Christy Keenan: Avoiding tilt in sit-and-gos

In sit-and-gos, tournament life is everything. Without it, losing money is inevitable. As a  consequence, the closer we come towards busting, the more valuable our chips are. And yet, when we lose chips we are more prone to make bad decisions due to tilt.

Try to see the concession of chips as an incentive to make every decision perfectly. Tilt has a tendency to emerge when we can least afford it. Tilting when we have enough chips to absorb the negative impact is undesirable, but tilting when we are short-stacked and most require perfect decision making is inexcusable. Unfortunately, this is precisely when we are most susceptible to its onset, so it is vital when  playing sit-and-gos that we recognise tilt before it does too much damage.

Knock-on tilt

The problem

This is when a bad beat or error on table one prompts an immediate spewy play on table two. Consider the following example: on the bubble of a six-max sit-and-go you have been growing your small stack with a succession of uncalled all-in shoves. You finally pull yourself level with the middle stack and pick up K♥-K♣ on the button. Intending to disguise your hand’s strength, you open-shove your 11BB stack just as he had been doing with marginal hands. The equal-middle stack on the BB, weary of your incessant shoving, makes an extremely loose call with 2♥-2♦. Guess who rivers the wheel?

When table two flashes up to demand your attention, you’re still seething. You open Q♠-J♦ from early position and call the tight small blind’s three-bet. When the flop comes Q♥-9♠-3♦, rationality goes out the window, and you convince yourself that the small blind has exactly A-K and shove over the top of his continuation bet. The SB calls and flips K♥-K♣. Sound familiar?

Now the standard response is to say it was a total cooler. How could you fold top pair on that board anyway? But let’s analyse the play. Opening Q-Jo from early position is questionable, and calling a tight player’s out of position three-bet is a definite mistake. Assuming the small blind  has a range of 9-9+, A-Q+, what flop are you hoping to see?

The short and correct answer is you’re not thinking, but clicking buttons with your mind still on the bad beat on table one. Postflop, sticking it in with top pair/reasonable kicker is fine in a vacuum, but a poor decision here versus the small blind’s tight range. The final mistake is ‘putting’ the small blind on A-K. If you do this regularly, stop. Nobody is good enough to make correct soul-reads on a regular basis and you should assign a reasonable range and respond accordingly.

We blame luck and call it a cooler because it is easier to find a scapegoat than to critique our own play, but the reality here is that misfortune on one table cost two buy-ins rather than one due to subsequent tilt.

The solution

Before I discovered online poker, I funded my way through university by refereeing amateur football. Masochistic tendencies aside, there is one parallel that can be drawn between the two pursuits: discipline is everything.

On the pitch, I have seen good teams concede a controversial corner or free kick and exhaust so much energy questioning my eyesight and parentage that they forget to organise their defence for the set piece. They immediately concede a goal.

Now my decision may or may not have been correct, but the team should never allow a variable such as a refereeing call to detract from their discipline. In poker, the fall of the cards is the  referee. Do not allow your misfortune to prompt a responding error from you. If this happens, acknowledge your own role in the situation and remember that once the hand is over, it’s over.

In Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo advises you to ‘put your attention on something you can control, such as: you. And your next move. And your attitude.’ Feelings of being hard done-by, annoyance or anger can only have a negative impact on your bottom line.

Drift

The problem

Over a prolonged period of time, poker players may ‘drift’ from playing at the peak of their powers. It can manifest itself in a few different ways, but the concept remains the same. Think of drift like a slow puncture: a quiet, gradual deterioration. It may be the passing up of some thin but profitable shoving spots, or a tendency to call ever-so slightly too loose on the bubble because of a run of bad luck.

Nowhere is drift more disastrous than at the sit-and-go tables. Over time, an accumulation of narrow ICM mistakes will have you drifting towards busto-ville without really pinpointing why.

Here’s an example. On the bubble of a six-max sit-and-go at 100/200, there is one dominant chip leader with 6,700 chips. Our hero is in second place with 1,430 and the short stack, who open-folds the button, has a mere 870. The chip leader has been open-shoving every hand and the hero and the shorty are in a straight fight for second place.

When the hero gets dealt A♦-K♠ it is so tempting to fist-pump-call, as the villain is open-shoving any two cards and the hero should certainly have the best hand. Don’t fall into that trap, as  calling here is a clear ICM mistake. Even versus a range of absolutely any two cards, the calling  range bottoms out at 8-8 and A-Ks. A-Ko might seem borderline, but calling frequently in these spots is a surefire way to burn through your bankroll.

