Robot Tilt - Tilting on Autopilot
Although you do need to put in a lot of hands in poker to overcome the variance and to make money, it should never come at the expense of playing an observant and dynamic game.
Although most people think of tilt as the massive spewfest where players start throwing all their chips in every hand, there are actually many, much more insidious ways to tilt, and one of the easiest and most dangerous forms is to fall into robot tilt.
The term 'robot tilt' simply refers to a situation where you start just playing off auto pilot. Instead of observing the table and trying to adjust your game accordingly, you simply turn off and start playing every hand the same, usually internally justifying such behaviour through reasoning you will just grind it out for a session and show a profit after enough hands.
The reality at all but the most micro of limits is that this is impossible in poker, and some kind of adjustment is required depending on the players around you in all but the very weakest games. As a result, turning to autopilot is an extremely dangerous form of tilt, as not only are you exposing your game to exploitation by all but the most unobservant players at the table, but you are also leaving yourself open to arguably the most dangerous factor of robot tilt - the autopilot effect.
When tilting hard and loose, it is quite obvious after a while what is going on to the person doing it. Most will either bust the table or leave, followed by a break that soon gets them back on the right track. Robot tilt does the exact opposite of this. As a player believes they are just grinding it out, they start to lay all blame for losses on running bad, instead of analysing the obvious flaws in their game adequately. This is a vicious circle of thinking, with each loss reinforcing the need to carry on playing the same simple style and get a result over a large enough sample of hands - an autopilot that will eventually crash the plane.
This is what makes this form of tilt so dangerous - although not as explosive as its cousin who throws chips at every pot, it is far less obvious and insidious in a player's thinking, and can easily set them up to a vicious circle of long term loss in the face of extended losing sessions. Although you do need to put in a lot of hands in poker to overcome the variance and to make money, it should never come at the expense of playing an observant and dynamic game.
Tilt can come in other forms than the most obvious. Some of the largest losses in the history of poker probably come down to players simply turning off and believing they can beat the game with little or no effort and watching their bankroll slowly turn to dust as their inner autopilot keeps telling them they are just running bad instead of highlighting how dull and predictable their game has become - do not let this happen to you.
Prices quoted in copy are correct at time of publication but liable to change.
