Ah, the steam. If a poker player claims never to have peered down the barrel of a looming poker steam – they’re either lying or they haven’t been gambling long enough. This doesn’t mean of course that everyone has been on steam before, a few people have wonderful control and carry their losses as a defeat and leave it at that. To be a powerful poker gambler, it’s especially important to treat your wins and your losses in an identical way – with little emotion. You compete in the game the same way you did following a tough loss as you would after winning a great hand. All poker pros are not attracted by tilting following a bad loss as they are highly experienced and you really should be to.
You have to understand that you won’t win each and every hand you are in, regardless if you are the front runner. Hands that usually make players to go on tilt are hands that you were the favorite or at least thought you were until you were rivered and you squandered a large chunk of your bankroll. Bad defeats are going to develop. Accept that idea right now, I’ll say it again – if your siblings enjoy cards, if your parents play cards, if your grandpa plays cards – We all have poor beats at some point. It’s an unavoidable outcome of participating in Texas Holdem, or really any kind of poker.
Since we are assumingly (almost all of us) playing poker for one purpose – to win cash, it does make sense that we would play appropriately to maximize profits. Now let’s say you are up $100 off of a $100 deposit, and you suffer a huge blow in a No Limits game and your stack is down to $120. You’ve squandered $80 in a hand where you should have picked up $200two hundred dollars when you decided to go all-in on the flop and had a 10 – 1 advantage. And that amateur! He sucked you out on the river? – Well hold it right there. This is a quintessential choice for a new bettor to start tilting. They basically lost too much money on one round that they really should have won and they are angry
