Tilt

Tilt

Surfers have more than twenty terms to describe different kinds of waves. The reason is that the type of wave, the way it breaks, the direction it’s coming from, the bottom depth, etc., create differing challenges for surfers. There are closeouts (waves that break all at once) and double-ups (a type of wave created when two waves meet to form one wave) and reforms (a wave that will break, then die down, then break again). Non-surfers just call all of these “waves.” On rare occasions when we non-surfers need to be more specific, we just add a lot of extra words. Those extra words don’t cost us much because it doesn’t come up very often—maybe never. But for people involved in specialized activities, it’s worth it to be able to communicate a complex concept in a single word that laypeople would need lengthy phrases to convey. Having a nuanced, precise vocabulary is what jargon is all about. It’s why carpenters have at least a dozen names for different kinds of nails, and in the field of neuro-oncology, there are more than 120 types of brain and central nervous system tumors.

Because poker players are in a constant struggle to keep in-the-moment fluctuations in perspective, their jargon has a variety of terms for the concept that “bad outcomes can have an impact on your emotions that compromise your decision-making going forward so that you make emotionally charged, irrational decisions that are likely to result in more bad outcomes that will then negatively impact your decision-making going forward and so on.” The most common is tilt. Tilt is the poker player’s worst enemy, and the word instantly communicates to other poker players that you were emotionally unhinged in your decision-making because of the way things turned out. If you blow some recent event out of proportion and react in a drastic way, you’re on tilt.

The concept of tilt comes from traditional pinball machines. To keep players from damaging the machines by lifting them to alter the course of the ball, the manufacturers placed sensors inside that disabled the machine if it was violently jostled. The flippers stopped working, the lights went off, and the word “tilt” flashed at numerous places on the layout. The origin of tilt in pinball is apt because what’s going on in our brain in moments of tilt is like a shaken pinball machine. Intense emotion can interfere with the cognitive control involved in weighing options and resisting an immediate reaction.

There are emotional and physiological signs of tilt. In poker, you can hear a poker player on tilt from several tables away. Every several hands, you hear a raised voice in an incredulous tone: “Seriously? Again?” or “I don’t know why I bother playing. I should just hand over all my money.” (Imagine the inflection of exasperation and a lot of swearing.) Along with these verbal cues, there are physiological signs of tilt. We can feel our cheeks flush and our heart race. Our respiration speeds up.

Tilt, of course, is not just limited to poker. Any kind of outcome has the potential for causing an emotional reaction. We can be tempted to make a reactive, emotional decision in a disagreement with a relationship partner, or because of bad service in a restaurant, or a comment in the workplace, or making a sale only to have it canceled, or having an idea dismissed. We’ve all had this experience in our personal and professional lives: blowing out of proportion a momentary event because of an in-the-moment emotional reaction.

By recognizing these verbal and physiological signs of tilt from fixating on short-term results, or ticker watching, we can commit to develop certain habit routines at those moments. We can precommit to walk away from the situation when we feel the signs of tilt, whether it’s a fight with a spouse or child, aggravation in a work situation, or losing at a poker table. We can take some space till we calm down and get some perspective, recognizing that when we are on tilt we aren’t decision fit. Aphorisms like “take ten deep breaths” and “why don’t you sleep on it?” capture this desire to avoid decisions while on tilt. We can commit to asking ourselves the 10-10-10 questions—how this will matter in ten minutes, ten months, and ten years—or things like, “What’s happened to me in the past when I’ve felt this way?” or “Do I think it’s going to help me to be in this state while I’m making decisions?” Or we can gain perspective by asking how or whether this will have a real effect on our long-term happiness.

If you are part of a truthseeking pod—a group that helps its members examine their decisions—that pod can incorporate questions designed to sniff out tilt and reduce the number of decisions we execute while on tilt. We can incorporate vigilance around ticker watching when evaluating each other’s decisions, including the most obvious question: “Do you think maybe you are/were on tilt?” We can follow that with time-traveling questions like, “Do you think this will really matter in the long run?” If we make the concept of tilt and its negative impact on decision quality part of the discussion, it creates accountability around tilt to the group. Ignoring the signals of emotional decision-making raises the prospect of having to answer for it. That, in turn, will get us positive reinforcement from the group for recognizing the signs of tilt and avoiding decision-making in that state. It also trains good habits of mind so we can run these processes on our own, acting as our own decision buddy.

At the very beginning of my poker career, I heard an aphorism from some of the legends of the profession: “It’s all just one long poker game.” That aphorism is a reminder to take the long view, especially when something big happened in the last half hour, or the previous hand—or when we get a flat tire. Once we learn specific ways to recruit past and future versions of us to remind ourselves of this, we can keep the most recent upticks and downticks in their proper perspective. When we take the long view, we’re going to think in a more rational way.