Tilt Talk, A Huge Hand

My PLO excursion over the last week has been filled with ups and downs. Some days I felt like I was playing pretty well, given my relative skill level, and I would squeeze out a buy-in or two profit. Other days, I would be tilting pretty hard, without ever taking a beat to encourage such bad play, and I would drop 2, 3, maybe 4 buy-ins before I finally signed off in shame.

Let's talk about tilt for a minute. "Tilt" is a word generally used to describe the frustration of a player due to any number of causes, and the resulting effect on the way he plays. Most times, a particularly bad beat will send a player into tilt mode, causing him to try to recoup his losses as quickly as possible, by playing more hands and pushing all-in with very modest holdings. Sometimes, when a player is tilting badly, he just wants to bust and get away from the table. It is important for a successful player to understand who at his table is steaming so that he can adjust his play against that player. When a bad beat doesn't tilt a player, any number of things might alter the way he plays- fatigue, boredom, hunger, frustration, table talk, or the need to be somewhere else are just some of the factors that can cause tilt.

Back to my talk about PLO. In Hold'em, I find that I only tilt when I'm frustrated or take a big bad beat that would've greatly changed my chances of winning a tournament/ making money in a cash game. However, in Pot Limit Omaha, I sometimes find myself tilting IMMEDIATELY upon sitting down at a table. I'm playing too loose, making too many crying/hero calls, and just all around not playing the game the way I need to play it in order to win. I'm unsure what causes this- maybe it is the huge emphasis on draws as opposed to legit hands like in Hold'em. When I sit down, I feel like the best way to make money is to get my stack in with the nut flush draw and suck out- but clearly that is not the best way to profit in Omaha. It feels like I'm tilting in one way or another 75% of the time at a PLO table. But that other 25%, I don't think I'm a bad player, just inexperienced.

I had worked my roll on UltimateBet up to 105.00, from the 75.00 I started with. I have played almost exclusively .10/.25PLO, but I have also sat down at a .25/.50 NL Hold'em table and a .01/.02PLO table (While I was waiting for a .10/.25 to open up). I lost a couple buy-ins Wednesday, a couple buy-ins Thursday, a couple buy-ins Friday, made a little on Saturday, and lost 2.5 buy-ins Sunday before making a push. I was down to like 20.00 in my account besides the 10.00 I took to the PLO table. I had about an hour to screw around, and before long I had doubled up. Then, just like that, I turned a set and completed my full-house to bust a guy and was up to 35.00 at my table. Common sense told to me to just leave the table- I had to be at my parents at 7:00 for my dad's birthday and I hadn't even gotten him a card yet. It was 6:15 and I needed to shower, but I felt like I was running well so I didn't leave the table. Then a monster hand came up, an incredible only-in-Omaha hand... that I will break down in it's entirety during my next blog posting. :)

(A CLIFFHANGER ENDING?!?!? WTF?!?!?)

-The Gerk-