Closely related to the Don’t Play Drunk poker tip, the next best piece of advice for online poker players is to NOT play when your emotional state is not stable.
That means don’t play angry, but also when sad, depressed, annoyed, confused, or any other emotional state where your emotions are in charge of you, instead of you being in charge of your emotions.
So if you have had a bad day at work, got called out by the boss, or have just had a row with your significant other, playing some online poker to blow off steam is probably not the wisest decision that you could make.
Assuming that you can have enough self control to recognize when you are not in a fit emotional state to play poker and you can make the adult decision to not play right now, that still leaves the situation where you are in a balanced state of mind when you start playing, but something happens at the tables that causes you to lose your self control.
In other words, you start tilting. For whatever reason, a bad draw, an unlucky river card, some donkey sucks out on a runner runner straight, your pocket aces get cracked for the third time, whatever.
It doesn’t matter what caused you to tilt, now you have to be the grown up and take control of this situation. Playing on tilt can be seriously damaging to your bankroll. And only you can stop it.
Not only is it dangerous to your stack, but the other, more savvy players at the table will recognize that you are on tilt, and some of them will start to push your buttons a bit more in order to get you to donk off your chips to them.
When this happens you have got to walk away. Take a break for a few minutes. Even better, take a break for the nigh. There will always be another day to play – if you can keep your bankroll intact til that day comes, of course.
So this is the best advice you will ever get for managing your tilting; whatever caused you to lose your cool, it happens to everyone. At some time, those bad beats that you just experienced, they happened to other players. And they will happen again, and in all likelihood they will happen again to YOU at some time in the future.
This stuff happens in online poker. The difference between winners and losers is that winners realize that this stuff happens and they are ready to deal with it. Losers play through the tilt. Which do you want to be?