mini tilt doesn't have to be fatal; you can survive it with a good hand thrown your way here and there. However, when you're in mini tilt and get a strong hand which doesn't win, that can be hard to recover from (both psychologically and stack-wise). That happened to me last night. Here's the hand that hurt:

my chip stack at the start of the hand: $20,000
my hole cards: 9d As
flop: 7c Kc 2h
turn: Ah
river: Ac
my hand: three of a kind, aces
winning hand: Kd Kh for a full house, kings full of aces
my chip stack at the end of the hand: $12,900

The second kind of tilt I engaged in is what I call "stack tilt". That's when my stack has shrunk to about a quarter of its original size, and I start to become obsessed with how small it is. I stop making good poker decisions, and instead try to bring my stack back up to respectability at any cost. Clearly a very bad strategy! To play well, you really have to play each hand on its own merits, regardless of the size of your stack.

I recently read that poker wunderkind Annette Obrestad played and won an online tournament after she'd put a yellow sticky note on her computer screen, over the place where her hole cards were displayed. She said she only peeked once all tournament; her point was that position is so powerful in poker, sometimes it's irrelevant what your cards actually are! This made me think of another experiment to try -- it would be really interesting to play a variant of poker where you never get to see your stack size. My idea is that this version of poker would pretty much ensure that you'd never fall into stack tilt. I think this variant is also achievable with the simple expedient of a sticky note, but I'm not 100% sure. It's a little embarrassing to admit that I don't know the PokerStars GUI well enough off the top of my head to say with certainty, despite having used it so many hundreds of hours!

As no doubt you've already guessed, indulging in not one but two flavors of tilt caused me to hit the felt at last.

delta: $-40,000
balance: $711,640