Money Hater

Poker tournaments and those little rubber bracelets that now come in a bunch of different colors (but started off yellow because of Lance Armstrong’s privates) are very similar; both are extremely popular and both are extremely annoying.

Both do a great deal of good for their causes; the poker tournaments pump dead money into the poker economy (which I then procure to fund my lavish lifestyle) whereas the bracelets drum up hundreds of thousands of dollars for various noble causes. Both are driven by people who are praying on what may not be considered a “miracle” but definitely is in “longshot” territory. Both came into vogue about 7-8 years ago. Both have hit their popularity apex and now are descending into who-knows-where. Both have gone from being vanilla to now coming in at least 5 different flavors.

Poker tournaments are basically just a cash game that everyone is too impatient to see play out in real time, so they throw in a bunch of rules to speed things up.

Thousands of people who think they know how to play poker have descended upon Las Vegas in hopes of catching a greased pig. (I know what you’re thinking, but “lightning in a bottle” seems too god-like to fit here and frankly is just too damn cliche. Winning a poker tournament and catching a greased pig are both endeavors in which the winner ends up exhausted, relieved and filthy, and thus gets the nod.)

Many of these descenders are “professional poker players”. Most of them are losing players who simply haven’t slammed to earth yet. They all come to Vegas, toss money into the giant WSOP machine, and hope they leave town with more than they came with. There will be guys on their last loan who leave Vegas debt free and with enough of a bankroll that they probably won’t even bust it by next year’s WSOP. In the interim they will travel around as a professional poker player and slowly give their money to me and a few other cash game pros. They’ll bring whatever they haven’t blasted off or spent on a car they cannot afford back to next year’s WSOP and repeat the entire process.

There are tales upon tales of guys who have been staring busto in the face but have had the governor show up at the 11th hour in the form of a big tournament score for themselves or one of their friends. They are in this perilous spot because they do not know how to properly manage their money. I know how to manage my money and thus have never been even close to broke, but I have to believe that I am still dumb enough to get lucky at the WSOP. So, this year I purchased 5% of the action of a player who is playing in 11 different events.

Today was his first event. It was No-Limit hold’em. 35 minutes into the tournament he is blessed with the opportunity to put in all of his chips with two magnificent aces. He got called by two badly beaten jacks. This is what it is all about; get the money in good and hope not to get screwed.

A jack came. An ace did not.

The World Series of Poker has begun.

A good friend of mine is a radiologist whose group reads the MRIs for an NFL team, which I find to be really cool. We were in Madison together when he was in med school and I was in undergrad. Being brilliant yet drunken morons, our conversations would often turn to some of the more absurd things one must experience while in medical school.

I recall my buddy explaining that for the rectal exam, a medical professional comes in and is both the victim and overseer of the examination. I vividly remember him using the word “feedback”. “Well, you get in there and then he tells you to feel for this and gives you feedback on what you’re doing.” I do not know why but for some reason that really cracked me up at the time, and apparently it still does.

This person gets up in the morning knowing that at some point later in the day someone is going to put something in their ass. And not only are they going to have to speak intelligently while it is happening, they also have to speak ABOUT what is happening.

Since I have been losing almost every single day, I have been wondering to myself what other professions entail one getting things shoved up their ass day after day. Well, I think Mr. Feedback’s job puts my whiny little downswing to shame. But then I thought more about it. If you are going to have things rammed into your backside, Mr. Feedback’s gig isn’t that bad. He knows if he will or will not be the victim of a most gruesome violation later in the day. These things are planned. He can prepare himself mentally.

I do not know how often (or if at all) or with what level of zeal things will be presented to my posterior when I walk into the card room. I just have to sit there and wait, knowing that at any minute it could be on at my expense.

Either torture me or don’t torture me, but the not knowing is making me insane.

A guy I used to teach with once told me that, “the known evil is much preferable to the unknown one.” I now fully understand what that means.

In a nutshell, someone is on “tilt” when emotion begins to dictate their actions.

I first heard the term in 2002 when I started playing $10 pot-limit single table tournaments at PokerBill’s 3rd story apartment in Uptown.

I had my first experience with tilt my senior year at UW-Madison. My friends and I would play hearts at 10pm every night during the week. There would be 4-5 of us, and we would play for an hour or so and then go back to studying or procrastinating or whatever we were doing.

One of my friends was prone to tilt. He would eat a bunch of hearts or the Q of spades or something, and he invariably would make a mistake leading the next trick because all he could think was “god damn that sucked”. We didn’t call it tilt back then, even thought it was the same thing. (We actually called them “god damn” plays, because “god damn” was written all over his face.)