Sure, most of the time when you call you will win. However, when you call and lose to T-3o, most people will bemoan their misfortune. Drift can turn into full-blown tilt. Ignore the relative strength of the hands. The fact is the shove was a good one, and the call was an error. Only if  the hero and the shorty’s stacks had been reversed would a call be correct.

Let’s take another example of drift. In a nine-man SNG at 50/100, our hero min-raises the button with K♠-Q♠ and the loose-aggressive BB calls with effective stacks of 17BB. The flop is J♠-7♠-4♥ and the BB leads out with a chunky bet of 310. With two overcards, a big flush draw  and backdoor Broadway possibilities, the hero has around 55% equity in the hand. On form and playing at the peak of his powers, the hero would stick it in here in a heartbeat.

However, he says to himself, ‘These big draws have been terrible to me recently. I just haven’t been hitting at all.’ So he elects to call and see what the turn brings. This is drift. It is a subtle deterioration in your A-game that leads to suboptimal plays in close situations.

The solution

Do not allow what has gone on before to inform your current decision. Making poor decisions because you believe you are running bad is unacceptable. As I often tell my students, poker is about decisions, not results.

Here’s Tommy Angelo again: ‘There is no inherent existence to streaks… When your mind  invents a streak, you believe it exists, because you believe what your mind tells you.’ Of all the many great things written about poker over the years, this is probably the most important to keep in mind.

We create these streaks because our brains look for patterns to make sense of what is  happening. We should treat every decision as its own entity. Once the decision has been made, our role in the process has been taken care of; let variance handle the rest.

Drift can occur to anybody, at any time, and catching it before it starts costing you a lot of money requires focus. Keep your sessions short and review your play regularly using Hold’em Manager or Universal Replayer. Use SitNGo Wizard to make sure you aren’t making any glaring ICM errors, as these are the bane of the sit-and-go player’s existence.

What is the point?

The problem

This is another common form of tilt among sit-and-go regs. A cash player is fortunate in that, once he starts to feel tilted or drifts, he can simply quit his session. For the sit-and-go grinder, who may have 20 or more tournaments running simultaneously, quitting mid-session is not an option.

Simply electing not to register for any additional games is the best he can do. And if he busts  out of a few in brutal, tilt-inducing fashion, it can be very easy to throw in the towel in his  remaining games, making loose and reckless plays without regard to simple concepts such as ICM.

In a nutshell, it means playing substandard poker on purpose. Not because he isn’t a good player, but rather because he is not mentally or emotionally strong enough to handle the swings inherent in sit-and-gos. Sure, it sucks to get unlucky at the tables, but the logic that says, ‘Well my opponents are getting rewarded for playing like donks, why don’t I try it?’ is absurd. Stop yourself before you fall into that trap.

The solution

Embrace the fact that every setback has an opportunity attached. Sure, you might have busted out of 20 straight games without a cash, but that is no reason to give up focus. Plenty of good players would tilt off the rest of their money, but this is an opportunity for you to prove your mental strength by salvaging what’s left of the session.

The legendary Chip Reese famously claimed that his greatest accomplishment in poker was not a win, but enduring a remarkably bad run with ‘only’ $1.5m in losses when most people would have lost a whole lot more.

Be honest with yourself: even if you think you are playing perfectly and that the bad luck can’t continue forever, there’s no harm in winding down your session and taking the rest of the day off. There is no need to swim against the tide. Go outside, have a beer, see some friends. This might be the most +EV decision you could make. The games will still be there tomorrow, and  you can then approach them with a clear head and yesterday’s write-off nothing but a memory.

Checking your balance

One habit that can induce suboptimal play is the constant checking of your account balance or Hold’em Manager results tab in the middle of a session. There is little upside, and a big  potential downside, to this practice.

Firstly, if you are playing well, making some big bucks and are in your groove, just keep doing what you are doing. Checking your results mid-session can only make you take your foot off the pedal. And if your session is going badly, there is a possibility that you will start getting tilted and spew off your remaining buy-ins.

If you are still involved in games then resolve to analyse your session at the end, not during  play. The session is still salvageable and anything that could take your eye off the ball when you have cash in play is certainly -EV.