Poker strategy - Micro Tilt

OK, we all know of tilt, but I want to discuss it's smaller brother, micro tilt. Micro tilt is still tilt and can affect your game in the same terrible way, but it's causes are not always as easy to determine or put behind you.

So what are we looking out for here? What we want to do is make the best decision given the situation every time. Poker isn't magic, it's just constantly making good decisions, until money comes your way. So what we do is learn the theory, watch the other players, and do our best to make the right decision each time.

Now this bit is really important. If something affects you making the best decision, you are losing in the long term. Tilt affects you making the right decision, as does stress, fatigue, alcohol etc. If you aren't playing your best game you are relying purely on luck.

So I see micro tilt as being caused by something much smaller than normal tilt, but it still affects your game, perhaps just as badly. The worst thing is micro tilt may come from you losing nothing at all, or just a few blinds. The effects can be opening up your betting/3 betting range without proper cause, floating or raising cbets in bad situations and having a stronger suspicion a player is bluffing, even though it's unlikely they are.

The way to conquer this is to identify any situations that frustrate or upset you on the tables. Every small detail. Once you can understand where they are coming from you can hopefully play your best poker all night. If you think about this, if you can play tilt free poker 100% of the time, your win rate should dramatically improve, as one bad all in call while tilting might really affect your overall rate if it happens often enough.

OK, so some of the things I've found cause these micro tilts:
* a bad run of cards
* getting caught bluffing
* folding a medium strength hand to find out they were bluffing with air
* being outplayed
* being forced to fold after raising pre flop, especially after 3 betting
* getting lots of action on your weaker starting hands and no action once you get AA/KK
* getting forced to fold AA/KK after the flop
* having a maniac or fish win a big pot or two
* being bet into or 3 bet a lot
* getting horrible flops to bet on
* have to fold a couple of medium sized pots in a row

I hope this helps to think about where a bad play might originate from. Good luck with this.