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GET Too ROUGH
with a pinball machine-let's see that silver orb really bounce
off those flippers-and it will unilaterally end your game, flashing
beside the score a solitary word of explanation: TILT. The same
thing, in poker parlance, can happen to people. No matter how
experienced, losers will often get rough with themselves, letting
their knowledge of the odds slump into wishful thinking. A guy
losing a thousand bucks will often throw away two more trying
to win it back. He will climb half out of his hole, get bashed
over the head again, and fall back down to find himself stuck
even deeper. The word about the desperado playing this way is
that he's "on tilt."
The word will quickly pass all over town, and people will flock
toward a slice of the action. Say "Tourist on tilt, table
five, the Horseshoe," and watch the rail grow thick and
sweaty with human greed, with people who'd pay heavily for a
stake in the ritual slaughter. There were to be times, during
my year as a poker pro, when I would need my own built-in spirit
level, to check the precise angle of my current self-awareness.
Was I a fit person to be in charge of my bankroll? It is a question
a poker pro must keep asking himself, watching for signs of
deviation from the norm. As my career began, I felt less like
a Rock of Gibraltar than a Leaning Tower of Pisa.
It was perhaps, in retrospect, a mistake to launch myself on
the international poker circuit in a fortnight that saw two
books published under my name on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
But there was nothing to be done about it. The first great event
of the new season, the European Poker Championship, was scheduled
for Malta in mid-November-a few days after one biography appeared
in the United States, and a few days before the next was published
in Britain. Having already mucked both publishers about somewhat,
I was in no position to seek further changes in their schedules.
So the championships were already a week old when a bleak British
November Monday morning saw me check in at Heathrow to the news
that Air Malta's flight to Valetta had been indefinitely delayed
by fog.
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