Since that time, I have come to learn that tilt is truly the double-edged sword of poker. I am sure that I have made a great deal of my money because of people going on tilt. I like nothing more than to see someone who typically plays pretty well take a few stinky ones and then start 3betting the 84s. Now suddenly a person who would normally be pulling money out of this game is actually pumping money into it. Fantastic. Tilt is destroying this guy, while fattening the coffers of those of us who have better self-discipline.

There are many different strains of tilt. Below I have attempted to list a few different types of tilt and some of their major attributes.

StuckTilt - This form of tilt usually comes about when a player has been losing and now realizes that it is getting to be time to go home. This player does not like to leave if they have lost money on the session, so they now must do everything they can to get their money back, regardless of how fantastically awful it is. (I once heard a player talk about needing to “make something happen” soon, for he had to leave in 45 minutes and was down over 50 bets.) This involves playing more hands than they would if they were winning, and often can involve such stupid plays as limp/reraising the 96 of diamonds, being the first coldcaller on the button with T7s or some other such nonsense hand.

BeatTilt/SlightlyStuckTilt - This kind of tilt grips many. I play with several who suffer from this form of tilt affliction. They lose a few pots in a row, usually in absurd fashion (after all this is limit hold’em), and now it is time to tilt. They will often say things like, “Can’t win with good hands, so might as well play bad ones”, as they rake in a massive pot with the 86 of clubs that they inexcusably called 3 bets cold with and have now unceremoneously rammed up the ass of some poor guy who has been waiting for hours to finally get two aces. An interesting characteristic of this form of tilt is that once the tilter wins this huge pot with the 86s (or whatever shitbox they chose to misplay), they are immediately cured and off tilt. They tend to go back to playing in their typical fashion. If the tilter is not fortunate enough to win a pot by playing super bad, they now become a high risk to succumb to other forms of tilt such as ScreamingGorrillaTilt.

PersianAssholeTilt/GuyWhoIsSupressingHisHomosexualityTilt - Just as its name suggest, PAT afflicts only Persian men. This form of tilt emanates itself in a variety of ways, but it almost always involves an altercation with the dealer. It may be as subtle as ignoring the dealer when he/she asks, “Would you like the big blind, sir?” The tilter now has the dealer trapped. If the dealer skips him, he can yell and scream and lie about having his money out there and say, “What are you blind or something?” (if the dealer is female he can use the trusty Persian favorite “too much sex last night, honey?”) and just be an overall asshole. If the dealer does deal them a hand, he can now scream at the dealer for not paying attention and say, “Do you see my money out there? Why did you deal me in if there was no money out there? Are you blind? Don’t you know how to do your job?” If the dealer simply waits for the player to signal if they want the blind or not, the player can now berate the dealer for holding up the game and will typically say something like, “I have been playing here for hours and I am still sitting here. You think I am suddenly not going to play now??!?!” I find this form of tilt to be the most irritating.

UnintelligbleTremblingWithFrustratedRageAsianGuyTilt - This form of tilt is not as common as one might think, and is in fact rather rare. Given that many Asians play poker, many assume that if an Asian guy is on tilt, it must be UTWFRAGT. This simply isn’t true. I have only seen UTWFRAGT a few times, and it looks exactly like it sounds. The guy is shaking and frustrated because (a) this dealer is kill him and (b) no one can understand what the hell he is saying, in spite of their best efforts to do so. This form of tilt has not been widely studied, but it usually results in the guy leaving.

WhiteJackAssWhoThinksHe’sAProfessionalPokerPlayerButHasNoChanceTilt - This type of tilt affects people who are capable of playing rather well, but do not understand how being a professional poker player works. The play of those afflicted with this form of tilt often does not suffer that much. They are often heard to say such things as “Yeah, I’m still exhausted from that 28 hour sesh I played this weekend. I got buried and ended up being there all night chasing my money.” The afflicted often will often snidely comment on the poor play of others, but almost never berate dealers. Players who suffer from this form of tilt for prolonged periods often end up being afflicted with BeatTilt/SlightlyStuckTilt as well and sometimes even ScreamingGorillaTilt.

ScreamingGorillaTilt - This form of tilt is my favorite. It usually afflicts bad players, but it has even been seen in professionals. Nothing is out of bounds when one is on ScreamingGorillaTilt. Players afflicted with this have been known to tear cards in half, crumple cards and hurl them across the table or even shove the cards down the rake hole. It is a free for all when SGT is involved. I hesitate to attempt to describe it further, for words cannot adequately convey the essence of SGT; it must be seen to be truly understood.