Ah, the steam. If a poker player claims never to have looked over the shadow of an approaching steam – they are either telling a lie or they have not been betting long enough. This does not mean of course that everyone has been on steam before, a number of people have wonderful control and carry their losses as a defeat and leave it at that. To be a great poker gambler, it is extremely important to approach your successes and your losses in a similar manner – with little emotion. You compete in the game in the same manner you did after taking a tough loss like you would after winning a huge hand. Many of the poker masters are not tempted by tilting after a bad defeat as they are incredibly accomplished and you should be to.
You need to be aware that you can’t win each and every hand you are in, even if you are the strongest player. Hands that commonly make players to go on tilt are hands you were the leading choice or at least thought you were up until you were hit and you lost a huge portion of your bankroll. Awful losses are bound to develop. Embrace that certainty right now, I will say it again – if your sister plays cards, if your mother enjoys cards, if your grandparents enjoy cards – We all have poor losses sometime. It’s an inevitable effect of competing in Texas Hold’em, or for that matter any kind of poker.
After all we are assumingly (nearly all of us) in the game for a single reason – to win cash, it certainly makes sense that we will wager accordingly to maximize winnings. Now let’s say you are up one hundred dollars off of a $100 deposit, and you suffer a big hit in a NL game and your stack is down to one hundred and twenty dollars. You have lost $80 in a round where you were certain to pick up $200two hundred dollars when you decided to go all-in on the flop and enjoyed a 10 – 1 edge. And that guy! He banged you out on the river? – Well hold it right here. This is a quintessential opportunity for a brand-new bettor to start tilting. They just lost too much $$$$ on one hand that they really should have won and they are angry