The river is dealt, it seems innocuous, but then your opponent shows his hand. The pot is being shipped to his destination and you start getting hot because he just sucked out on you. This is the definition of a bad beat. You no longer care about anything and start raising it up.

The minutes turn to hours and you're still sitting at the poker table. Losing an ever increasing amount of money. But you do not care because it is not fair that he sucked out on you. It is absurd.

Does this sound familiar? I know it happened to me in the beginning and still does, but not on such a large scale. Most are in denial and say that they never act like this, but I can guarantee that in some way or another money is being thrown away when it could be kept in your pocket. You know what I am talking about don't you? You wouldn't be reading this otherwise.

There are simple steps to eliminate and minimize this kind of behavior. I call this poker tilt or simply tilt.

In simple words, it is when you lose control that bad things happen. It often looks like you have control when you do not.

Here are 5 secrets to getting closer to your black belt in tiltlessness:

1. What Are You Afraid Of? - I'll begin. I am afraid of losing money and not having enough. You see, I am a professional poker player and I make my living off of playing poker and if I lose I can't live (harshly put). What are you afraid of? Why are you acting like a lunatic when you get bad beat a few times at the poker tables?

2. Goals - Recently I have begun to visualize what my goal is before each session of poker. My first goal is to have fun while I play. I started poker because it was the most interesting game I had ever come across and I have no intentions of changing that! Is your goal to have fun or is it to be miserable? I'm guessing you want to have fun, right? That makes two of us. Identify what is standing in your way of fun. Maybe you are playing a limit that is too high or maybe you just need to re-arrange your priorities. I don't know. Ultimately it is up to you to find your own way.

3. Being Aware - Awareness is crucial to any good poker player. You have to observe yourself. Otherwise you just do not know how you can improve. You might get hot and become frustrated after a few bad beats. Once you know this you can stop playing before it starts. There are always signs before the signs, did you know that? If you learn more and more how you work then you can start changing that to more useful ways.

4. Quitting - This is a big, BIG part of any good poker players game. Did you know that Phil Ivey quits the highest online poker games after he loses one big pot? Now that takes discipline to do. And it is something you too should do. What would happen if you quit playing whenever you started playing bad and tilting? Your overall winrate or amount of fun would go up. Identify your signs of tilt and start quitting whenever they start creeping up on you, you will thank yourself!

5. Fun - Keeping it fun is what has kept me from going insane. It is all to easy for me to fall into a rut of making money, making money and making more money. Money is not where happiness lies, it is the things that it can give us. Freedom is one of those things and of the most important for me. And if I cannot keep poker fun then why would I want to play? Ask yourself these questions and see what comes up :-)

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by Henri Junttila