The Secret of Tilt

Our home games end when people leave, and when people leave depends on how much tilt is involved in the game.

Tilt can get so bad that sometimes people just stand up and walk out of the game. The best example of extreme tilt that I can remember is a home game at Tiltboy Bruce’s house. Let’s just say that he was having a particularly bad session; he was steaming pretty good and got so frustrated he said, “Right. I’m leaving.” We said, “Bruce, you can’t leave, you live here. Where are you going to go?” So he decided to play Tetris next to us for five hours while we carried on playing cards.

But some Tiltboys just can’t leave the game, no matter how bad we tilt them. Lenny’s one of those guys. Lenny will just carry on playing, and that’s what makes tilting him that much more satisfying. You see, you can needle him for so long that it builds up and he explodes. One evening Lenny was having a pretty good night, but he had to get to work the next day. He said he would be going home at 1am, but his last half hour was so bad that we tilted him into staying for “just an hour longer.” By 3am, Lenny was still trying to get even. By 6am we had to call it quits, because now he had to get to work – directly – with no time for sleep. Lenny takes two steps out of the door, stops, looks at the sky and screams, “What am I doing with my life?”

It’s all down to the secret of tilt - the slow burn. There aren’t too many people, aside from Phil Gordon and maybe myself, who will go on tilt immediately. You’ve got to stay on the guy’s back – all night. If you persist, you can crack almost anybody eventually, and the longer they hold off the initial tilt, the worse the tilt is later. Remember, any one Tiltboy has about ten years of slow-burning tilt built up on any other Titlboy already.

My advice to budding tilters would be to adopt a policy of general harassment towards your opponent. Perry’s the master of this; he’ll just keep on firing away until he wears you down like a criminal under the lamplight. He’ll go after family members: your mother, your wife – nothing is sacred. The first quip is funny; the second one, less funny; the third one’s annoying. By about the 16th or 17th comment, he hits another one that would have been funny at the beginning, but you’re so steamed at this point you can barely see, let alone laugh. Then he’ll put a bad beat on you and say something like, “You’re mom took a bad beat last night, too.” Stuff that doesn’t actually make much sense, but is just intended to be insulting usually works a treat. Take a little needly annoying thing, combine it with a bad beat, and you’ve just made tilt pie.

Once we were at a game at JK’s and we’d tilted him so bad that he had to go to bed. He left the room in a huff, but on the way out he said, “When you leave, whatever you guys do, make sure you lock the front door.” He was very anxious that we fully absorbed this instruction, and came back to tell us four or five times. He woke up the next morning and went straight out to get a paper, discovering, to his chagrin, that the door was unlocked. He went on tilt immediately, fuming about what he was going to do to the last guy out of the door. As he returned with his paper and headed towards the kitchen, he heard the unmistakable sound of chip shuffling. We had never left. Evening tilt followed by breakfast tilt – delectable.